It has to be a bit depressing to be in the cloud infrastructure business if your name isn’t Amazon. Sure, there’s a huge, growing market, and the companies behind Amazon are growing even faster. Yet it seems no matter how fast they grow, Amazon remains a dot on the horizon.

It seems inconceivable that AWS can continue to hold sway over such a large market for so long, but as we’ve pointed out before, it has been able to maintain its position through true first-mover advantage. The other players didn’t even show up until several years after Amazon launched its first service in 2006, and they are paying the price for their failure to see the way computing would change the way Amazon did.

They certainly see it now, whether it’s IBM, Microsoft or Google, or Tencent and Alibaba, both of which are growing fast in the China/Asia markets. All of these companies are trying to find the formula to help differentiate themselves from AWS and give them some additional market traction.

Cloud market growth

Interestingly, even though companies have begun to move with increasing urgency to the cloud, the pace of growth slowed a bit in the first quarter to a 42 percent rate, according to data from Synergy Research, but that doesn’t mean the end of this growth cycle is anywhere close.

A massive SMS spamming operation kicked out tens of millions of text messages, pestering unsuspecting recipients with links to fake sites flogging loans and free money.

The operation was simple but smart. The system processed vast batches of phone numbers and curated custom messages on the fly with links to the fake sites. These fake sites urged spam victims to sign up with their name, email address and phone number and promised “free money… for real.” (It wasn’t.) Sometimes confused victims would message the spam number back. If the system spotted certain keywords, like “report” or “FCC,” their number would be added to a “stop list” so they wouldn’t be bothered again.

It’s almost as if the spammers thought of everything. Except, that is, putting a password on their server.

Security researcher Bob Diachenko found the spam-sending database on an exposed server last month. He shared a portion of the data with TechCrunch. He also wrote up his findings. By coincidence, the server was pulled offline before we could reach out, but we still had time to look at the inner workings of the SMS spam operation.

And we knew exactly whom to contact — because the spam operators’ email addresses were listed as “admins” in the database.

“This incident raises the issue once again that data security can affect legitimate businesses and what many would consider ‘gray marketing’ at best,” said Diachenko.

The database is run by an outfit called ApexSMS. Little is known about Apex — it’s not known if it’s a legitimate company or not. Its website today is simply a login page, but for a time simply said, “nothing to see here.”

What is known is that ApexSMS, the name of the database on the exposed server, spammed millions of cell phone numbers with varying messages, all pushing their victims to dozens of different scam sites.

ApexSMS relies on Mobile Drip, a “high-volume SMS” messaging and marketing platform. (A Mobile Drip subdomain points directly to ApexSMS’ login page.) Mobile Drip, which debuted in February, says it allows customers to use its platform to send pre-written messages that autoreplies with the next message and broadcasts messages — where the customer sends a single message in bulk.

The company’s sign-up form suggests the company can allow customers to send more than five million SMS messages each month — if they pay for it.

In all, the exposed database contained 80 million records — so-called leads, which marketers use to pitch products and services — which included people’s names, locations, phone numbers and IP addresses. It also contained cell phone numbers and their carrier network name.

Of the estimated 38 million messages sent through disposable toll-free phone numbers, 2.1 million victims clicked on the link in the message.

The database even kept track of who clicked on which message through Grand Slam Marketing, one of the alleged companies involved in the operations, which was named a “premium parter” on one of the scam sites victims were pointed to.

Other scam sites — like copytm.com — contained hidden code that scraped the name, email address, phone number and IP address and submitted it to ApexSMS’ spam database.

Dozens of other scam sites existed in the database.

The database also recorded when victims replied. More than 115,000 people responded to spam messages. “Wrong number,” said a few. “Who is this,” said others.

When one spam message said, “this is what we was talking about last night” with a scam link to try to trick the user into tapping, the database recorded the clearly frustrated reply. “Nathan is married and didn’t talk to you yesterday because I his wife had this phone. Text this phone I’ll have you charged with harassment,” the entry read.

We sent several emails to the operators found in the database but did not hear back. When reached, a statement from Mobile Drip said:

“Mobile Drip is an SMS platform for businesses that gives a customer the ability to send SMS messages to their opt-in leads and customers, as well as track the results of their marketing campaigns,” said the statement. “Mobile Drip has clients from many different industries and all of them are required to adhere to strict guidelines on message content, as well as TCPA compliance,” referring to federal telemarketing rules.

