The UK government has completed a major revision to controversial but populist online safety legislation that’s been in the works for years — and was finally introduced to parliament earlier this year — but has been paused since this summer following turmoil in the governing Conservative Party.

In September, new secretary of state for digital, Michelle Donelan, said the reshuffled government, under newly elected prime minister Liz Truss (who has since been replaced by another new PM, Rishi Sunak) would make certain edits to the bill before bringing it back to parliament.

The draft legislation is now due to return to the House of Commons next week when lawmakers will resume scrutiny of the wide-ranging speech regulation proposals.

The government says the changes its made to the Online Safety Bill are in response to concerns it could lead to platforms overblocking content and chilling freedom of expression online — largely focused on adult safety provisions related to so-called ‘legal but harmful’ content, which included mitigation requirements like transparency obligations but did not actually require such material to be removed.

Nonetheless the controversy and concern over this aspect of the bill has been fierce.

In a press release announcing the latest raft of tweaks, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Secretary of state for digital issues, Michelle Donelan, wrote: “Any incentives for social media firms to over-remove people’s legal online content will be taken out of the Online Safety Bill. Firms will still need to protect children and remove content that is illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, however the Bill will no longer define specific types of legal content that companies must address.

“This removes any influence future governments could have on what private companies do about legal speech on their sites, or any risk that companies are motivated to take down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions. New measures will also be added to make social media platforms more transparent and accountable to their users, as a result of amendments the Government will propose.”

“Parents and the wider public will benefit from new changes to force tech firms to publish more information about the risks their platforms pose to children so people can see what dangers sites really hold. Firms will be made to show how they enforce their user age limits to stop kids circumventing authentication methods and they will have to publish details of when the regulator Ofcom has taken action against them,” DCMS added.

Writing in the Telegraph about her approach to revising the bill, Donelan said: “I have carefully amended the Online Safety Bill to ensure  it reflects the values of our way of life — protecting children, safeguarding the vulnerable, protecting legal free speech and defending consumer choice. Protecting children is the fundamental reason why the Online Safety Bill was created, and so the changes I have made strengthen the child protection elements of the bill significantly.”

“The ‘legal but harmful’ clauses in the bill, in my view, violated the rights of adults to choose what legal speech they say and see. So I have removed ‘legal but harmful’ in favour of a new system based on choice and freedom,” she added. “Equally, if something is not prohibited in their terms and conditions, tech giants should not be removing it. Platforms will need to be far more transparent about how their algorithms work and, for the first time, users will have the right of appeal. Silicon Valley executives will no longer be able to arbitrarily silence people, nor continue to treat some sections of society differently.”

Over the weekend the government revealed another, related amendment to the legislation — saying it would make encouraging self harm a criminal offence, thereby taking that type of problem content out of the ‘legal but harmful’ bucket and meaning platforms will have a legal duty to remove it.

It also recently announced measures to beef up laws against abuse of intimate imagery, including criminalizing the sharing of deepfake porn without consent, among other recent changes.

‘Triple shield’

DCMS is pitching its new approach with the Online Safety Bill as providing what it frames as a “triple shield” of online protection which is most strongly focused on children but still offers measures intended to help general consumers shield themselves from a range of online harms — with social media firms legally required to 1) remove illegal content, 2) take down material in breach of their own terms of service, and 3) provide adults with greater choice over the content they see and engage with.

Provisions in the revised bill could, for example, enable adult users to opt to see a filtered feed if they wish to limit their exposure to content that may be unpleasant to them but which does not meet the bill’s higher bar of being strictly illegal.

The government has also retained measures aimed at empowering adults to be able to block anonymous trolls — via using tools that the biggest platforms will need to offer to let them control whether they can be contacted by unverified social media users.

“To make sure the Bill’s protections for adults online strike the right balance with its protections for free speech, duties relating to ‘legal but harmful’ content accessed by adults will be removed from the legislation and replaced with the consumer-friendly ‘triple shield’,” DCMS wrote. “The Bill will instead give adults greater control over online posts they may not wish to see on platforms.

