Uber tie-up with Omio adds train & coach booking to app — starting with UK

Uber is testing adding train and coach travel to its app in the UK so customers can book longer distance ground travel via a fully integrated tie-up with Berlin-based multimodal travel platform, Omio.

The latter has built up its own consumer facing apps for booking intercity and international travel, across a wide variety of supported transport options, over almost a decade of operations. But, in recent years, it’s been ploughing resource into building out a b2b line — making its inventory available to partners via APIs so they can add transport booking options to their own apps and platforms.

Uber isn’t the first such tie up for Omio, per founder and CEO Naren Shaam. But he tells TechCrunch it’s the first partner to get full access to its ground transport inventory — which covers more than 1,000 transportation providers across 37 countries at this point.

“Uber is the first partner that is both at this scale but also the first that gets access to our full ticketing API so you actually are, as a customer, able to do everything within the Uber app — so it is the first with respect to this product that we’re offering,” he says.

Omio’s earlier b2b partnerships include some transport providers themselves, such as UK-based LNER, as well as the travel search engine Kayak and smartphone maker Huawei, among others.

The ride hailing giant is also the biggest b2b partner Omio has signed up so far: Shaam says the tie-up will put its inventory in front of the circa 5 million+ customers Uber claims in the UK market.

And while Omio’s own app includes non-ground transport options (like ferries and even flights) he says its platform remains strongest in inventory terms for booking train and coach/bus travel — hence why it’s starting there with Uber. Although Shaam hints there could be more to come. “This is the beginning of our partnership; it will expand — beyond just geography,” he suggests, noting that Omio’s b2b partners can “pick and choose” from its full inventory range of supported transport models to offer their own customers.

“It is very clear to me that we’re never going to have 100% of all the eyeballs in the wall using only Omio so very much the company is evolving into a more data company — where the data and our inventory becomes a core asset,” he adds, discussing its ramping up of focus on b2b alongside what he couches as a nicely scaling b2c business of its own.

“We spent years building very unique inventory… so actually during the pandemic… we realized that what we built — the core of the asset — is unique inventory that is very hard to access anywhere so we started building a team for b2b.”

From the get-go, the ground transport tie-up via Omio’s API will enable UK Uber users to book international trains if they’re so inclined.

Albeit actually getting out of the country and into France may prove more challenging — given recent post-Brexit travel chaos hitting holidaymakers at borders …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/uber-omio-ground-transport-booking/

Netflix’s lawsuit against the ‘Bridgerton Musical’ could change online fandom

Netflix filed a lawsuit this weekend against two TikTok stars in their early twenties, Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, alleging that their Grammy-winning “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” project infringed on the copyright of Netflix‘s original series “Bridgerton.”

Early last year, the songwriting duo started penning impressive ballads about the popular Netflix show for fun, posting them on TikTok. Their videos were so popular that Barlow and Bear released an entire musical soundtrack based on “Bridgerton,” then beat out legends like Andrew Lloyd Webber to win the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Musical Album. The moment was a milestone, demonstrating the impact of social media on pop culture.

If this project has been gaining steam for over a year, why would Netflix sue now? On July 26, the duo staged a sold-out performance at the Kennedy Center in New York City, featuring The National Symphony Orchestra and a collection of Broadway guest stars. With tickets ranging between $29 and $149, plus VIP upgrades, Netflix put its foot down after “repeated objections,” demanding an end to these for-profit performances.

Based on novels by Julia Quinn, “Bridgerton” has shattered viewership records for Netflix originals. In a time of financial strain and subscriber loss for the streamer, the Regency-era romance is important IP.

Barlow and Bear’s lawyers first approached Netflix in March 2021, asking for the streaming giant’s blessing of a recorded album and a charity show. Netflix, according to its own characterization in its lawsuit, said that it wouldn’t authorize the activity, but also wouldn’t “[stand] in the way.”

For Netflix, the Kennedy Center performance was a step too far. Barlow and Bear did not have permission from Netflix to stage their ticketed event, but according to legal experts, Netflix’s permission is irrelevant to the question of copyright infringement.

“It’s a very interesting fair use case,” said Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies internet law and fandom. “This is what law school exams are made of.”

Is the ‘Bridgerton Musical’ legal? It’s complicated.

“Barlow & Bear’s conduct began on social media, but stretches ‘fan fiction’ well past its breaking point,” Netflix’s lawsuit reads. “It is blatant infringement of intellectual property rights.”

But the legal reality isn’t as cut-and-dry as Netflix’s complaint makes it out to be.

Historically, fan works have sometimes been deemed legal under the fair use doctrine, which states that some copyrighted material can be used without explicit permission.

