TechCrunch+

The day has arrived. Today, Disney+ launched its ad-supported tier, “Disney+ Basic,” at $7.99/month. The plan is currently only available in the U.S. and will become available in other countries sometime next year.

“Today’s launch marks a milestone moment for Disney+ and puts consumer choice at the forefront. With these new ad-supported offerings, we’re able to deliver greater flexibility for consumers to enjoy the full breadth and depth of incredible storytelling from The Walt Disney Company,” Michael Paull, president of Direct to Consumer, said in a statement.

Netflix has its work cut out for it if it wants to compete successfully with Disney+’s new ad-supported tier. For instance, Disney+ Basic not only lets viewers stream high-quality video, including Full HD, HDR10, 4K Ultra HD, Dolby Vision and Expanded Aspect Ratio with IMAX Enhanced, but it also lets subscribers stream on up to four supported devices simultaneously. Plus, the ad plan includes Disney+’s full content catalog.

Netflix’s ad-supported plan, on the other hand, only supports 720p HD video quality, subscribers can only stream on one device at the same time and around 5% to 10% of Netflix’s content library is missing due to licensing restrictions.

Neither Disney+ Basic nor Netflix’s “Basic with ads” plan allows offline viewing or downloads.

Other features not included in the Disney+ Basic plan at launch are GroupWatch, SharePlay and Dolby Atmos. A Disney spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company hopes to support this in the future, but the exact timing is unknown.

Ads will range from 15 to 30 or 45 seconds long, the spokesperson added. As we previously reported, Disney+ is limiting thetotal ad loadto an average of four minutes of commercials an hour. Preschool content has zero ads.

Also, the company revised the Disney Bundle. The Disney Bundle Duo (Disney+ Basic and Hulu’s ad plan) will cost $9.99/month, whereas the Disney Bundle Trio Basic (Disney+ Basic, Hulu’s ad plan and ESPN+) will be $12.99/month and the Disney Bundle Trio Premium is priced at $19.99/month.

Alongside the launch, Disney+ increased the price of its Premium ad-free subscription to $10.99/month, up from $7.99. So while it may seem that Disney+ is launching a cheaper tier, the reality is that subscribers will have to pay the same price for a plan that will now get ads.

Research firm Kantar found that 23% of existing Disney+ subscribers plan to switch to the new tier, Deadline reported. That means more than 37 million subscribers could choose to pay the same price they always have but for an arguably “downgraded” subscription plan.

Hulu, the Disney-owned streaming service, also got a price hike, along with the Disney Bundle and Hulu Live TV.

The main reason Disney+ launched its ad-supported tier was to open up its streaming service to new subscribers. Disney previously said that the new tier will keep the company on track to reach its target of 230-260 million Disney+ subscribers by 2024. The streamer reported an impressive total of 164.2 million global subscribers in Q4 2022, which includes 46.4 million domestic subscribers.

Also, Disney’s direct-to-consumer division lost $1.5 billion, so the ad-supported tier is a potential new revenue stream for the company. The streaming giant boasted in today’s announcement that Disney+ Basic is launching with over 100 advertisers.

“Today, we welcome Disney+ with ads to the largest, most diverse and impactful portfolio in the industry. We are committed to connecting our clients to the best storytelling in the world while delivering innovation and viewer-first experience in streaming now and in the future,” said Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising.

Disney+ launches its ad-supported tier to compete with Netflix by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Cameo today launched Cameo Kids, its new video messaging service that features personalized videos from popular animated characters like Thomas the Tank Engine, JJ, Cody, Cece and Nina from “CoComelon,” Blippi from “Blippi Wonders,” True from Netflix’s “True and the Rainbow Kingdom,” as well as an animated Santa Claus.

Today’s launch is notable as it marks the company’s first large investment into family entertainment. After a slowdown in business earlier this year that resulted in laying off 25% of its workforce, Cameo is on the hunt to grow its user base.