“If users are likely to encounter certain types of content — such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-semitism or misogyny not meeting the criminal threshold — internet companies will have to offer adults tools to help them avoid it. These could include human moderation, blocking content flagged by other users or sensitivity and warning screens.”

Donelan mounted an aggressive defence of the changes on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, claiming the government has strengthened provisions to protect children at the same time as adapting it to respond to concerns over the bill’s impact on freedom of expression for adults.

“Nothing is getting watered down or taken out when it comes to children,” she argued. “We’re adding extra in. So there is no change to children.”

Platforms will still be required to prevent children from being exposed to ‘legal but harmful’ speech, she also suggested — arguing that much of the content of greatest concern to child safety campaigners is often prohibited in platforms’ own T&Cs and the problem is they do not enforce them. The legislation will require platforms to live up to their claims, she said.

Earlier in the program, Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell — the 14-year-old British schoolgirl who killed herself five years ago after viewing social media content promoting self-harm and suicide on algorithmically driven platforms including Instagram and Pinterest — expressed concern that the bill is being watered down, questioning the government’s late stage decision to remove the ‘legal but harmful’ duties clause.

“It’s very hard to understand that something that was important as recently as July — when the bill would have had a third reading in the Commons and [this legal but harmful content was] included in the bill, it’s very hard to understand why that suddenly can’t be there,” he told the BBC.

Discussing why he feels so strongly about risks attached to ‘legal but harmful’ content spreading online, Russell referred to the inquest into his daughter’s death which surfaced evidence from the platforms that showed she had engaged with a lot of such content — giving an example of a pencil-style drawing of a sad girl captioned with the text “who would love a suicidal girl” as one of the pieces of content she had viewed that had particularly stayed with him.

“That in and on its own isn’t necessarily harmful but when the platforms’ algorithms send hundreds if not thousands of those posts or posts like it to someone — particularly if they’re young and vulnerable — then that content had to be regulated against,” he argued. “The algorithms have to be looked into as well. And that’s what the concern is.”

Russell also accused platforms of not taking strong enough measures to prevent minors from accessing their services. “The platforms have not taken seriously the advances in age verification and age assurance that tech now has — they’ve not paid enough attention to that. They’ve sort of turned a blind eye to the age of people on their platforms,” he suggested.

While not embracing the government’s edits to ‘legal but harmful’ duties in the bill, Russell did welcome DCMS’ drive to dial up transparency obligations on platforms as a result of revisions that will require them to publish risk assessments — when previously they may have had to undertaken an assessment but would not have been required to publish it.

Asked by the BBC about Russell’s criticism of the removal of the ‘legal but harmful’ clause, Donelan said: “Content that is harmful or could hurt children but is not illegal — so is legal — will still be removed under this version of the bill. So the content that Molly Russell saw will not be allowed as a result of this bill. And there will no longer be cases like that coming forward because we’re preventing that from happening.”

She also argued the revised bill would force platforms to enforce their own age restrictions — such as by making them explain how they are stopping minors from accessing their services.

“We’ve strengthened the bill,” she reiterated. “We’ve now introduced clauses where companies can’t just say yes we only allow children over 13 to join our platform — then they allow ten year olds and actively promote it to them. We’re stopping that from happening — we’re saying no, you’ve got to enforce that age restriction, you’ve got to tell parents how you’re doing that and everybody else. We’re saying you’ve got to work to the regulator with the children’s commissioner when you’re producing the guidelines and putting them in practice.”

Asked how the government can be sure platforms will really ban underage users, Donelan pointed to what she described as the “very punitive sanctions” still in the bill — including fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover, adding: “If a company breaches any aspect of the bill, including for children, they could face fines… [as large as] billions of pounds. That’s a really big incentive not to breach the bill.”

She said the government has also strengthened this aspect of the bill — saying companies “do have to be assured of the age of their users”.

“Now we’re not saying you have to use ‘X specific tech’ because it will be out of date by next week — this bill has to last the test of time — what we are saying is you could use a range of age assurance technology or age verification technology but whatever you do you’ve got to make sure you know the age of these users to know whether they’re 14 or whether they’re 45 — so you know the protection have got to be in place and I think that’s the right approach.”