“I’ve seen a lot of people implying that because [Barlow and Bear] are commercializing it, that means it’s not fair use,” Fiesler told TechCrunch. “Whether something is commercial or non-commerical is part of a fair use analysis, but it’s part of only one factor.”

Fair use analysis looks at the purpose of a work (is it for-profit?), the amount of copyrighted material it uses, the nature of the work (how transformative is it?), and how the work might economically impact the original.

Fiesler told TechCrunch that there have been many examples of commercial fan works that were …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/unofficial-bridgerton-musical-lawsuit-netflix-barlow-bear/

A touch-up for Glambook’s bank balance, as it aims to be Airbnb for beauty professionals

In the world of beauty, independent professionals often end up renting a chair in a salon. Glambook reckons that market is ripe for some tech-forward disruption, not dissimilar from renting a chair in someone’s car (Uber) a desk in someone’s office (WeWork), or a room with a view in someone’s house (Airbnb). The company raised $2.5 million at a $12 million valuation.

The new investment will be used to grow the company’s existing customer base and support the nascent infrastructure. The company is opening beauty co-working spaces across London for starters, and is eyeing international expansion. In addition to its own real estate, the company is already hosting 20,000 freelance professionals across 50 European cities, for at-home, at-office, or in-salon appointments.

“A new generation of consumers view beauty brands as entities they can access through a variety of points of intersection, including physical and digital. They expect the same quality of service in-store, on the website, and on social media, so Glambook becomes a bridge between beauty makers and customers,” says Alex Tomchenko, CEO of Glambook.

Glambook is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/glambook/

How a Romanian MedTech startup helped US doctors treat refugee Ukrainian cancer patients

An innovative new medical startup in Romania helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat Ukrainian cancer patients made refugees after Russia’s brutal invasion.

The “Tumor Board” project was initiated by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life saving treatments for displaced Ukrainians with cancer.

A collaboration of Heal 21 Association and Blue Heron Foundation, the Board used a platform provided by Romanian startup Medicai to connect doctors, share medical files, and provide a platform to discuss treatment plans, as well as allow the patients to track their own progress.

Starting in April, imaging of the cancer patients from Ukraine was uploaded (those who had it) and the new imaging from Moldava were translated from Ukrainian to Romanian/English, and reports were prepared for each patient.

Medicai, which has raised €1.2M in venture funding to date, says its web based HIPAA-compliant platform hopes to become a sort of “Miro for health”, allowing healthcare professionals to collaborate over patient documents and records.

The problem Medicai is solving sounds familiar. For example, to this day, patients go into a $1 million MRI machine and – generally speaking – walk out with a CD disk with an image of their knee or some other part of their body. It’s just one example of how data can be siloed and how patients are usually locked into large, centralized systems. This means medical professionals can’t easily collaborate with specialists outside of their hospitals.

Established corporates selling these centralized systems include BoxDICOM, Ambra Health and amongst the startups there is EnvoyAI and Collective Minds Radiology (raised $6.7M), among others.

Medicai founder Mircea Popa’s journey in healthcare started in 2011 when, with a friend of his, he co-founded a company that is now called SkinVision, a skin cancer screening app that detects melanoma (skin cancer) through ML algorithms applied on images taken with smartphones. SkinVision reached 1.2 million downloads and raised a total of $15 million in total. Medicai Co-founder Alexandru Artimon (CTO) previously co-founded software company Atta Systems.

Popa told me via email: “One lesson we’ve learned lately about healthcare is that we desperately need flexibility. With the Tumor Board project we’ve shown that Medicai can set up infrastructure in a matter of days to provide access to expertise across 2 continents: US & Canada to Romania and Moldavia – and this was done in less than ideal conditions.”

“Through the Tumor Board project we were able to touch the lives of oncological patients that would have had no other option in seeking treatment and we’re really proud to be a part of that,” he added.

So far Medicai says it has reached 29 paying clinics/hospitals, with 2,434 doctors accounts and 1400 patients accounts. It’s also claimed a strategic partnership with Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies.

Investors to date include D Moonshots, Cleverage Venture Capital, Roca X and Gapminder VC.

Meanwhile the Tumor Board project continues. If there are the predicted four million Ukrainian refugees arriving in the coming months, there could be between 13,000 and 16,000 new patients with cancer per …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/how-a-romanian-medtech-startup-helped-us-doctors-treat-refugee-ukrainian-cancer-patients/

Salesforce shutters Hong Kong office, leans on Alibaba in China

Salesforce is repositioning itself in China as it looks to expand the reach of its customer relationship management software in the country.