Cameo Kids will likely unlock a broader audience as shows like “CoComelon” draw in millions of viewers. In February 2022, “CoComelon” accounted for 33.3 billion minutes of viewing across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and YouTube, per Nielsen.

The celebrity video-sharing service will introduce more and more characters to Cameo Kids on a “rolling basis,” Cameo wrote in its announcement. Parents and their children can get personalized birthday and holiday video greetings for $25 to $30. Video orders are usually delivered within seven days, claims the company.

“We’ve seen jaw-dropping fan reactions to Cameo videos over the last few years including truly wowed children, so we’re excited to spread even more of that joy with this new offering,” said Steven Galanis, Cameo Co-Founder and CEO, in a statement. “We’re building a platform where families can get their kid’s favorite star to not just know their name but share support for every important moment in their child’s life – big and small.”

Cameo partnered with Candle Media to help develop Cameo Kids. The media company was co-founded by former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs. Last year, Candle Media acquired Moonbug Entertainment, the distributor of shows “CoComelon,” “Blippi” and “Little Baby Bum.”

“The creator economy is driven by opportunities for fans to engage directly with their favorite personalities, and we are thrilled to partner with Cameo to allow parents and loved ones to create personalized Cameo videos featuring many of our most popular animated characters from Moonbug, and over time, additional Candle brands and franchises,” added Mayer and Staggs.

Cameo now offers kid-friendly personalized videos from CoComelon, Blippi, Thomas the Tank Engine by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Indian financial services firm Paytm said Thursday evening it is considering repurchasing its shares, following a tremulous year that has seen its stock price fall by over 60%.

In a stock exchange filing, Paytm said it will consider a proposal to buyback the fully paid-up equity shares of the company and discuss it in a meeting with board on December 13.

“The management believes that given the company’s prevailing liquidity/ financial position, a buyback may be beneficial for our shareholders. The outcome of the Board meeting will be disseminated to the stock exchanges after conclusion of the Board meeting on December 13, 2022, in accordance with the applicable provisions of the SEBI Listing Regulations,” it said in the filing.

Buybacks are not uncommon and are generally seen as a way companies could reward their shareholders. Many firms have ramped up repurchasing their shares this year, taking advantage of the falling prices in the public markets globally.

The move is especially notable for Paytm, whose shares have fallen over 65% since listing late last year and have never recovered to touch the issue price of $25.2. Its shares ended Thursday at $6.2.

(More to follow)

India’s Paytm considers buying back shares following a rough year by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

A startup from former Meta employees aims to streamline the content moderation process for companies grappling with some of the internet’s most complex, dangerous challenges.

Cinder, which likes to describe itself as an “operating system for trust and safety,” boasts years of combined experience in security and content policy work. That includes CEO and co-founder Glen Wise, a former red team engineer at Meta, Philip Brennan and Declan Cummings, who worked on threat intelligence at Meta, and Brian Fishman, the former director of Facebook’s counterterrorism and dangerous organizations team.

Cinder is backed by venture firm Accel, which led a seed round in May and a $12.8 million Series A this month, with participation from Y Combinator. The company was created in January of this year and has raised a total of $14 million to date.

Speaking with TechCrunch, Wise likened Cinder to business software platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk that can pull scattered sets of data together into a single user interface. But with Cinder, instead of sales or customer service teams tracking and sifting data, content moderators and other members of a company’s trust and safety teams can centralize a sensitive workflow into one purpose-built tool.

Wise says that companies without robust workflows in place for trust and safety right now awkwardly rely on systems that were built for different use cases, like bug tracking.

“I started talking to a lot of heads of trust and safety [and] a lot of other large internet companies, honestly a lot outside of social media as well, and they were struggling with operationally how to solve a lot of this, Wise told TechCrunch. “They would hire really smart people but they’d be stuck in spreadsheets, they’d be stuck in SQL statements and be stuck in this kind of world of the past, because they had no tools custom built for this.”