This component of the bill is likely to continue to face fierce opposition from digital rights campaigners who are already warning that biased AIs will likely be the tech that gets applied at scale to predict users’ age as platforms seek to meet compliance requirements — and that the legislation therefore risks automating discriminatory outcomes…

Another notable revision to the bill the government confirmed today is the removal of a “harmful communications” offence that free speech campaigners had warned risked having a major speech chilling effect based on a disproportionate weighting on someone taking offence to public speech.

Offences on false and threatening comms have been retained.

“To retain protections for victims of abuse, the government will no longer repeal elements of the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act offences, which means the criminal law will continue to protect people from harmful communications, including racist, sexist and misogynistic abuse,” DCMS further notes.

There will also be a requirement for major platforms not to remove content that does not breach the law or suspend or ban users where there has not been a breach of their ToS — as another measure the government claims will help bolster freedom of expression online.

Further amendments are aimed at dialling up protections for women and girls online, with the government saying it will add the criminal offence of controlling or coercive behaviour to the list of priority offences in the Bill.

“This means platforms will have to take proactive steps, such as putting in measures to allow users to manage who can interact with them or their content, instead of only responding when this illegal content is flagged to them through complaints,” per DCMS.

Another change recognizes the Children’s Commissioner to the face of the bill as a “statutory consultee” to the regulator, Ofcom’s, codes of practice, which platforms will be required to cleave to to shrink their legal risk — casting a key child safety advocate in a core role shaping compliance recommendations.

The government has tabled some of the slew of latest amendments to the Bill in the Commons for Report Stage on December 5, when it returns to parliament — but notes that further amendments will be made at later stages of the Bill’s passage.

Accompanying the revisions announcement, DCMS cites new polling from Ipsos — which it claims shows “overwhelming public backing for action” — citing stats from the survey that show 83% of people think social media companies should have a duty to protect children who are using their platforms (“only 4% disagree”); and eight in ten people (78%) want social media companies to be held accountable for keeping underage children off their platforms (7% disagree).

The survey found eight in ten people (81%) think the government should make sure social media companies protect children when they are online and 77% think social media companies should be punished if they don’t protect children, it also said.

Commenting in a statement, Donelan added:

“Unregulated social media has damaged our children for too long and it must end.

I will bring a strengthened Online Safety Bill back to Parliament which will allow parents to see and act on the dangers sites pose to young people. It is also freed from any threat that tech firms or future governments could use the laws as a licence to censor legitimate views.

Young people will be safeguarded, criminality stamped out and adults given control over what they see and engage with online. We now have a binary choice: to get these measures into law and improve things or squabble in the status quo and leave more young lives at risk.”

This report was updated to include a reference to the Ipsos survey cited by DCMS and to include additional remarks by Donelan published in the Telegraph newspaper

UK confirms removal of Online Safety Bill’s ‘legal but harmful’ clause by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/uk-online-safety-bill-legal-but-harmful-edit/

The companies are using strategies to maintain access to resources and markets across the world’s two largest economies, while seeking to avoid the kind of attention that comes with being labeled a Chinese company.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-startups-try-to-make-it-big-in-the-u-s-but-without-the-backlash-11669706136?mod=rss_Technology

The dispute could draw new attention to how speech is monitored on the internet.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-apple-attack-sets-stage-for-public-spat-with-risks-for-apple-twitter-11669696416?mod=rss_Technology

India will undertake the first pilot for retail digital currency on December 1, the central bank said Tuesday, extending the test to evaluate the creation and distribution of the e-rupee in the South Asian market with a closed group of customers and merchants a month after it began evaluating the CBDC for the wholesale segment.

Four local banks — State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and IDFC — will participate in the initial phase of the pilot in four cities (Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Bhubaneswar). Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank will join the pilot “subsequently,” the Reserve Bank of India said. The pilot will eventually be expanded to cover the cities of Ahmedabad, Gangtok, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Kochi, Lucknow, Patna and Shimla.

“The scope of pilot may be expanded gradually to include more banks, users and locations as needed,” it said.