The company is “accelerating” its strategic partnership with Alibaba, a Salesforce spokesperson told TechCrunch. In 2019, Alibaba became the exclusive provider of the American giant’s software across Greater China.

As a result of its tightened partnership with Alibaba, Salesforce is “optimizing our business structure to better serve the Greater China Region” and “opening new roles while eliminating some others,” the spokesperson said.

The company’s career page shows it’s currently hiring a product management director and a senior software engineer in the southern Chinese city Guangzhou, where it placed its tech team.

It’s unclear what positions Salesforce is cutting in China, but the spokesperson confirmed that the firm is closing its office space in Hong Kong, which has historically been a springboard for multinationals to enter China. Many roles at Salesforce’s Hong Kong office are in sales and account management, LinkedIn profiles show.

It’s also unclear how exactly its relationship with Alibaba is evolving. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Salesforce’s interest in China lies in serving international businesses localizing in China, but it can’t do it alone due to the country’s intricate regulatory restrictions.

As China introduced new rules to control data handling across borders over the past few years, international tech giants have scaled back their presence in China or exited the market completelyLinkedIn, Yahoo, and Airbnb, to name a few.

Last year, Salesforce and Alibaba launched a joint product to help brands scale up their social commerce presence in China. The use of social networks such as WeChat to drive e-commerce sales, dubbed social commerce, has become a norm in China.

“Salesforce Social Commerce is intended to be built and hosted in China on Alibaba Cloud, one of the world’s top three cloud providers and the largest in APAC, to help support the level of scalability needed for China’s ever-growing commerce ecosystem and to help customers address local data residency regulations and compliance concerns,” Salesforce said at the time.

Salesforce could also potentially woo China’s e-commerce exporters who are fleeing centralized marketplaces like Amazon for self-hosted stores. But it has not shown visible effort to attract this crowd, while its competitor Oracle offers a one-stop shop for export-led sellers to handle data analytics, digital payments, and more. That said, Shopify is an affordable go-to solution for most sellers seeking independence from Amazon.

A report by Chinese business publication Ebrun reported on Wednesday that Salesforce has “disbanded” its China unit, which oversees the firm’s business in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Alibaba will be taking over the firm’s sales in mainland China and Hong Kong, while Taiwan will fall under the management of its Singapore office, the report said.

When asked to verify these claims, Salesforce’s spokesperson pointed to the statement provided to …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/salesforce-china-alibaba-cloud/

German semiconductor giant Semikron says hackers encrypted its network

Semikron, a German manufacturer that produces semiconductors for electric vehicles and industrial automation systems, has confirmed it has fallen victim to a cyberattack that has resulted in data encryption.

“Semikron is already in the process of dealing with the situation so that workflows and all related processes can continue without disruption for both employees and customers as soon as possible,” a Semikron spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Semikron declined to disclose the nature of the cyberattack, but all signs point to ransomware. The semiconductor maker said in a statement that hackers claim to have “exfiltrated data from our system,” adding that the incident has led to a “partial encryption of our IT systems and files.” This suggests the malicious actor behind the attack has used the double extortion ransomware tactic, whereby cybercriminals exfiltrate a victim’s sensitive data in addition to encrypting it.

The Nuremberg-based group company, which claims to power 35% of the wind turbines installed globally each year, declined to say who was behind the attack nor whether it received a ransom demand. However, Bleeping Computer reports that Semikron was the victim of the LV ransomware, with the hackers apparently stealing 2 terabytes of documents.

LV ransomware has been in operation since at least 2020 and uses a modified variant of REvil ransomware, according to cybersecurity company Secureworks. According to the group’s dark web blog, which doesn’t yet list Semikron as a victim, the gang targets companies that allegedly do not meet data protection obligations.

“They rejected to fix their mistakes, they rejected to protect this data in the case when they could and had to protect it,” its dark web blog states. “These companies preferred to sell their private information, their employees’ and customers’ personal data.”

It’s unclear what data was exfiltrated from Semikron’s systems, and the company declined to say how many customers and employees are potentially impacted. Semikron has over 3,000 employees in 24 offices and 8 production sites worldwide across Germany, Brazil, China, France, India, Italy, Slovakia, and the United States.

“With the support of external cyber security and forensic experts, we are investigating the incident,” Semikron added. “At the same time, we are working to restore the ability to work in order to minimize the disruption to our employees, customers and partners and to ensure the security of our IT systems as best as possible.”

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/semikron-hackers-encrypted-electric-vehicles/

Aisera lands $90M to automate customer service requests with AI

“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for

Aisera, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI-driven” support ticketing system, today announced that it raised $90 million in Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs with participation from True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others. CEO Muddu Sudhakar said the new cash will be put toward market expansion and supporting Aisera’s go-to-market strategy, in addition to investing in the company’s product development, R&D, sales and marketing initiatives.

Sudhakar says he built Aisera after perceiving the need for “predictive AI” solutions that could auto-resolve customer service, IT, sales and operations problems. Leveraging AI, the platform plugs into existing systems of record, including help desk portals, to respond to incoming inquiries and requests.

Sudhakar founded Aisera in 2017 alongside Christos Tryfonas, a longtime colleague. Sudhakar most recently led teams at ServiceNow and EMC, previously founding startups (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon and Sanera Systems) that were acquired by VMware and Splunk. Tryfonas, a former AT&T Bell Labs researcher, worked with Sudhakar at several of his ventures before joining Aisera.

“We thought [the pandemic] would be a problem, but Aisera’s technology does very well in remote environments. Customers wanted AI and automation to drive user engagement and adoption,” Sudhakar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Now in the current market downturn, we’re seeing the need for cost reduction on licenses and people. This is driving demand for Aisera as we’re able to help organizations reduce costs for IT and business services.”

The way Sudhakar explains it, Aisera’s platform learns to resolve issues through a combination of language-analyzing AI and robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA technology attempts to mimic the way people interact with software to accomplish basic, repeatable tasks at scale. It’s not a particularly novel idea — RPA vendors, including Automation Anywhere and UiPath, claim to be able to do this to some extent. But Sudhakar asserts that Aisera’s brand of RPA is custom-built for customer/employee service use cases.

Image Credits: Aisera

“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for natural language processing and natural language understanding.”

When a request comes in via email, voice, a ticket or a chatroom, Aisera attempts to understand it by analyzing it with an algorithm trained to understand language. The platform then cross-references sources like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Confluence and SharePoint for customer data to personalize its replies to the request. After that step, Aisera creates a list of actions that need to be completed to fulfill the request, which it submits to a “workflow management” engine.

Aisera can return articles or snippets of articles from a company’s knowledge base that most …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/aisera-lands-90m-to-automate-customer-service-requests-with-ai/

Playstudios launches blockchain gaming division and $10M web3-focused fund

Playstudios, a publicly-traded mobile gaming platform and developer, is venturing into the web3 world with a new blockchain division and investment fund.

The gaming entity, which owns popular mobile apps like Tetris, is now launching a new blockchain-focused sector, which will use “rewarded play” to leverage blockchain technology and deliver more rewarding experiences to users across its portfolio of games. It’s also announced a $10 million investment, Future Fund, to back companies building rewarded play options.

In the past, the gaming studio accumulated a massive portfolio of free-to-play games – like MGM Slots Live, myVEGAS Slots, and others – that provide players the ability to earn real-world rewards through its loyalty program. To date, its community has used its in-app loyalty points to purchase over 10 million rewards, the company said.

“As we enter into the web3 space, we’ve kind of been doing play-to-earn for 10 years so I’d argue we’re the pioneers in the world of play,” Andrew Pascal, founder and CEO of Playstudios, said to TechCrunch. “We’ve spent a lot of our energy thinking about how to reward players in our games.

The new division will be built upon the acquisition of blockchain-based loyalty platform for games WonderBlocks, as well as a strategic alliance with blockchain infrastructure gaming developer Forte.

“A lot has been made in the promise of web3 games,” Pascal said. “The fact that people can acquire assets that are no longer specific to one game, it’s really massive that it can enrich over time as that asset can be incorporated and leveraged across games. Interoperability is one of the more exciting dimensions of what web3 gaming can unlock.”

Its fund has already made investments in blockchain gaming technology like Forte and will be used to grow its strategic innovation through blockchain loyalty and reward models, Pascal said.

Last month, industry players said that the web3 gaming industry is one of the few sectors seemingly less affected by current crypto market conditions due to gamers seeking out entertainment regardless of volatility, though overall sales volumes in the sector are still broadly slumping. The blockchain gaming space has continued to court attention over the past year as developers and funds alike continue to bank on the industry through new capital and innovations.

“It’s our intention to continue growing, adopting and diversifying our games and audiences and the things we offer our players,” Pascal said. “With the emergence of blockchain models and web3 space, we certainly have watched how it has evolved in all its different forms. We think we’ll have a unique take in the way we approach tokenizing our loyalty programs to continue to enrich the benefits for players.”

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/playstudios-launches-blockchain-gaming-division-and-10m-web3-focused-fund/

U.K provisionally approves $8.1B NortonLifeLock-Avast merger, citing competition from Microsoft

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally greenlighted the proposed $8.1 billion merger of cybersecurity companies NortonLifeLock and Avast, with Microsoft emerging as an unlikely ally as the two companies seek to push the deal over the line.