If a content moderator using one of those systems wants to review a social media post, for example, they’d have to leave that environment and follow a URL to view the content in question before coming back into the bug tracking tool to view any relevant context and provide their input.

“Then like an hour and a half later, they can actually make a decision, Wise said. “And so we want to do all of that out of the box.” Wise says that so far Cinder mostly appeals to large companies that have established trust and safety operations or ones in the process of figuring out what those workflows should look like.

For social networks and other companies hosting user-generated content, the threats that trust and safety teams face are as complex as they are varied. Companies building out trust and safety must weave together expertise on everything from targeted harassment and hate groups to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and state-sponsored influence operations.

Making moderation decisions in those areas can be as simple as flagging a single text post that uses a racial slur — a decision that might only take a few seconds — or as nuanced as linking together hundreds of accounts operating a covert government-sponsored influence campaign over the course of many months.

While some content is outright illegal, with official detection and reporting workflows to reflect that, most enforcement decisions fall to private companies to sort out. And as we’ve seen time and time again in recent years, the rules that define what content is allowed online and what content isn’t are living documents that respond, double back and evolve in real-time.

Cinder aims to centralize those policies and the necessary context, enabling straightforward decision making at scale while still facilitating “dynamic investigations” — the kind of work that a disinformation campaign or a coordinated effort to undermine an election might require. The platform doesn’t do any detection itself and it doesn’t set the rules, that’s all up to the companies that license its software. (For now, Cinder isn’t naming any of its clients.)

Wise also notes that because Cinder was designed for the content review process, the company has been able to accommodate the human element of some of the web’s most emotionally demanding work, building for those needs “from the ground up.” That includes emerging industry-standard practices like blurring and grayscaling or prompting moderators to take a break after viewing something particularly challenging. Those interventions and others can mitigate what might otherwise be lasting harm to content reviewers.

“I think a lot of people understand how hard of a job it is to be a moderator and to look at a lot of this content,” Wise told TechCrunch. “What’s been really rewarding about this is that companies are really trying to invest in safety measures and are looking to a third party to help provide them.”

Beyond moderator safety concerns, Wise says Cinder is built with security and privacy considered at every level, which comes naturally to a team with a strong security pedigree. He describes a “robust” permissioning system within the software that makes it possible to obscure sensitive identifying information or other data easily, allowing different levels of access to pre-defined groups.

“We have a few customers on board and using the product and they’re really happy about it,” Wise said. “People never really had the tools built for this… and people are really excited to see that, okay, there’s a company of people who’ve done this before, who can help build for the exact use case, which has been really great.”

Cinder’s content moderation software is custom-built for trust and safety teams by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

Metagood, a for-profit social impact NFT startup, has raised $5 million in its pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.

“We launched the company on the concept of using NFTs as an expression where everyone does good things for each other and the good stuff is tokenized and exchangeable,” Bill Tai, co-founder and chairman of Metagood, said to TechCrunch.

The company launched its flagship NFT collection OnChainMonkey to create tokenized value for community members. It also aims to give members the chance to promote and fund social good projects through its DAO, which raised 2,000 ETH in just one year, he added.

Its DAO distributed 55 ETH, or $68,500 at current prices, to 28 projects across 10 weeks in its “Season 1,” Amanda Terry, co-founder of Metagood, said to TechCrunch. Some of its projects include funding the rehabilitation of a skate park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with art from OnChainMonkey and helping Afghan refugees evacuate to Italy.

Investors in the recent funding round include Animoca Brands, Morgan Creek Capital founder and CEO Mark Yusko, and Virgin Group investment manager Freddie Andrewes, to name a few.

“We appeal to a certain kind of person that wants to have a positive impact on the world,” Tai said. “Many of our investors have experienced good success in their careers and want to use their influence to do other good things in the world.”

Previous investors include a number of high-profile celebrities or executives like actor Owen Wilson, Virgin Unite chair Holly Branson, and Rotten Tomatoes co-founders Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, as well as crypto investments from Dapper Labs co-founder Roham Gharegozlou, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, among others.