The central bank hopes to lower the economy’s reliance on cash, enable cheaper and smoother international settlements, and protect people from the volatility of private cryptocurrencies, RBI officials have said in recent quarters. Based on the test results, the central bank will experiment with additional features and applications of the digital rupee in future pilots, it said.

India’s central bank has spent the last few years largely pushing to make its citizens avoid crypto trading. Despite a ruling from the country’s apex court, the central bank continues to force the hand of banks from engaging with crypto platforms in India, a move that has made on-ramp a nightmare for the firms involved, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Amid the collapse of FTX, which further wiped the value of several cryptocurrencies, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, tweeted that Indian investors who got out of crypto due to the government’s “prudent guardrails of taxation and exchange control” should thank the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “his foresight and thus being saved from this crypto meltdown and losses.

In the wake of the uncertainty, the local ecosystem has seen some talent move outside of the country and a growing number of local entrepreneurs build for the foreign markets and avoid serving customers in India, the world’s second-largest internet market.

Top crypto firms including Coinbase and Polygon as well as local exchanges CoinDCX, CoinSwitch Kuber and WazirX set up a new industry body this month to promote dialogue between key stakeholders and drive awareness about web3, months after the largest local crypto advocacy group was disbanded.

The limited roll-out of e-rupee comes at a time when several governments across the globe are trialing digital versions of their currencies. Singapore’s monetary authority said in late October that it will test a digital version of the local dollar. The central banks of China and the Bahamas have also experimented in this field. The National Bank of Kazakhstan plans to integrate its CBDC on the BNB Chain, crypto giant Binance said earlier.

But some have expressed concerns about the unchecked proliferation of digital currencies.

Jeremy Fleming, the director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, recently warned that Beijing was aiming to use a range of technologies, including the digital currency, to control markets and people. Beijing’s efforts to build a central-bank digital currency could allow it to monitor transactions for oppressive means and in the future enable it to evade international sanctions, he added.

“Users will be able to transact with e₹-R through a digital wallet offered by the participating banks and stored on mobile phones / devices. Transactions can be both Person to Person (P2P) and Person to Merchant (P2M). Payments to merchants can be made using QR codes displayed at merchant locations. The e₹-R would offer features of physical cash like trust, safety and settlement finality. As in the case of cash, it will not earn any interest and can be converted to other forms of money, like deposits with banks,” the Reserve Bank of India said in a press announcement.

India to pilot retail digital currency on December 1 by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/india-to-pilot-retail-digital-currency-on-december-1/

Earlier today, renowned VC Bill Gurley put together a list of the many “red flags” that VCs should have paid closer attention to when funding FTX, suggesting in a tweet that this summary of warning signs might help keep VCs “out of the investor hurt locker” going forward. Gurley includes such no-nos as “unique financial data presentations,” “aversion to audits,” “large secondary transactions,” and “lack of a legitimate board.”

Yet publishing them now is a little like shouting “fire!” after everyone is already outside the theater, watching its smoldering remains dissolve into the parking lot. Most of the behaviors that Gurley identified today came to a grounding halt when the market abruptly shifted in spring, and by then, the damage was already done. More, if history has shown us anything, it will happen again and not because VCs miss red flags but because they sometimes throw these investing rules out the window.

Gurley asserts, for example, that one reason the startup market cratered was that investors “let the good times roll” (red flag #1). It’s pretty hard to argue with this one. Consider how little VCs really knew about Samuel Bankman-Fried, all while he burnished his image as the crypto industry’s wunderkind. (Weirdly, Sam Bankman-Fried’s smiling visage is still plastered around parts of San Francisco.) 

Gurley also cites the “lack of a legitimate board” as a red flag (#2). This was another nod to FTX, which had no board of directors, but barely-there boards have become pervasive. In a story just tonight about Pipe, TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo writes that the three-year-old marketplace has only one outside board member who is not a cofounder of the company, and that individual has been a VC for three years. (Pipe raised more than $300 million from more than a dozen firms.)