The merger has been hanging in the balance since the two companies first announced their plans in August last year, with the CMA revealing in March that it was opening an investigation as the coming together of two cyber security giants raised competition concerns. Indeed, the two companies offer a range of security software products, spanning antivirus, identity protection, and VPNs, with the CMA noting at the time that the due are “close competitors” with “few other significant rivals.”

“We are living more of our lives online and it is vital that people have access to competitive cyber safety software when seeking to protect themselves and their families,” David Stewart, CMA executive director, said at the time.

No concerns

Fast-forward to today, and the CMA said that it has now concluded that the merger “does not raise competition concerns in the U.K.,” and that there are various alternative free and premium cyber security software products on the market. These include the likes of McAfee, which in fact was recently acquired by an investor consortium for $14 billion, and the mighty Microsoft, which the CMA said “holds a unique position in the market as the owner of the Windows operating system.”

Microsoft has indeed bolstered its omnipresent operating system with its own built-in Defender-branded antivirus software — back in June, the company launched Microsoft Defender for Individuals, an online security application for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers across Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS. And it also launched a standalone version of Microsoft Defender for Business. Collectively, these various products have meant that consumers and businesses have become less reliant on security software from third-party providers such as NortonLifeLock or Avast.

“Applications recently launched by Microsoft for its customers bring its cyber safety offering closer to those of the merging businesses and are likely to further strengthen Microsoft as a competitor going forward,” the CMA said in its statement.

From a U.K. regulatory perspective, the merger isn’t over the line quite yet. The provisional approval has now been put back out for further feedback, with “interested parties” invited to respond by August 24 — the final decision is expected by September 8, 2022.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/u-k-provisionally-approves-8-1b-nortonlifelock-avast-merger-citing-competition-from-microsoft/

Employee benefits platform Ben raises $16M to cut HR admin

Employee benefits platform Ben today announced it has raised $16 million in a series A round of funding led by European VC giant Atomico.

While salary is undoubtedly the main draw in a company’s compensation offer, additional “perks” can help sweeten the deal for current or would-be employees — this could be anything from gym subsidies or an ebike subscription, to meal allowances and mental wellbeing support. But curating and bundling all these various benefits is a massively resource-intensive endeavor, something that Ben is setting out to solve.

Founded out of London in 2019, Ben is a SaaS platform that offers core employment benefits such as life insurance, health, and pension, as well as more lifestyle-based nice-to-haves such as gym memberships and work-from-home allowances.

While Ben is aimed at the human resources (HR) realm, it essentially straddles both the HR and fintech divide, integrating with systems spanning accounting, HR, and payroll to automate many of the onboarding and enrolment processes. Through the platform, employers can set budgets and spend controls for each worker’s perks, as well as facilitate the entire payments process to the service provider. On top of that, Ben can also issue Mastercards that each employee can use on whatever perks they want within the limits stipulated by the company.

“What was once a huge burden for HR teams to compile and manage is now collated and presented through the Ben platform,” Ben cofounder and CEO Sebastian Fallert explained to TechCrunch. “This both expands choice greatly while also minimizing time-consuming admin.”

Ben’s benefits

A quick peek across the employee benefits’ landscape reveals a number of similar companies, including Forma which recently announced a $40 million series B round of funding back in March, while London-based Juno secured a $4 million round.

Ben, for its part, is pitching its “end-to-end flexibility” and comprehensiveness of its benefits as one of its core differentiators, spanning regulated “core” (e.g. life insurance and pensions) products and lifestyle (e.g. gyms) perks.

“On the ‘core’ front, we’re able to provide country-specific coverage through our global broker network and enrolment technology,” Ben cofounder and COO David Duckworth said. “This is important, so companies always get the best combination of coverage and price. On the lifestyle front, we have relationships with benefits suppliers and can enable spend controls on the Ben Mastercard to turn any merchant into a benefit, including spending Lifestyle budgets on core products.”

On top of that, Duckworth also pointed to the fact that Ben is an “open” platform that isn’t locked into a set range of benefits.

“Companies are not limited to specific providers and can bring their own providers and broker relationships, while Ben takes over the ongoing administration,” he said.

It’s also worth noting that a key premise behind the “extensiveness” and flexibility of the benefits on offer is that different people have different needs, depending on a multitude of factors — including their age.

“This is the first time in history that four generations coexist in the workforce at the same time,” Fallert added. “Baby Boomers, …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/employee-benefits-platform-ben-raises-16m-to-cut-hr-admin/