In follow-up questions, Mobile Drip denied any connection to ApexSMS, and referred to the company’s terms and conditions, which expressly prohibit spam on its platform.

“We take compliance and data security very seriously, and we are currently investigating to determine to what extent our information has been exposed to unauthorized parties. We have currently engaged an outside legal firm to assist with our investigation of this matter and we are also engaging a cyber security firm to perform a security audit,” the company said.

“Our servers have always been password protected, so any information that may have been acquired was done so through illegal means with the goal of harming the reputation and financial success of the business,” said the company. TechCrunch disputes this claim.

Although we know the identities of the spammers, we are choosing not to publish their names. Although we’re confident in saying this is a spam operation, it’s for the courts to decide if it’s unlawful.

Most of the names in the database are associated with either ApexSMS, Mobile Drip, Grand Slam Marketing or a few other smaller advertising and marketing companies. It’s not known who was an active participant in the spam operation.

One of the named “admins” in the database, who we are also not naming, claimed he was a contracted developer but declined to comment to TechCrunch citing a non-disclosure agreement with ApexSMS. The former contractor was identified by his email address and credentials for Cloudflare, which protects sites against cyberattacks and provides site privacy, found in the database.

It’s also not known for how long the database was exposed or if anybody else accessed the database.

Regardless of the motives or the legality of the operation, Diachenko said these spammers were “still using and improperly storing the information or data of millions of people.”

Read more:

• 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
• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’
• Robocaller firm Stratics Networks exposed millions of call recordings
• Massive mortgage and loan data leak gets worse as original documents also exposed

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Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755–8849. You can also send PGP email with the fingerprint: 4D0E 92F2 E36A EC51 DAAE 5D97 CB8C 15FA EB6C EEA5.

In Riga, Latvia, an 80-person startup called Printify is reimagining the on-demand printing business.

Gone are the days where small merchants have to sell their customized products on platforms like Zazzle, Society6, CafePress, or Teespring . Using Printify, e-commerce business owners can create clothes, accessories and more fixed with their designs, logos, art or photos, then sell them directly on their very own online stores.

The “first wave” of on-demand printing companies, Printify founder and chief executive officer James Berdigans explained to TechCrunch, typically require that merchants sell their items on the provider’s platforms.

“The problem is that these merchants don’t have the capability to build their own brand,” Berdigans said. “At the end of the day, you end up building the Teespring brand, not your own brand.”

Printify, a graduate of the 500 Startups accelerator, has attracted a $3 million investment from Bling Capital, a venture capital fund launched five months ago by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures.

“Printify is perfectly positioned to enable the new trend of micro and boutique brands,” Ling said in a statement. “Consumers and SMBs alike can benefit from Printify’s high-quality, low-cost, and fast printing platform — and create their own micro-brands.”

Founded in 2015 by Berdigans, Artis Kehris and Gatis Dukurs, Printify had previously raised a $1 million round following a big pivot. Initially, the business “pretended to be the manufacturer,” opting to be less transparent as a means to entice customers.

“That was a terrible idea,” Berdigans said. “Even though you aren’t lying, you end up not being a very honest company and that’s not the business model we wanted.”

Now, Printify operates as a B2B marketplace that connects manufacturers with ecommerce stores. Plus, the startup handles the mundane tasks of fulfilling orders, including billing, manufacturing requests and shipping so store owners can focus on brand building. The switch allowed the startup to begin growing 30 percent year-over-year, as well as add hundreds of unique products to its catalog.

The founders say Printify most often caters to political campaign employees, designers & artists, and influencers & “hustlers,” or people who are self-taught experts on managing digital sales. With a fixed pricing scheme, merchants know exactly what they are paying Printify but have the flexibility of pricing their own product. Other print-on-demand marketplaces, like the aforementioned “first wave” businesses, don’t give merchants the ability to determine their own margins.

“If you use Zazzle, for example, you only get a small portion of revenue share but on Printify, you pay us a small fee,” Berdigans said. “If you were selling t-shirts for $25 and the average production cost is $10, our sellers will see a 50 to 60 percent margin.”

Dozens of angel investors, including YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, ClassPass co-founder Fritz Lanman, DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore, Google AdSense pioneer Gokul Rajaram and Facebook’s vice president of product Kevin Weil, also participated in the company’s latest round.

“What Airbnb did for the hospitality industry, that’s basically what we can do for the print-on-demand industry,” said Kehris, Printify’s chief operating officer.