Another issue is dual-class shares (red flag #3), which in many cases give entrepreneurs the power to ignore the wishes of investors. VCs once argued against them but long ago gave into founder demands for them, no matter how ridiculous the ask. Don’t believe us? Lyft’s founders and Snap’s founders have shares designed to keep them in control until they kick the bucket. Adam Neumann had so much control over WeWork that had he not been elbowed out, his children and grandchildren might have been in charge of the company ultimately. 

Not last, Gurley pegs secondary sale transactions (red flag #8) as an obvious danger. Hopin, the virtual events platform, is a prime example. The three-year-old company has been dealing with shrinking market share and layoffs, yet according to a Financial Times piece from earlier this year, its founder was able to take $195 million worth of shares off the table while also retaining nearly 40% of the company and voting control.

Bankman-Fried similarly took $300 million off the table last fall in a $420 million round. At the time, FTX was barely two years old.

One problem with Gurley’s indictment of his peers is that Gurley himself was complicit in some of these offenses. Remember WeWork, which promised that Adam Neumann’s progeny would rule the company for eternity? Gurley’s firm – Benchmark – had a seat on the company’s board.

The bigger issue ties to how venture firms are structured and paid. VCs can afford to push it to the limit because they know someone else — their own investors — will be around to pick up the pieces.

Unfortunately, the picture isn’t nearly so rosy for everyone else. Instead, the consequences of every “red flag” that was waved away is becoming more apparent with each layoff, down round, and executive change-up.

VCs had a good run, and they will again at some point. But right now, if you don’t foresee that tens — if not hundreds — of billions of dollars from pension funds, school endowments, hospital systems, and others that provide capital to VCs is about to go up in smoke, you haven’t been paying attention.

It’s not just FTX that’s going down, not by a long shot.

It’s maybe a little late to be talking about red flags in venture investing? by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/its-a-little-late-to-be-talking-about-red-flags-in-venture-investing/

Today, Apple announced its list of App Store award winners for this year along with the top chart for most downloaded apps and games across free and paid categories. These awards include apps for all of the company’s platforms including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV. For 2022, the social network app BeReal won the app of the year award for iPhone, while the notetaking app GoodNotes 5 won the crown for the best iPad app.

Synium Software GmbH’s MacFamilyTree 10 — a visual family tree exploration app —was noted as the top Mac of the year; TelevisaUnivision Interactive’s Vix streaming service was awarded the top Apple TV app for elevating Spanish-language stories; and Gentler Stories’ Gentler Streak, an exercise and fitness tracker, was awarded the best Apple Watch app of the year.

Electronic Arts’ Apex Legends Mobile snagged the top iPhone game award while X.D. Network Inc.’s Moncage got the top iPad game title. Other gaming winners include Inscryption from Devolver for Mac, El Hijo from HandyGames for Apple TV, and “Wylde Flowers” from Studio Drydock for Apple Arcade. Shenzhen Tencent Tianyou Technology’s League of Legends Esports Manager won the China app of the year.

BeReal was a social media sleeper hit this year forcing giants like TikTok and Instagram to ape the format. The France-based company originally launched the app in 2020. But its format of getting an alert at random times of the day to post a photo combining front and back cameras within two minutes became popular this year. It’s a stark departure that a social app won the best crown app this year as compared to the last two years’ top apps “Toca Life World” (a Kids’ app) and “WakeOut!” (a workout app). In its blog post for awards, Apple described BeReal as an app to provide”an authentic look into the lives of their family and friends.”

Image Credits: Apple

“This year’s App Store Award winners reimagined our experiences with apps that delivered fresh, thoughtful, and genuine perspectives,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement, “From self-taught solo creators to international teams spanning the globe, these entrepreneurs are making a meaningful impact, and represent the ways in which apps and games influence our communities and lives.”

Last year, Apple had a bonus section called “Apps that brought us together.” So this year, it has introduced a “Cultural Impact” section to honor some apps that had a “lasting impact on people’s lives and influenced culture.” The list includes How We Feel Project’s How We Feel app for logging in daily emotion-based check-ins; Rise-Home Stories Project’s Home Stories Project to highlight stories of systemic housing injustices and their impact on people of color; Locket Labs’ Locket Widget to allow live photo sharing between friends and family through a home screen widget; Vitalii Mogylevets’s hydration tracking app Waterllama; and ARTE Experience’s Inua – A Story in Ice and Time to explore historical events from Inuit tradition.