“Holly Branson sees this as a vehicle to extend what she’s doing,” Tai said. “That’s the common theme here. Culturally, we attract good-hearted people that want to lead the world into better places.”

The capital will be used toward growing the company, hiring new talent, and building OnChainMonkey’s community and tools, Terry said. “We’ve been profitable off our pre-seed but we want to keep growing. We’re sitting on about 3,000 ETH from our public mint and other revenues.”

Metagood believes that web3 can be a positive force in creating an economy of good karma, where people are rewarded for doing good things, Tai said. The startup aims to combine rewards through charitable giving and the prices of the OnChainMonkey NFTs. “As the karma spreads, the economy grows.”

The DAO model allows for a maximum amount of funds to go toward projects— and fast, Tai said.

The skate park mentioned above is an example of a “micro charity grant that would be very hard to administer with a large organization, and we were able to pull that off within days,” Tai said.

“We want the rubber to meet the road between causes and giving, Tai said. “We can address things that large centralized charity organizations who have a lot of authorities can’t do. […] It wouldn’t surprise me if years from now we would be doing thousands of these a year.”

NFT-focused startup Metagood raises $5 million to grow ‘social good’ impact by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

It seems perhaps the rules of fairness your parents taught you as children also apply to large multi-billion dollar defense contracts. This week the DoD announced that it was awarding four big tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle – an equal opportunity to share in a $9 billion contract to bring the department to the cloud.

The new program, which is dubbed the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), has a five and a half year window through 2028 with the four companies having an equal opportunity to access the $9 billion in funds, but with none being actually allocated as of yet to any of them.

“No funds will be obligated at the time of award; funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued,” the department said in a statement.

“The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge.”

Whether this new contract solves the issues that arose around the original ill-fated DoD cloud procurement deal remains unclear. For those of you unfamiliar with the saga, the DoD cloud journey has been a long and twisted one.

It began in 2018 when the department announced the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure orJEDI for short. The cutesie Star Wars reference aside, the deal came under intense scrutiny because of its winner-take-all component, which immediately had companies complaining and jockeying for position for what was a $10 billion deal.

Oracle, which you’ll note has equal access in this deal, was particularly vocal, complaining that Amazon had an unfair advantage for a variety of reasons. In the end, it wasn’t Amazon that won the deal though, it was Microsoft. But that wasn’t the end of the story as Amazon challenged the result in court, claiming the previous president had a bias against former Amazon board chair (and former CEO) Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post newspaper.

After a lot of additional drama, the department finally pulled the plug on the whole thing in July 2021 and went back to square one.

And this week’s announcement is the culmination of that decision. The fact that it left the entire thing open-ended this time begs the question how this will all finally get resolved, but we have another five years to figure it out and see if the DoD can finally enter the cloud age without making the four major players (really, three and Oracle) unhappy again with who gets what.

Maybe mom really was right, and life isn’t cut up into equal pieces of pie.

This time, the DoD gives four tech titans equal shot at piece of $9B cloud contract by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

WeWalk, a U.K.-based startup developing a “smart cane” for visually-impaired people, today announced it has raised £2 million ($2.4 million) in venture funding from several notable institutional and angel investors — this includes Manchester City and German international footballer İlkay Gündoğan.

Founded out of London in 2019, WeWalk has developed a GPS-enabled smart cane and smartphone app, helping users navigate their surrounding environment. Time named the WeWalk Smart Cane one of the “best inventions” of 2019.

The cane, which costs around $600, can detect physical obstacles on the sidewalk and alert the user through vibrations and sounds, while the app integration enables turn-by-turn navigation too. Last year, WeWalk announced a partnership with Intel-owned Moovit to bring local transit data into the mix.

Fast-forward to today, and WeWalk is now looking to use its fresh cash injection to bolster its product with computer vision smarts, developed in partnership with Imperial College London and the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

Visual aid

While it’s not clear exactly what this will entail yet, the ultimate goal is to build something capable of reading road signs, or telling the user what number is on the front of a bus, or even what a specific object in their path is.