Volkswagen opened up pre-orders in Europe at a special launch event Wednesday for the first model in its new all-electric ID brand. Within 24 hours, the company received more than 10,000 registrations, a result that suggests growing demand for electric vehicles.

VW revealed Wednesday the name, some pricing and range specs for the first model in its multi-billion-dollar effort to produce and sell a portfolio of electric vehicles. This first model, known as the ID.3, is an electric hatchback that will be offered in three battery options with ranges between 330 and up to 550 kilometers (205 miles to 341 miles) in accordance with WLTP. The WLTP, or Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure, is the European standard to measure energy consumption and emissions.

The ID.3 hatchback is the first model to be built on the automaker’s new Modular Electric Drive Toolkit, or MEB, electric-car architecture.

Customer interest in the special edition “ID.3 1” — which will be limited to 30,000 vehicles — is “significantly exceeding the brand’s expectations, VW said Thursday, adding that the company’s website has struggled to handle the large number of users accessing the system to pre-order the vehicle.

Production of the ID.3 1 is expected to start at the end of 2019; the first vehicles are to be delivered in mid-2020, VW said.

“This leads to long waiting times and interruptions in the registration process in some markets. Volkswagen is working hard to eliminate the hitches,” Volkswagen said in a statement. “Nevertheless, more than 10,000 registrations were received throughout Europe during the first 24 hours.”

Initial interest in the ID.3 — as measured by the pre-order figures shared by VW — is reminiscent, albeit on a smaller scale, to those heady days in 2016 when Tesla opened up reservations for its Model 3 sedan. A week after Tesla opened up pre-ordering, the company boasted more than 325,000 customers had made $1,000 deposits for the Model 3. That vehicle wouldn’t come to market until July 2017.

VW customers pay a deposit of 1,000 euros ($1,122) to pre-order the special edition vehicle. The special edition version of the ID.3 will include free electric charging for the first year up to a maximum of 2,000 kWh at all public charging points connected to the Volkswagen charging app WeCharge and using the pan-European rapid charging network IONITY.

The pre-booking special edition, which will cost less than €40,000 ($44,898) before incentives has an estimated range of 420 km under WLTP (about 260 miles). A base model of the ID.3 will have a smaller battery and will start under €30,000 in Germany, according to VW.

Volkswagen has been showing off its ID line of concept electric vehicles for several years. Now, the company is finally starting to prepare some of them for production, beginning with the ID.3.

Others will soon follow. VW has said that by 2025 it will have more than 20 full-electric models for sale. Its goal is to sell 1 million electric vehicles annually by 2025.

A little over two years ago, The New Yorker ran a story about the survivalism craze sweeping Silicon Valley. The moneyed elite behind the tools of convenience that make modern life were, it turned out, making detailed contingency plans for the collapse of the civilization they’d help architect.

Now, there’s a media company for that.

The Prepared, a new site launched a little over a year ago by three men — two who have their own ties to the tech world — is aiming to make the world of survivalism more approachable to a wide audience.

Taking away the stigma or stereotype of lone wolves hoarding caches of weapons and food and waiting for the zombie apocalypse, The Prepared bills itself as a sort of scouting class for adults — if the Scouts BSA and Girl Scouts posed the question, “Should You Worry About EMPs?”

As John Ramey, The Prepared founder and a serial entrepreneur, puts it, “I’ve been a prepper my whole adult life.”

The company operates a web site offering columns and “how to” videos; it has a YouTube channel and also runs disaster preparedness-focused events.

Ramey thinks he was one of the first “outed preppers” in Silicon Valley. It all started with a coffee meeting between Ramey and a prominent investor at a venture capital fund around 2010. The investor saw Ramey’s “get-home” bag in his car and began asking questions.

The questions didn’t stop. “A bunch of people started reaching out to me,” Ramey said.

Survivalism in left and right

For John Stokes, who co-founded Ars Technica and is the deputy editor of The Prepared, it was the financial crisis of 2008 that prompted his interest in disaster preparedness:

“I got hit up by private wealth managers after they read about the sale [of Ars] on TechCrunch. In May of 2008 some guys from Lehman came to the house when I was in Chicago. I still hadn’t signed on with any private bankers and then the week before TARP passed I met with a private wealth manager at Credit Suisse and he said if it doesn’t pass everything stops,” Stokes recalled. “It was this ‘shit-hits-the-fan’ scenario, where there’s no money in ATMs and people don’t go to work and there’re rats in the streets… This guy is telling me the world is going to end next week… and that’s when I got serious about this preparedness stuff.”

He wasn’t alone. The 2008 financial crisis, its political aftermath, and the ensuing eight years of the Obama administration gave birth to an image of a certain kind of survivalist. It’s one that Stokes and Ramey actually think marginalized what would be a mainstream movement if not for its early associations with a radical fringe.

“As a rational person I was frustrated by the way the prepping business market worked,” says Ramey. “In the 2008 to 2016 time period was when the stereotype of preppers was developed. It went down the wrong path and a very vocal minority took over that industry… The vast majority was amateur, cuckoo, fringe-type stuff.”

In some ways, Steve Huffman, the Reddit chief executive and co-founder interviewed by The New Yorker, embodies the particularly Silicon Valley-style of survivalist that Ramey and Stokes think is more representative of a broad swathe of American thinking.

“I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work,” Huffman (echoing Stokes) told The New Yorker. “While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”

Huffman was one of a number of Valley voices to share their concerns about the fragility of modern American political society — while also being concerned about the possibility of some sort of environmental catastrophe.

It’s possible — likely even — that this embrace of survivalism by certain corners of Silicon Valley is an equal and opposite reaction to the political climate that saw more politically conservative Americans reach for their revolvers under the Obama administration. (It’s well-documented that gun sales go up under Democratic administrations when gun owners perceive that there’s a greater threat to their Second Amendment right to bear arms.)

“I’ve seen this decline in this space,” says Stokes. “A part of the opportunity and the story of the opportunity of this website is that the first zombie wave and the Alex Jones kind of stuff… is dead… What’s left is the more traditional emergency defense stuff… and a new group of people worried about climate change and political instability.”

Indeed, the advent of the Trump administration caused the collapse of media properties and entities that had thrived during the Obama years — a (maybe not-so-curious) consequence of shifting politics and a greater sense of security among Americans who feared greater government intervention into their lives.

“There were 1 million of those people — and that market had basically collapsed,” says Ramey. “Those million people are, by and large, gone. But there are millions more people who ask, ‘What are reasonable steps to protect my home?’ ”

Guns, germs and steel

If there’s a through-line that connects Ramey and Stokes and their other collaborator, Tom Rader, a Navy corpsman who previously worked as the editor-in-chief of “The Firearm Blog,” it’s guns. 

All three are longtime gun owners, and Stokes has written about guns for this site, and several others, with a focus on hunting, the outdoors and smart guns.

“[Rader] came at it from the firearm side. Stokes came at it from the outdoors side,” says Ramey. “All of us saw the core point that the audience [for survivalism] was changing. This fat middle was growing and they were closeted and underserved.”

So the material on The Prepared runs more in the scouting-for-adults vein rather than toward stockpiling for the zombie apocalypse

“So much of prepping is about more of the ‘Eagle Scout’ stuff,” says Ramey. “Not the, ‘I’m going to have four machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammo.’ I would say half of our audience doesn’t have a gun.”

Besides, the audience for doomsday preppers is already well served by, well, “Doomsday Preppers.”

Even the kind of stories that Stokes, Ramey and Rader are pushing out has antecedents in television programs like “Man vs. Wild” or “Naked and Afraid.”

The litany of threats that could cause civilizational collapse has not necessarily changed, but the nature of the current administration and its ability to respond effectively to climate-related natural disasters, civil disobedience and revolution, disease outbreaks, nuclear strikes or any other of the potential calamities that could ring the death knell of society as we know it has unified Americans in a belief in the overall incompetence of government to achieve anything.

“In the 2016 election there was this pendulum swung in the opposite direction,” says Ramey. “Tens of millions of Americans are into this… they had to be closeted for a while.”

Prepping for the “woke” survivalist

What The Prepared gives these folks is a modern-looking website that doesn’t traffic in terror or predictions of the apocalypse in a sensational way. The concerns, as presented, are more matter of fact, with tutorials on how to prepare a “bug out bag” or a “get home” bag (the essential supplies for 72 hours of survival in the event of a catastrophe), or tie a tourniquet.

“To be a prepper means to think about those things and to be a more responsible adult,” says Stokes. 

For the first months of its existence, the site was self-funded, but as it has grown, The Prepared has managed to attract some backers in the beginning of the year.

The financing path that Ramey, a former innovation advisor to the Obama administration, decided to pursue was novel. The company did a priced round (Ramey would not disclose the size) with a small group of angel investors. Uniquely, the co-founders built the structure of the round around cash-flow and has committed to regular distributions to investors whenever the company makes a profit.

“Any year we have a profit we distribute 35% of that profit,” says Ramey. “We do it to cover people’s tax liability and I have the discretion to either give it as dividends or keep in the business to reinvest.”

The site is running on affiliate marketing for much of its revenues, something that makes sense, given that its how-to sections would naturally include reviews of tourniquets. Other revenue could come from live events that would potentially operate like training sessions from scout camp.

In the meantime, Ramey and Stokes caution that the world is calling for greater preparedness.

“It’s extremely unlikely that we get to a Walking Dead level of collapse.. What’s more likely on the extreme end is climate collapse like forced migration, or extreme weather… You can describe that as collapse but it’s not going to be two people in a bunker,” says Ramey. “To get to that level of preparedness, homesteading is growing…. People are thinking more about tiny homes, a burner lifestyle, van life.”

Call them the “woke” end of the survivalist spectrum.

“I started with the 72 hours, and then two weeks because of the earthquake stuff, and now I’m up to four or five months for my family of five,” says Stokes of his own level of preparedness. “In Austin we just had two weeks without city water because of the flooding… I don’t prepare for a specific thing like a solar storm or nuclear war, I think of duration of time without access to basic services… how many weeks am I prepared to go if there’s no lights or no water?”

Stokes says this kind of thinking is just sensible.

“We’re all long on civilization,” says Stokes. “I am fully invested in civilization as an entrepreneur and as an owner of a stock portfolio. Almost all of my chips are on civilization, but I keep some of my chips as a hedge.”

Such hate. Such dismay. “How Slack is ruining work.” “Actually, Slack really sucks.” “Slack may actually be hurting your workplace productivity.” “Slack is awful.” Slack “destroys teams’ ability to think, plan & get complex work out the door.” “Slack is a terrible collaboration tool.” “Face it, Slack is ruining your life.”

Contrarian view: Slack is not inherently bad. Rather, the particular way in which you are misusing it epitomizes your company’s deeper problems. I’m the CTO of a company which uses Slack extensively, successfully, and happily — but because we’re a consultancy, I have also been the sometime member of dozens of others’ Slack workspaces, where I have witnessed all the various flavors of flaws recounted above. In my experience, those are not actually caused by Slack.

Please note that I am not saying “Slack is just a tool, you have to use it correctly.” Even if that were so, a tool which lends itself so easily to being used so badly would be a bad tool. What I’m saying is something more subtle, and far more damning: that Slack is a mirror which reflects the pathologies inherent in your workplace. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Slacks, but in ourselves.

More dismal news from the smartphone number crunchers. New figures out of Canalys put the North American smartphone market at five year low for the first quarter of 2019. That’s…bad. But also, pretty inline with what we’ve been seeing globally. The market has stagnated, and while manufacturers aren’t in full on panic mode, there’s certainly cause for concern.

Shipments dropped from 44.4 million down to 36.4 million, marking an an 18 percent drop year over year for the first quarter. Canalys says it’s the steepest drop it’s recorded for the category, chalking some of the issues up to “a lackluster performance by Apple and the absence of ZTE.”

Apple is still the top of the heap, commanding 40 percent of the North American market with help from the sale of older discounted units. But Samsung managed to to tighten the gap on the back of a successful Galaxy S10 launch. The company grew by three percent for the year, up to 29.3 percent of the market.

LG, Lenovo and TCL rounded out the top five, with the latter two making pretty solid marketshare strides. The remainder of the market took a massive hit, however, with a 65 percent drop off in shipments. Analysts seem confident that 5G imminent arrival will help give the market a boost in coming quarters, but it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to maintain that momentum.

Existing approaches to blocking malicious advertising aren’t working — at least according to digital ad veteran Seth Demsey.

That should resonate with anyone who’s ever encountered an ad that immediately redirected them to a website filled with annoying gift card offers. And it’s the issue that the startup Demsey co-founded, clean.io, is working to address.

Today, the company is unveiling the new clean.io name (a rebrand from its old moniker of Clean Creative), and also announcing that it’s raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Real Ventures.

“When you think about what we’re really dealing with, forget media, forget ads — we’re dealing with the beautiful openness of the web,” Demsey said. “That allows you to compose different elements from different people on the page, but that power of composition also opens the door to abuse.”

Hence the aforementioned ads that suddenly overwhelm you with scammy-sounding offers.

Demsey — who worked at Microsoft and Google before spending several years as CTO for TechCrunch-owner AOL’s advertising business — said companies have tried to fight back by scanning website code and by creating blacklists of bad advertisers. But the clean.io team saw that “these things were moving and changing so fast that blacklists were not effective anymore, and that scanning wasn’t effective anymore.”

Instead, Demsey said the company has created “a general purpose system for JavaScript security that allows us to determine what should and should not be allowed to execute in JavaScript.” Put another way, clean.io provides “granular control over who gets to load JavaScript.”

As a simple example, if clean.io detects JavaScript that redirects your browser, it can check to see who’s actually calling for the redirect — if it’s the publisher whose page you’re on, then that’s probably fine. But, Demsey said, if it’s “some random JavaScript CDN,” then clean.io will say, “Let’s block this one.”

CEO Matt Gillis added that clean.io’s approach is particularly tough on the sources of malicious advertising, who he described as “the most sophisticated performance advertisers on the planet.” That’s because the startup’s technology doesn’t simply block the ad. Instead, it runs the ad and blocks the bad JavaScript, which means the advertiser pays for the impression without getting results.

“We make it unprofitable for the bad actors,” Gillis said. “Most of the others who are scanning or URL blocking not really eliminating [the bad behavior], they’re just playing the game of cat and mouse.”

As for why the company changed its name, Demsey suggested that clean.io could eventually apply this technology in areas beyond advertising.

“The name change is to really signify the fact that our ambitions and our technology are broader than merely cleaning up the ad ecosystem,” he said.

Facebook’s VP of VR product Hugo Barra is out after some leadership changes at the top of the Oculus organization. He’ll be stepping down into a new role leading AR/VR partnerships, while Eric Tseng, Facebook’s director of product management, will be replacing Barra in a new title as head of VR product management.

The leadership structure at Facebook’s virtual reality team has been a bit contentious.

Barra came on in early 2017 after the ouster of Oculus’s existing leadership structure, when then-CEO Brendan Iribe was demoted alongside much of the founding team to lead product-specific verticals. Later that year Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was ousted.

Barra’s role inside CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s inner-circle was soon diminished after longtime executive Andrew Bosworth was placed ahead of him in the org chart leading AR/VR at Facebook in a role that also included other consumer hardware efforts like Portal. Barra’s departure comes as the company prepares to release two of its latest virtual reality products, the Rift S and Quest.

Late last year, Oculus had an internal reorganization that shifted the team to more specialization-focused groups as opposed to product-focused.

It’s unclear what the full scope of Barra’s new role is. Facebook partnered with Xiaomi — where Barra previously led international efforts — to build the Oculus Go and Xiaomi’s Mi VR headset. 

On Tseng’s promotion, a Facebook spokesperson said, “He is the right person to step into this role because of his experience leading product teams at Facebook, and leading the Android product team at Google.”

Alongside this news, Facebook noted that longtime content exec Jason Rubin has seen his role expand as well and has received a new title, VP of Special Gaming Initiatives.

Netflix is further investing in its children’s programming ahead of the launch of a highly anticipated rival: Disney+. The company announced today it has acquired StoryBots — a children’s media company and brand created by JibJab’s founders, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis.

The streaming service isn’t disclosing the acquisition price, but CNBC says the price was “immaterial to Netflix,” citing sources.

Netflix doesn’t often make acquisitions, as it prefers to spend directly on content. However, it does rarely buy content companies — as it did with its first acquisition,  indie comic book maker MillarWorld in 2017.

StoryBots’ kids show “Ask the StoryBots” first launched on Netflix in 2016, and features five curious creatures who track down answers to the questions that kids are often curious about — like how night happens, or why we brush our teeth, for example.

Over the years, it has featured several celeb voices to accompany its animated characters, including Snoop Dogg, Edward Norton, Whoopi Goldberg and Wanda Sykes, among others.

Season 3 of the program is launching in the fall on the streaming service.

The Netflix deal will see the Spiridellis brothers producing more StoryBots original programming, including additional series and short-form content.

The larger goal with Netflix is to have its own brand of popular kids’ educational programming – a Sesame Street for the Netflix era, perhaps.

Other streaming services, including HBO NOW and Apple TV+, already have deals with Sesame Workshop, the former which now airs Sesame Street and the latter which will have the muppets teaching kids programming basics.

“Together with Netflix, our goal is to make StoryBots the leading educational entertainment brand for connected kids and families globally. We see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring something epically good into the world,” said Evan and Gregg Spiridellis, in a prepared statement.