Image Credits: Apple

App Store has had a challenging 2022 with an impact on revenue and regulatory battles. It had to allow developers to use third-party systems for in-app purchases in regions including South Korea and the Netherlands (just for dating apps). The U.S. and the EU are also looking at ways to control app distribution monopolies across different app stores. These regulations could force Apple to loosen some rules around how it allows app distribution and payments on the App Store.

In March, Apple allowed “reader apps” — apps that give users access to digital content like music, books, and videos — to include external links for users to create and manage their accounts. In June, the company relaxed some of its rules around binary content in the app, using HTML5, and lottery and donation-related apps. In October, it cracked down on NFT functionality within apps, restricting developers from using digital collectibles to unlock new features. Plus, it also mandated that any NFTs purchase system must you Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism, and give a commission to the company. It also updated its guidelines to specify that it will take a cut for buying social media post boosts within the app.

Apple also released the top downloaded apps and games across free and paid categories for the year. Here are the top apps in the US:

Apple announces winners of the App Store Awards for 2022 by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/apple-announces-winners-of-the-app-store-awards-for-2022/

Most large restaurant chains across Africa have grown accustomed to using legacy systems and point-of-sale providers to manage operations. However, for smaller restaurants — which represent the biggest segment of this $50 billion industry — these systems can be rather expensive and do not adequately cater to their needs; thus, they stick with running operations manually. 

Orda, a Nigerian food tech platform that provides a cloud-based restaurant operating system to solve these issues for small, independent restaurants, is announcing that it has secured a $3.4 million seed investment. The two-year-old startup raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding this January, bringing its total funding raised this year to $4.5 million. 

Its clients are mostly small and medium-sized restaurants. With limited access to technology, these restaurants typically resort to using offline methods, including pen and paper, for things like manual reconciliation and inventory management. Orda’s operating system allows these businesses to handle these parts of their business online, as well as get access to other features, including kitchen display systems, accounting software and integrations with food aggregators such as YC-backed Chowdeck, Bolt Food and Glovo.

“We take an interesting approach to software and helping restaurant owners set up,” chief executive officer Guy Futi told TechCrunch in an interview. “Our software digitizes the process of those who write things in hand and helps them figure out their inventory management and recipe yields.”

Futi said Orda has witnessed tremendous adoption among small restaurants in its two markets, Nigeria and Kenya, and claims the startup might have reached product-market fit already. His conviction lies in the number of vendors it has pulled in, about 600, and the pace at which the food tech onboarded them, in less than a year. 

The chief executive said there are “hundreds more” in the pipeline waiting to be onboarded, as Orda plans to serve more than 1,000 restaurants by the end of Q1 2022. Orda’s transactions have also increased too. It now processes over 50,000 orders weekly for its vendors, 5x what it recorded as of this January, with its gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing 30% month-on-month. “We’re seeing fast-paced growth in Nigeria and Kenya with a retention rate of above 95%,” Futi added. 

Orda’s pricing model allows restaurants to choose between three payment plans: N1,000 (~$1.54), N5,000 (~$7.69) and N20,000 (~$30.76) to access different parts of the software, ranging from order management and an omnichannel to integrations with food aggregators and delivery platforms and setup personnel. Revenue has increased as a result, growing 30% month-on-month, according to Futi.

Despite this growth, building solutions for these African restaurants, especially without a playbook, has come with its fair share of constraints. For instance, Orda has had to configure its cloud-based solution to work offline and let restaurants continue to log data in times when internet access is poor. 

Meanwhile, Orda intends to add more functionalities to the platform, particularly around financial products as it looks to power lending and payments for its customers. The platform already processes payments for 10% of its vendors, according to Futi, and might begin a major rollout by Q2 next year. 