“We are aiming to maximise sensor efficiency and cost-effectiveness, leveraging smartphone sensing when appropriate,” WeWalk R&D lead Jean Marc Feghali explained to TechCrunch. “We are also investigating the state-of-the-art to determine what could be possible in different form factors.”

This initiative could also benefit from WeWalk’s existing partnership with Microsoft as part of its AI for Accessibility program, and may lead to deeper integrations with Microsoft’s Seeing AI app or Azure ML, according to Feghali.

The company has already started work on the project, recruiting some 30 people to help build and test the necessary software and hardware

“The RNIB is supporting user-testing and ensuring that our designs are human-centred,” Feghali said. “Imperial College is supporting the underlying sensing algorithms. We envision a product that could be attached discreetly, providing its sensors with the widest field of view without impeding the user’s typical motion. We will then look to different feedback mechanisms including auditory and tactile to inform the user of information necessary for their safe mobility.”

It’s still a while away though, with plans to have something ready for market by 2024, but the company said that it is already testing camera and remote-human assistance functionality within the WeWalk mobile app, using this as a “design platter” to add further computer vision tools in the future.

With a fresh £2 million in the bank, the company said that it also plans to support other groups by creating “adaptive mobility aids” such as walking sticks or frames for elderly people.

“We want to scale our business to reach a wider global audience and advance our technology to offer better, more meaningful information to visually impaired people, older people, and anyone that faces mobility challenges,” WeWalk co-founder and CEO Gökhan Meriçliler said in a statement.

WeWalk’s funding round was led by Nesta Impact Investments, King’s Health Partners (KHP Ventures) and APY Ventures, with participation from public investors via Crowdcube and, of course, İlkay Gündoğan.

WeWalk raises cash to bring computer vision to smart cane for visually-impaired people by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Foxconn is investing another $500 million in its India business as it ramps up its plans to expand its chipmaking factories in the South Asian market that is slowly becoming a key hardware hub for Apple.

In a stock exchange filing in Taiwan on Thursday, Foxconn said its Singapore subsidiary is deploying the capital into the India entity, Hon Hai Technology India Mega Development Private Limited.

The move follows Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai, picking up pace to expand its smartphone production capacity in India as key partner Apple begins locally producing the current generation iPhone units in the country.

In late September, Apple began assembling the iPhone 14 models in India, locally producing the current lineup for the first time in the same calendar year in the world’s second largest smartphone market.

Analysts estimate that Apple will turn India into a global iPhone manufacturing hub by 2025 as it slowly cuts its reliance on China, where it has been producing the vast majority of its devices for over a decade. In a September report, JP Morgan analysts said Apple will move 5% of global iPhone 14 production to India by late 2022 and expand its manufacturing capacity in the country to produce 25% of all iPhones by 2025.

In a report Wednesday, Morgan Stanley analysts echoed many similar estimations, saying, Apple’s goal is to have India “contribute up to 10% of total iPhone production in 2-3 years.”

Foxconn also recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian state of Gujarat to set up a $20 billion semiconductor and display unit in the coastal state that is home of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Foxconn said it will bring technical expertise to the venture whereas Vedanta, known for its mining business, will finance the project, top officials said. The state of Gujarat will offer subsidies on capital expenditure and electricity to the project.

Apple partner Foxconn invests another $500 million in India business by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Zeraki, a Kenyan edtech that has built digital learning and school data analytics platforms, has raised $1.8 million seed funding in a round led by Acumen Fund, for product catalog growth and regional expansion.

Save the Children Impact Investment Fund, Verdant Frontiers Fintech, Logos Ventures participated in the round, as did the Nairobi Business Angels Network (NaiBAN), and Melvyn Lubega, co-founder of Go1, an Australia-based edtech unicorn.