Building and scaling out its payments feature is one of the food tech’s objectives with this new investment. Others include expanding its network of restaurants and continuing its pan-African expansion drive (into South Africa and much later, Ivory Coast). It has beefed up its leadership team to that effect, bringing personnel: Afua Ahwoi, head of operations and strategy (ex-Goldman Sachs) and Modesola Osasomi, head of growth (ex-Barclays Bank) for its next growth phase. 

Africa’s food tech platforms, despite playing in a nascent ecosystem, are catching the eye of investors these days. In addition to the aforementioned Glovo and Jumia Food, newer upstarts such as Chowdeck and Foodcourt, which help restaurants make online deliveries, have received backing from global investors like Y Combinator, while others like Vendease, OneOrder and TopUp Mama that provide food supplies to restaurants and handle their supply chains have raised significant capital themselves.

Asked whether Orda intends to venture into these other categories, Futi said that such a business decision wouldn’t be ideal as it will veer the startup off its course of building software. “Globally, you see that Sysco isn’t in the same vertical as Toast,” said the founder who launched the startup with Fikayo Akinwale, Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamila and Namir El-Khouri. “If there’s some sort of collaboration with other players, we’ll be open to that. But from our position, building the right software takes you deep down the rabbit hole and that requires focus.”

Emerging market investor Quona Capital co-led the round with New York-based FinTech Collective. Other investors include existing ones such as LoftyInc Capital, Enza Capital and Norrsken Foundation, as well as new venture capital firms like Outside VC and Far Out Ventures.

Here’s what Kofoworola Agbaje, senior investment associate at Quona Capital, said on why her firm is backing the food tech: “When a restaurant owner moves from pen and paper to a fully automated digital platform, it’s incredibly empowering. Suddenly they have insights available to them that can improve their productivity and margins, enabling them to grow their businesses. A solution like Orda can have an outsized impact on small and medium-sized restaurants and the livelihoods of those who operate them.”

Orda raises millions to digitize African restaurants with its cloud-based operating system by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/orda-raises-millions-to-digitize-african-restaurants-with-its-cloud-based-operating-system/

I don’t owe no one ish.

No More.

If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called Instafest will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits.

The free web app, created by developer Anshay Saboo, is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months, and all time.

You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight, and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” that might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is.

Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username, and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow this guide to revoke access.

Saboo told TechCrunch that he got the idea of the app while thinking about what Coechella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists.

“I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day, I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said

The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer, and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it may take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify.

Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation.

Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster.

The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the Lineupsupply app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist.

The app’s launch comes days before Spotify releases its Wrapped for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped.

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/instafest-app-lets-you-create-your-own-festival-lineup-from-spotify/

The venture market is in the middle of a downturn, but there are still plenty of emerging fund managers. Seedstars International Ventures, the investment firm that backs high-growth startups around the world, announced today it has launched a platform called Seedstars Capital with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to help new fund managers around the world launch funds and develop their investment firms.

Seedstars Group co-founder and Seedstars Capital managing partner Michael Weber and Seedstars Capital partner Benjamin Langer told TechCrunch in an email that “Seedstars’ mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.” Over the past decade, it has supported various stakeholders, mostly tech entrepreneurs, through entrepreneurial programs.

“We’ve seen so many talented entrepreneurs grow their companies very fast, to the standard of the U.S. or Europe, but unfortunately too many struggle to raise capital to grow even faster. To continue our mission to support them, Seedstars is now supporting the next generation of VC fund managers in emerging markets that will then back those promising entrepreneurs.”

Seedstars Capital will look for sector and industry-specific strategies in regions and countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. It is looking for funds that target pre-seed to Series A companies, since that is where they see the biggest funding gaps and potential.

“Ideally, we want to support gender-diverse teams as we know we need a more inclusive industry,” said Weber and Langer. “We are convinced this will have a tremendous impact at the portfolio level and we will be able to empower more women entrepreneurs.”

The platform will incubate, accelerate and invest in new venture capital funds in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Managers have usually raised a micro fund, already have experience as angel investors or worked at larger investment firms, and are in the process of launching their first institutional funds of between $15 million to $50 million.

Many fund managers are ones that Seedstars has known for a long time “and despite having relatively little track record on their own we knew they had the necessary skills to become top performing managers,” Weber and Langer said.

In fact, this is how Seedstars International Ventures began. Weber and Langer had worked with co-founder Charlie Graham-Brown since 2014, and in 2019, launched its first global fund for emerging markets, focusing on pre-seed stage. Last year, it launched Fund II with Patricia Sosrodjojo, which is now backed by the IFC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Visa Foundation and Symbiotics, among other investors.

Seedstars Africa Ventures, which invests across the continent, was also formed in a similar way. Seedstars had known Tamim El Zein and Maxime Bouan since they worked at Blue Orchard, focusing on Africa. They hired a third partner, Bruce Nsereko-Lule, and now the fund has LBO France as an anchor investor.

“Over the last year, we have meet with many exceptionally talented teams working very hard building their ecosystems and investing in outstanding entrepreneurs across emerging markets,” Weber and Langer said. “We want to partner with them and allow them to develop their strategies and have a powerful and positive impact.”

Seedstars Capital is committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and plans to use ESG and impact considerations as it selects a diverse group of fund managers. It also plans to serve as an investment catalyst with the goal of getting fund managers over $500 million of new funding in total. Seedstars Capital says this will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20 billion of additional GDP in emerging markets over the next 10 years.

Challenges Seedstars Capital will help emerging VC managers solve include ones like access to international funding. Since most of them typically have assets under management below $50 million and focus on a specific country or sector, they often rely on local individual investors, family offices and development finance institutions (DFIs), which can make fundraising periods stretch as long as 18 to 24 months.

Many emerging managers also lack access to infrastructure, even though they are good at investing in high-growth startups. That means they don’t have the resources to build the right support infrastructure for their portfolio companies and firms, including marketing budgets, tech stacks to manage deal flow and investors, tools and framework to measure the positive impact of portfolio companies or a network of mentors to support their founders.

They also lack access to a community of people, including mentors, investors and other managers, that can help them share best practices, deal flow, market trends or informal events, Weber and Lager said. “These are critical components of building a brand that will allow managers to select the best opportunities and attract the best talent.”

Weber and Langer said Seedstars can help solve these issues because it has over 10 years of experience in emerging markets, and has accelerated or incubated more than 2,000 ventures. It also has a network of more than 1,000 experts and mentors and is therefore “in a prime position to become that partner who can support emerging managers thrive in the industry and develop their investment firms in an institutional manner.”

In terms of investment, Weber and Langer said Seedstars Capital has tested several models, including investing in the management company, providing warehousing facilities or serving as an LP.

In the future, it will work with managers throughout the fundraising stage, providing access to Seedstars network and relationships to help funds hit their first or final close more quickly. It will also be an LP in all funds, and plans to invest between 3% to 5% of the fund size, with the goal of increasing that allocation to up to 10% in the future.

“Having said that, we do not intend to become an investor and our goal will always remain the same, working alongside the most talented emerging managers as partners in the development of their investment firms,” Weber and Langer said.

Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/seedstars-capital/

At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS announced a small but important update to Lambda, its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut the virtual machine down — and despite improvements like faster Firecracker microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process.

Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing noted in today’s keynote, spiky workloads are pretty much what Lambda (and all other serverless platforms) were built for. With its Firecracker microVMs, AWS already improved cold start times from multiple seconds to well under a second. Now, the company promises a 90% improvement in cold start times by using Firecracker’s Snapshotting feature.

This new feature is now available to all Lambda users, though it has to be enabled for existing Lambda functions and for now, it only works for Java functions that make use of the Corretto runtime.

Once enabled, when you first run that function, it will perform a standard initialization. After that, it will create an encrypted snapshot of the memory and disk state and cache that for reuse. Then, when the function is invoked again, Lambda will grab the cache and start up the function. Cached snapshots are removed after 14 days of inactivity.

As DeSantis also noted, improvements like this will enable more users to bring their workloads to a platform like Lambda. The company already saw this with the launch of Firecracker on Lambda, he explained.

AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/aws-makes-lambda-cold-start-latency-a-thing-of-the-past-with-snapstart/