Zeraki co-founder and CEO Isaac Nyangolo told TechCrunch they plan on introducing more administrative tools for schools like timetabling software, in addition to supporting parents with fee loans.

“We’ve built an extensive distribution channel covering almost half of the high schools in Kenya and that means, we have an opportunity to solve other tech needs that schools have,” said Nyangolo.

“We plan on building more administrative tools for schools, and payment products on the parents’ side. We have also brought back focus on [the once dormant] digital learning platform, and also tested a number of products like timetabling,” he added.

Zeraki is also looking to enter 10 new markets over the next three years, after scaling in Kenya, Uganda and Guinea, where it currently operates.

“We’re expanding first into the regions that we understand and have similar business environments. We plan on first moving into the entire East Africa community and then exploring the Anglophone region,” said Nyangolo.

Co-founded by Nyangolo and Erick Oude (COO) in 2014, Zeraki initially introduced an interactive digital learning platform for high school students, which included quizzes and systems for tracking their performance, but it wasn’t until the Covid pandemic struck in 2020 that it became popular.

“We realized that schools were purchasing the product but not using it because they lacked the appropriate infrastructure, and teachers didn’t know how to integrate it within the school setting. We were bootstrapping at the time, and didn’t have enough resources to do consumer education. But around 2017 we realized that data was actually a much bigger problem in schools,” he said.

Zeraki then embarked on building the data analytics system to help schools to better manage their students’ data. The data analytics platform allows teachers to upload students’ grades from their mobile phones, and gives a performance breakdown for each student, subject or stream.

The platform, which is more popular than digital learning platform, also integrates a bulk messaging service for internal and external communication, in addition to allowing parents an avenue for tracking student performance and fee payment.

“Every child needs a report card at the end of the school term. And the platforms for producing these report forms were offline computer-based platforms. So, teachers had to line up behind two or three computers at a school to do the data entry in order to produce the report forms. By moving this to a mobile-first cloud-based experience, it means that as soon as they are done grading students’ grades at home, the teachers just enter the scores on their phone.”

Nyangolo added that, so far, over 5,000 schools with a total of 2 million students, are using the data analytics platform. He expects the demand to continue growing as they launch in new markets, and as more schools embrace digital tools to streamline their administrative tasks.

“Education is yet to be digitalized across most countries in Africa, and there is greater opportunity for us to build this market. Laying that foundation that introduces countries, schools and parents on how technology can solve the problems we have in education and being one of the companies in Africa that have shown that it is possible to do this at scale makes this an exciting opportunity,” he said.

Zeraki, a Kenyan edtech providing digital solutions for school admin, raises $1.8M by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Many founders are reactive when business doesn’t go as planned. They may make knee-jerk reactions like: “If I lose 10% of revenue then I’ll just lay off five people.”

The problem with such approaches is that they don’t always solve the underlying business problem.

Take Peloton as an example: At the beginning of the pandemic, the at-home fitness company was riding high and nearly doubled its annual sales. The spike — largely driven by people turning to home fitness as gyms suddenly became untenable — would also be its downfall, unleashing a series of miscalculations that sent its stock diving.

What really happened with Peloton was that the unanticipated demand led to financial and planning mistakes. Peloton had banked on consumers changing their behavior and preferring to exercise at home. They were wrong.

What could Peloton have done to prepare for both the sudden upswing and downswing? They didn’t have a crystal ball, but luckily, we have something that comes close. It’s called a “Three-Case Model.”

What is a three-case model?

With case models, companies can proactively mitigate risk and forecast financial trajectories. The business climate, consumer preferences and competition can all send into motion sequences of events that nobody can predict with certainty. Thankfully, founders can still prepare for them.

Case models are a part of scenario analysis, which helps you visualize the mostly likely outcomes for a business. Through case models, founders can understand how shifts in the business climate could impact sales, cash flow, profits and more. They can also visualize the ramification of strategic decisions, such as what would happen if they make an acquisition, build a factory, raise prices or go after a new market.

To prepare for a downturn, build a three-case model by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch