Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly

Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, has raised $8 million in Series A investment.

London-based venture capital firm Anthemis co-led the growth round alongside crypto-focused fund Dragonfly Capital. Anthemis is a follow-on investor in Ejara, having also led the fintech’s $2 million seed round announced last October.

Participating VC firms in this new financing include other follow-on investors Mercy Corps Ventures, Coinshares Ventures and Lateral Capital–and new investors such as Circle Ventures, Moonstake, Emurgo, Hashkey Group and BPI France. Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockwoks is one of the angels in the round.

Ejara wants to “democratize access to investment and savings products across the region, using blockchain technology.” While its recently launched savings product where it tokenizes government bonds is one of the ways it uses blockchain, so is its crypto product which was pivotal to the two-year-old startup raising $10 million in less than 18 months.

By providing users in Francophone Africa with an option to buy, sell, exchange and store their crypto investments, CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux saw an opportunity to increase crypto activity in the region. However, unlike most crypto platforms in Africa that provide custodial wallets to users, Ejara offered customers the option of non-custodial wallets so they could own and store their keys. That decision paid off, especially during this period when the collapse of FTX and other crypto organizations continue to underscore the need for customers to prioritize privacy and ownership when dealing with crypto and tokenized assets.

“When everyone was taking the other route and building centralized exchanges, we always thought that, if you want to own crypto, you need to own your keys. And that’s pretty much what’s saved us in turbulent times,” Chatue-Diop said to TechCrunch over a call.

Ejara’s crypto product has caught on fast with users in a region where access to financial products is limited to the most informed and wealthy. In addition to connecting their mobile money accounts and accessing crypto, users could also make cross-border transactions via stablecoins. As a result, users on the platform have grown in multiples over the last 14 months. Last October, it had 8,000 users from Cameroon, its first market and others including Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. Now, it counts over 70,000 users across nine Francophone African countries.

Chatue-Diop – who noted that Ejara has seen revenue growth 10x and achieved a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October despite crypto’s meltdown – expects users on the platform to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. Its savings product, which Ejara described, in a statement, as the first of its kind in the crypto world, was launched to get it there. In an ecosystem where many people around the world are trying to find use cases for blockchain technology, Ejara has demonstrated that startups in emerging markets are likely to pioneer many such innovations in web3,” the company added.

With this product, the Cameroonian fintech asserts that users do not need to set up a bank account to access savings products but can instead start that journey with Ejara by downloading its app and depositing a minimum of 1,000 CFA franc (~$1.5). Users can earn up to 10% interest on their two-year deposits on the platform, said Chatue-Diop, while adding that Ejara is going up against traditional financial institutions with this product.

“The competition for treasury bonds is with the traditional asset managers and banks. And given the way they are structured, they mainly target high-net-worth individuals and institutions like other banks or insurance companies,” she commented. “Nobody is targeting the woman selling the markets or the man driving a motorbike for a living. And because we structure the product the way we do, we have many people come to our platform because they can save up to 1000 CFA franc daily.”

Both lead investors in this round recognize Ejara’s ambition to be a financial super app of some sort for users in French-speaking Africa and even those in the diaspora who send and invest money back home. Mia Deng, a partner at Dragonfly said Ejara is well-positioned to imitate the growth of China’s Alipay and WeChat Pay, two prominent web2 super apps based, in the early 2010s and help the Francophone region achieve a web3 financial leap in the coming years.

“Conscious of the challenges across the zone, Ejara does not intend to limit itself to being a crypto app, but rather to become a one-stop-shop for products tailored to the needs of Africans: a shop where a suite of financial products will be accessible at their fingertips, without the need for any crypto knowledge,” stated Ruth Foxe Blader, partner at Anthemis, on Ejara’s potential.

Ejara’s journey to a million users is somewhat dependent on how fast its target audience catches on to the nuances associated with crypto, savings and investments. It’s one reason why the fintech is championing a couple of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls and orphans about crypto, savings, investments (it is yet to launch its fractional investing product) and financial education while prepping the market for its growth.

“The initiative we launched for women and orphans and girls is to improve their financial literacy and computer skills. When I think about Ejara, I think about an ecosystem and as a leveler to bring the community together, whether they are in Africa or the diaspora, whether they belong to the elites, or they are in the poorer layers of the community,” said the chief executive who also mentioned that Ejara recently obtained a license to extend its offerings to the French-speaking diaspora in Europe.

Last week, Djamo, an Ivorian fintech announced what seems to be the largest equity round in the country. At $10 million, Ejara is one of Cameroon’s most-funded companies (if not the most funded). That’s two similar events across different Francophone markets in quick succession. Though it’s too early to say, it appears the market is rapidly embracing innovation, and its ecosystem — which for the most part, embodies a strict regulatory landscape — is becoming more attractive to foreign venture capital despite the current global downturn.

Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

Meta hit with ~$275M GDPR penalty for Facebook data-scraping breach

Facebook’s parent, Meta, has been hit with another hefty penalty for breaching European data protection law.

The €265 million (~$275M) fine was announced today by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the tech giant’s lead regulator for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The DPC confirmed that the decision, which was adopted on Friday, records findings of infringement of Articles 25(1) and 25(2) GDPR — which are focused on data protection by design and default.

The DPC said it is also imposing a range of corrective measures, writing: “The decision imposed a reprimand and an order requiring MPIL [Meta Platforms Ireland Limited] to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe.”

The penalty relates to an inquiry which was opened by the DPC on April 14, 2021, following media reports of more than 530M Facebook users’ personal data — including email addresses and mobile phone numbers — being exposed online.

At the time, Facebook tried to play down the breach — claiming the data that had been found floating around online was “old data” and that it had fixed the issue that led to the personal data being exposed.

The company followed that by saying it believed the data had been scraped from Facebook profiles by “malicious actors” using a contact importer feature it offered up to September 2019, before it tweaked it to prevent data abuse by blocking the ability to upload a large set of phone numbers to find ones that matched Facebook profiles.

The DPC confirmed its inquiry looked at a variety of contact search and importer tools the company offers on its platforms between the date the GDPR came into application and the date of changes to the contact importer tool Facebook made in fall 2019.

“The scope of the inquiry concerned an examination and assessment of Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer tools in relation to processing carried out by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (‘MPIL’) during the period between 25 May 2018 and September 2019,” the DPC wrote.

“The material issues in this inquiry concerned questions of compliance with the GDPR obligation for Data Protection by Design and Default,” it added, specifying that it had examined the implementation of “technical and organisational” measures relevant to Article 25 GDPR (which deals with data protection by design and default).

“There was a comprehensive inquiry process, including cooperation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU. Those supervisory authorities agreed with the decision of the DPC,” the regulator also said — putting a spotlight on the lack of disagreement over this particular decision, which is often not the case with cross-border GDPR enforcements (while disputes between EU regulators can often substantially increase the time it takes to enforce the GDPR — hence this final decision has landed relatively quickly).

DPC deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, told TechCrunch that the corrective measures it has applied to Meta as part of this decision are “an order pursuant to Article 58(2)(d) GDPR… to bring its processing into compliance with the GDPR in the manner specified in this Decision” — with the company getting a deadline of three months from the date of the final decision to comply with that.

“Specifically, to the extent that MPIL is engaged in ongoing processing of personal data which includes a default searchability setting of ‘Everyone’, this order requires… MPIL to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures regarding the Relevant Features in respect of any ongoing processing of personal data, for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed, and that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual’s intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons,” he added, emphasizing: “This order is made to ensure compliance with Article 25(2) GDPR.”

“Relevant Features” in this context are Facebook Contact Importer; Messenger Contact Importer; Instagram Contact Importer; and Messenger Search; and its variant Messenger Contact Creator features.

Meta was contacted for a response. A spokesman did not confirm whether or not it will seek to appeal — but the tech giant said it is “reviewing” the decision “carefully”.

Here’s Meta’s statement:

“Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works. That’s why we have cooperated fully with the Irish Data Protection Commission on this important issue. We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers. Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”

The company added that it has put in place a range of measures to combat data scraping since this breach — including applying rate limits and deploying technical tools to combat suspicious automated activity, as well as providing users with controls to limit the public visibility of their information.

The GDPR penalty is not the first for Meta — and it may not be its last.

Just over a year ago, Meta-owned WhatsApp was fined €225M (~$267M) for transparency breaches. While, back in March, the company was also fined around $18.6M over a string of historical Facebook data breaches.

The DPC also has a number of ongoing enquiries into other aspects of Meta’s business — not least a major probe of the legal basis Meta claims to be able to process people’s data which dates back around 4.5 years.

Meta hit with ~$275M GDPR penalty for Facebook data-scraping breach by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Apple and Huish devise clever pricing model for divers with Oceanic+ app

Oceanic+, developed by Huish Outdoors, made a splash at this year’s Apple Fall Event in September, when Apple pulled a surprise new watch out of its proverbial hat, the Apple Watch Ultra. One of the surprises was that the $800 watch is rated for recreational scuba diving, enabling owners to take it underwater to 40 meters or 130-ish feet.

Pre-installed on the watch is a Depth app, which shows depth, water temperature and a few other things. As a scuba diver, however, you need more than that. To avoid decompression sickness (the bends), you need a dive computer that logs how long you stay at certain depths. The precise instruments measuring and logging depth and time, paired with an algorithm, makes up a dive computer. This is pretty specialized stuff, and it makes sense that Apple decided to partner with an external supplier — in this case the scuba veterans at Huish Outdoors.

I reviewed the app and watch combo, but I wanted to talk about the pricing model and how it, in itself, is a game changer for scuba divers.

You can rent a dive computer from most dive shops, of course, but this comes with some (very slight) risk: If the computer was used by another diver the day before, their dive profile might influence yours. The worst that can happen is that the computer believes that you have less no decompression time than you really do. In other words: You may have to do shorter, shallower dives.

Because of this, and a few other reasons, serious divers usually have their own dive computers. The issue is that these often lay around for long stretches of time. Turning up to go diving, only to discover that the battery in my dive computer is low, is frighteningly common both for many of my fellow divers and for myself. When that happens, you end up scrambling to get a replacement battery (not trivial, as the dive computer needs to be re-sealed properly afterwards, and not everyone has the right tools to do that), or rent a dive computer and bring that with you as a backup.

A Scuba diver observes that the target 30 minute dive time alarm has been reached.Image Credit: Bang Bang Studios

The Oceanic+ app has a number of features available for free:

Snorkeling
Gauges
Depth meter
Max depth tracking
Last dive time
Maximum elapsed time
Total activity time
GPS location for an actiity
Logbook
Cumulative lifetime dive time
Total number of dives
Deepest dive
Longest dive
Dive ratings (you can rate your dive and specifics about the dive)
Sharing activities to social networks
Storing pictures

To get its advanced features, however, you have to pony up for a subscription. This is where things get clever. Renting a dive computer from a dive shop can cost anywhere from $5-$30 per day, and very few divers would choose to go without these days.

This is where the Oceanic+ makers did something clever. Instead of only having very long-term subscription plans (such as $80 per year, for example), the app makers devised shorter plans that suit divers extremely well:

$4.99 per day
$9.99 per month
$79.99 per year
$129 per year for “family share” up to five people.

You subscribe to the app for a day, month, or year via the Oceanic+ iPhone app.Image Credit: Huish Outdoors

Assuming you already have an Apple Watch Ultra, the above becomes a no-brainer. For the same price as the cheapest dive computer rental I could find, you can use your existing Apple Watch as a dive computer. Most dive trips last less than a month, so for $10, you’re covered for as much diving as you can stomach. And if you’re planning more than one dive trip in a year, you can shell out a bit extra.

The cool thing about the features that are added when you subscribe is that they are only strictly needed when you are actively diving. If you just want to refer back to your past dives once you’re safely back at home, that’s made possible by the free app.

The paid app adds the following features:

Tissue loading – the bit you need to avoid decompression sickness
Decompression info – that’s the part you need to stay safe as you are in the water, and calculates the surface intervals, and the time it takes before you can safely fly in an airplane after you’ve been diving
Community dive conditions – water temperature, visibility, and currents, etc.
Local 3-day weather forecast for your dive sites
Local 3-day temperature forecast for your dive sites
UV index

Of course, not everybody will be falling over themselves to spend $800 on the Apple Watch Ultra, but for those who did for the diving feature, the days of having to use a rented dive computer may be counted. If you can afford to buy the watch, the pricing plans mean that you’d be crazy to spend more than you have to in order to go meet some fish.

Apple and Huish devise clever pricing model for divers with Oceanic+ app by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat

As a startup founder, you have no shortage of voices to listen to. Most of those voices — especially those from venture capital or other startups — tend to give you a singular piece of advice when it comes to fundraising: Basically, raise as much as you can as fast as you can. This isn’t “bad” advice, per se, but given the funding environment we find ourselves in, it may not be the most realistic.

My co-founder and I started Reclaim.ai nearly four years ago, and our path to raising capital has been far from conventional. We realized early on that we tended to build best (and pitch best) using a more incremental approach — raising modest sums of capital as we grew rather than using a pitch deck and raising multiple rounds. Doing this not only gave us a more sustainable business that had less risk of entering zombie unicorn territory, it also let us build faster, and we had fewer distractions and more control.

I’ve written about this before, and we’ve since continued to follow that mantra as Reclaim has evolved. We recently raised another $3.2 million to power our next phase of growth, bringing our total funding to nearly $10 million over the past two years. We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity.

Raise capital by all means, but be conscious of the fact that raising too much means you may be relinquishing control at a very early and sensitive stage.

Here are three lessons we’ve learned from this journey:

Belief goes farther than a pitch deck

Our most recent round of funding came from a mix of new and existing investors. In fact, the round was fueled by a couple of key insiders who believed in what we were doing so much that they went to bat for us and brought in other angels and firms to the table. We didn’t have to do much pitching and outreach in the end.

To do this, we first identified the people in our cap table who seemed most likely to be interested in expanding ownership based on their profile and relationship. Second, we used an instrument called a SAFE to help expedite the process and reduce due diligence pain. Lastly, we emphasized lightweight growth metrics instead of a full deck to keep the focus on a few key points.

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

We went diving with the Apple Watch Ultra

In September, Apple launched the Apple Watch Ultra, which is not only waterproof to 100 meters (330 feet) in depth, but can also be used as a dive computer with the help of a companion app developed by Huish Outdoors. We took it into the deep blue sea to test it out.

I’ve been an enthusiastic scuba diver for more than a decade. I’ve logged hundreds of dives, and I’ve earned a handful of qualifications over the years: I’m an SSI Rescue Diver, an SSI Master Diver and a PADI Divemaster; I’ve also completed a bunch of specialty training over the years. If that means nothing to you, suffice it to say I’m trained in dive-specific first aid, and if you are diving with me, I can (at least in theory) save your life if something goes wrong. I’m also qualified to lead dive tours.

I’m also a big hardware and gadgets nerd, so when Apple first announced that the Apple Watch Ultra could be used as a dive computer, I got very excited and brazenly wrote that I would gladly trust my life to the freshest and chunkiest wrist-worn supercomputer from the Cupertino-based electronics manufacturer. The article got me some, er, interesting feedback from the dive community, but I stand by it. So when Apple gave me early access to the Huish OutdoorsOceanic+ app and an Apple Watch Ultra, I decided to put my money where my regulator goes, book a flight to Hawaii, and see if it could stand the pressure of 100 feet of seawater under my watchful eyes.

Was I nervous? Not really. A dive computer can fail without putting divers’ lives at risk. That said, I should mention that while the Apple Watch Ultra is in its full and final form, the Oceanic+ app was not. I was running a beta version, which did introduce a couple of nerves. The watch app was full-featured and worked sleekly, but the iPhone compendium app was a little rough at the edges, still.

The Oceanic+ watch app itself is where the brunt of the heavy lifting is done, so I’ll spend most of my focus there, but let’s start with a slight detour into some theory…

What’s a dive computer?

If you’re a veteran scuba diver, you probably don’t need this refresher, but for this review to truly make sense, we need to get a little bit nerdy about what a dive computer is and why it’s important to use one.

You may have heard of “the bends,” or decompression sickness. This is a potentially medically serious condition that can occur when you breathe a gas (usually air) at pressure (such as underwater). The problem is that when a gas is at pressure, it goes in through your lungs, and the nitrogen in the gas gets absorbed into your bloodstream. From there, it goes everywhere your blood goes – your muscles, your fat, your brain, your guts, and all your other tissues. This isn’t dangerous in itself, as long as the gas stays “in solution” – in other words, as long as your blood stays liquid, your fat stays fat, and your brain stays sans air bubbles.

If you reduce the pressure too quickly, for example, by surfacing from a dive too quickly, physics flexes its mighty arms (in the form of Boyle’s Law), and that gas can come out of solution, forming little bubbles. Those little bubbles can collect in places you don’t want them and cause very serious issues. A small air bubble in a blood vessel in your brain can cause an embolism. The same air bubble in your heart can cause heart attacks and air anywhere there shouldn’t be air can cause a number of other nasty effects. “Minor” issues are also possible, which can lead to rashes, itches or other unpleasantness. If you want a deep dive into all the nasty stuff that can happen, feel free to Google decompression sickness and dive injuries, and you’ll come across some gnarly shit.

The quirk that complicates all of this is that different tissues take on and release nitrogen at different rates, so you need to keep a close eye on things.

A scuba diver observes that the target 30-minute dive time alarm has been reached. Image credit: Bang Bang Media.

For recreational scuba divers, there is a pretty straightforward way of avoiding decompression sickness:

When diving, divers tend to the deepest part of their dive first, and then gradually and slowly go shallower and shallower on their dive, ensuring they don’t ascend faster than a certain ascent rate. A dive computer helps here: It will warn you if you are ascending too fast.
When diving, ensure that they don’t stay down too deep for too long so slow-loading tissues don’t get overloaded with nitrogen. Slow-loading tissues also offload more slowly, and they can cause problems even if you stick to all the other rules of diving. A dive computer will help here, too, by using algorithms to keep a model of how much each of a diver’s tissues are loaded with nitrogen and advise divers to go shallower or to end a dive if they are overloaded. (The algorithm Oceanic+ uses keeps track of 16 different theoretical tissue types, weighted in different ways to keep recreational divers as safe as possible.)
Finally, divers can give themselves some surface time between dives to properly give their body time to off-gas. In addition to diving, it’s important not to go mountaineering or get on a plane too soon after diving, and don’t dive too deep or too often in rapid succession. How do you keep track of all of that? You guessed it: A dive computer.

In the early days of scuba diving, before dive computers were a thing, you’d use a depth gauge and a watch. Your depth gauge would measure how deep you went, and your watch would be used to keep track of how long you stayed down there. And to calculate how much time you could spend underwater, you’d use dive tables. These early dive tables were calculated by essentially testing on daredevil navy divers in the early 1900s.

As you might expect, they had some issues: Most of the people in the tests were male, 18-25 years of age, and in very good shape. I can just about pass for male, but the rest of those things are not true for me. The other problem is that the dive tables don’t really have a concept of multi-level dives: They assume that you plunge to a certain depth (in the case of a navy diver, plant explosives on an enemy ship), stay there to do a job and then resurface. That’s not really how people dive for fun anymore.

So as soon as dive computers became reasonably accessible, people started using those instead. The first dive computers became available in the 1980s, and they started being reasonably priced – putting them in range of recreational divers in the late 1990s. They could beep at you when you ascended too fast, keep track of your tissue loading, and keep track of multi-depth, multi-dive scenarios that quickly become too complicated to figure out by hand. Some dive training still includes the use of dive tables to support teaching the theory and history, but the vast majority of divers don’t use those after they pass their certification.

The Oceanic+ app uses the Bühlmann decompression algorithm, which is widely used and trusted across the dive industry.

So do you need a dive computer to keep you safe?

As part of your dive training, you are taught how to surface safely from a dive. While a dive computer telling you how fast you are ascending can be a good safety blanket, if your computer should fail and all your other instruments also crap the bed, you can still safely make it back to the boat.

A trick most divers are taught is to “ascend at the rate of your smallest bubbles.” In other words, they breathe out through their regulator, and waft their hand through the bubbles that form. Find the smallest bubble; it will be ascending very slowly through the water. Keep pace with it all the way to the surface, and you will be ascending at a safe, slow rate.

Now, if your dive computer did fail, a safe, conservative diver wouldn’t choose to dive again that day. In theory you could buddy up with a diver who had a more aggressive dive profile than you in previous dives (i.e. they went deeper for longer than you) and you could assume that their dive computer’s data would be safe for you, too. If you stay shallower than them on the next dive, you should, in theory, be fine. However, if you dive on different gases (say, your Nitrox mix was 32% and theirs was 30% oxygen), or if they have done fewer dives than you recently, things get tricky.

In addition, a dive computer is a personal safety device. If you did end up with decompression sickness, the dive medics at the hyperbaric chamber will use the data from your dive computer to figure out what happened and how to treat you. In theory, because no sensible divemaster will recommend you use someone else’s dive computer as a proxy for your safety, most dive operations will ask you not to, and no dive certification body will condone this sort of thing. I would explain all of that to you, and then I’d add — hey, as a certified diver, you’re responsible for your own safety; you do what fits with your acceptable risk profile.

All of this is to say that it isn’t actually dangerous or scary to trust my diving experience to a brand-new Apple Watch and the beta version of an app. I did dive with a second dive computer in the pocket of my Buoyancy Compensator Device (BCD – that’s the life-vest-looking thing you can see in the pictures), so I had something to compare the Apple Watch Ultra with.

If the watch or the Oceanic+ app had failed, I would have had a chance to go on the second dive, relying on my backup computer. I should add that this isn’t uncommon for me: Whenever I’m working as a divemaster and leading other divers, I typically bring two dive computers — one for my wrist and one for in my pocket.

With all of that out of the way… a lot of this is about trusting the gear you are using, which brings me to the next question.

The dive computer I use as a backup is a Suunto Zoop. There are dive computers that are smaller than the Apple Watch Ultra – this is not one of them. The Zoom is now discontinued, but it is the size of an ice-hockey puck, and about as elegant. It does the trick of measuring your dive, however. These days, I keep it in a pocket as a backup. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / TechCrunch.

How do you know if you can trust a dive computer?

As mentioned, if your dive computer fails, you can still safely surface, but it would ruin the rest of your day of diving. Nobody wants to miss out on diving while on an expensive dive trip, so to know whether or not you can trust a dive computer, you need to trust a few different components of it:

The instrumentation – A dive computer needs to keep a running log of time and depth. Most dive computers run a continuous calculation of your tissue loading, and in addition keep a log with certain intervals, so you can review your log later.
The algorithm – Different algorithms use different levels of conservatism (i.e. how much safety buffer it has built-in, keeping in mind that everyone’s body is slightly different).
Reliability – It is exceedingly rare that a dedicated dive computer crashes. It may run out of battery, but as a single-function device that only has to keep track of a single set of algorithms, there’s not much that can go wrong.

Evaluating the Apple Watch Ultra and the Oceanic+ app, then, becomes a question of examining the instrumentation, the algorithm and the reliability.

For instrumentation, Apple claims that the Apple Watch Ultra is EN13319-compliant; this is a European standard covering the “Functional, safety, and testing requirements” for “depth and time measuring devices.” In other words: dive computers. Apple Watch Ultra uses depth sensors that are accurate to 40 meters/130 feet. Typically, a newly certified scuba diver is licensed to 18 meters/60 feet, but most scuba diving training orgs will offer a “deep diving” specialty, which will allow divers to go to the full 40 meters/130 feet depth. Beyond that, you are looking at “technical diving,” which usually requires diving with other gas mixes. Things get complicated fast from here.

The algorithm and the user interface for Oceanic+ is offered by Huish Outdoors, which knows a thing or two about scuba diving. The company owns a number of extremely well-respected scuba diving brands, including Atomic, Bare, Stahlsac, Zeagle, Hollis, and, of course, Oceanic.

So the Oceanic brand itself is trustworthy and has been serving the dive community for 50-plus years. The other diving brands in the Huish Outdoors portfolio are extremely highly regarded and are trusted by recreational, technical and industrial/military divers all over the world. The question mark for me is that the brand doesn’t necessarily have a strong core competency as an app developer.

The truth is that Apple did choose Huish Outdoors as its launch partner to release the Oceanic+ app, giving the developer a significant head start, with the combo receiving hundreds of hours of testing, both in pressurized chambers and in real-life dive conditions. Sources within Apple suggest that other app developers will be given access to the depth sensors later this year, and it’ll be interesting to see what other brands decide to release their own versions of these apps.

The final piece is reliability. I have not experienced crashes with Apple Watch apps before, but it stands to reason that they could happen, as they could with any other app on any other platform. Incidentally, this is where Oceanic+ is, as of yet, an unknown.

Two out of the 40 or so divers that were with us on this Oceanic+ testing extravaganza experienced issues with the Oceanic+/Apple Watch Ultra combo. It’s not entirely clear if this was a user error or whether the app malfunctioned in some way. I didn’t experience any issues, and I’m not clear on whether I ought to be worried. I asked Apple about this, and they said they are unable to comment on specific incidents with beta software.

Personally, if the Oceanic+ app had failed or crashed on my dives, I’d have been a little grumpy, but as described above it doesn’t present an actual risk to divers. If you notice the app is malfunctioning, you can surface slowly and safely. Huish Outdoors did release an update of the beta app as I was writing this review, and will have its final release ready in the public App Store as you are reading this.

Your correspondent greeting the photographer underwater. You can see the Apple Watch Ultra on my left wrist, facing toward me, and that I am in dire need of a haircut and a shave. Image credit: Bang Bang Media.

As above, so below

Oceanic+ is a sleek, powerful Apple Watch app that essentially replicates (almost) everything a dive computer can do, and adds a few new toys to the mix. The app is in active development, and the team developing the app told me they have an extensive roadmap for fun new features it has in the pipeline. First things first, though: Getting the app into people’s hands.

The app has a number of free features which are useful for snorklers and free divers. If you want to use it as a dive computer, however, you have to pay its (remarkably well-designed) subscription fee to unlock the full functionality.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/oceanic-plus-pricing-model/

A diver inspecting their dive profile on the Apple Watch Ultra, observing it has been 1 hour and 11 minutes since their dive (known as the “surface time.”) Image credit: Bang Bang Media.

At the surface, the watch can be used for dive planning and a log book, and to configure the settings for your next dive. If you have a recent dive on the books, it can also show you your surface interval time.

None of this is rocket science; dive computers have been able to do most of these things as long as they have been around. The Apple Watch Ultra’s huge touch-screen makes the user experience significantly nicer than on traditional dive watches, which can be pretty indescipherable from time to time. Think user interfaces that seem like relics from the 1980s Casio watch era, and you get a pretty good idea.

Dive Planner, Dive Mode and the logbook are all easily accessible when you’re at the surface. Image Credit: Apple.

Dive planning helps you use your current tissue loading to figure out how deep and how long you can dive for after a surface interval.

The log book helps you see the depth profile of your recent dives, along with dive time, max ascent rate, water temperature, maximum depth and the gas mix (air at 21% oxygen or Nitrox up to 40% oxygen), sampled every 15 seconds as you are underwater. These are features you can get on any dive computer, but Oceanic+ also shows any warnings about your recent dives, and uses the GPS chip in the watch to show a map of where you dived. Small iterations, but they make a huge difference over traditional dive computers.

Dive settings, Scuba settings, and the dive alarm configuration screen. Image Credit: Apple.

Finally, you can configure settings for your dive, including the units you want to set your app to (Celcius or Farenheit, feet or meters, pounds or kilos) and dive mode (snorkeling or scuba), and scuba settings (partial oxygen pressure and gradient factor settings, which are safety settings usually left to advanced divers, or divers who have body compositions or medical conditions that warrant being extra careful). You can also configure your gas (air or Nitrox) and Nitrox oxygen level settings.

You can also set up dive alarms: a depth alarm to warn you when you’ve reached a certain depth and a dive duration alarm. Both are helpful to ensure you stay within your dive plan. It’s also possible to configure whether the watch automatically starts tracking dives when it senses you’ve hopped into the water or whether you need to start the dives manually.

It’s possible to review the dive or adjust settings at the surface. As soon as you submerge, water lock automatically engages, and the touch screen is disabled.Image Credit:Bang Bang Media.

In the iPhone app, you can add additional notes about your dive: visibility, currents, notes about who you dived with, wildlife you saw, equipment you used, or other notes you want to take. You can also add your dive certification cards and numbers and other helpful notes.

For example, in the screen shot below, the post-dive information shows the depth profile of my dive, along with my max ascent rate (24 meters per minute). The recommended ascent rate is a maximum of 18 m/s, so the watch gave me a warning that I was being silly.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Apple Watch

Also in the app, you can plan your next dive by selecting the dive site on a map, and see recent water temperatures and other data about the dive.

Over time, the company told me it is planning to make this data crowdsourced, so divers who have been at the site recently can give you higher-resolution ideas of the temperature, visibility, currents and perhaps even wildlife spotted at various sites. Helpful if you are looking for whales or other large sea creatures!

The iPhone app still needs a little bit of work, but even with some minor graphic inconsistencies and quirks (mostly text alignment, minor typos, etc.), it gives a very good post-dive experience:

From left to right: depth chart, temperature chart, ascent rates, and remaining no-deco time. Image credit: Oceanic+ screen shots

As you can see from the screenshots, the Apple Maps preview was possibly zoomed in a little bit too far; yes, I was diving in the ocean, but without any visual cues for where I was, the map isn’t that useful.

The depth chart, temperature, ascent rates, and no-decompression (no-deco) graphs are fantastic tools for divers, however. Most dive computers let you connect to your computer with USB or Bluetooth; it was refreshing to see how seamless the Oceanic+ experience was. By the time I opened my iPhone, all my data was already synced and ready to dig into.

Taking it into the water

Yours truly wearing the Apple Watch Ultra. It’s very comfortable to wear with all its different wristbands, but it is a comically large watch. Let’s ignore that I’m using an Android phone in this photo, shall we. Image Credit: Bang Bang Studios

For normal use, the Apple Watch Ultra takes some getting used to. It is a very large watch, and on my puny little computer-nerd wrists, it looks comically huge. That issue goes away once I’m in the water, though; large as it is for a watch, it is about on par with an average dive computer.

In the ocean, the Apple Watch Ultra is truly in its element. The display is large, fantastically bright and very easy to read under water. Apple says it is the largest display ever on an Apple Watch, and twice as bright as the display on the Series 8.

I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the water sports band Apple has created for the Apple Watch Ultra. The ‘Ocean Band,’ as the company calls it, was designed specifically for ocean and water activities, molded from a high-performance elastomer.

The tubular geometry allows it to stretch for a perfect fit, and the titanium buckle and adjustable loop means that once it’s on, it ain’t coming off easily. The band was designed for extreme water sports, including kite surfing and other high-impact sports. Great for clumsy scuba divers like myself. I tried to rip the watch off underwater, and failed. It’s remarkably sturdy.

The company even sells a band extension if you need to wear the watch over a drysuit or a particularly chonky wetsuit.

The underwater readability of the Apple Watch Ultra is extraordinary – and pretty hard to photograph, so you’ll have to take my word for it, I’m afraid. Image Credit:Bang Bang Media.

Once you activate dive mode, the watch enters water-lock mode, which means that the touch screen becomes unusable, and you have to rely on the Digital Crown (which is 30 percent bigger than Series 8 with coarser grooves) and two buttons to engage with its functions.

In addition to the crown and the side button, both of which are slightly raised so they can be easily used even when you are wearing gloves, the Apple Watch Ultra has an orange Action button. When diving, this can be used to dismiss warnings and alarms, and to select a compass heading on the underwater compass.

The crown is protected by a titanium guard to help prevent accidental rotations, and the sapphire glass on the watch is protected by a titanium bezel all the way around. All great features to have on a dive computer.

The watch uses water-based sensors only during a dive: depth gauge, water temperature, and the compass, in addition to the time. You don’t get the vital readings (heart rate, etc.) that you would get on a run, which I think makes a lot of sense. Apple suggests that measuring vitals is hard to do consistently underwater, and in any case I ended up wearing the Apple Watch Ultra over a wetsuit anyway, so it couldn’t have made a reading if it had wanted to.

In use in the deep blue sea

Once a dive is started and the water lock mode is on, you can use the Digital Crown to scroll through a number of information screens. On all screens, you can see your current depth and no-deco time. Always on screen is also a variometer, which moves up and down as you ascend or descend. It can be remarkably hard to determine whether you are moving up and down in open water, so that’s a very helpful tool to keep you level in the water, for example when doing a safety stop.

Primary screen, Secondary screen, Compass screen, and the Air screen. Image Credit: Apple.

You can rotate the Digital Crown to access additional screens or press the Action button to set a compass heading. On the various screens, divers get access to a bunch of extra information.

Primary screen:

Dive Time – helpful to know how long you’ve been under, and when the boat expects you back
Minutes to Surface – how long would it take to safely ascend to the surface, including a safety stop
Water Temperature – never really all that helpful, as there is not much you can do about it once you’re in the water and realized you didn’t wear a warm enough wet suit

Secondary screen:

Max depth for this dive – helpful to ensure you are sticking to the outlined dive plan for this dive
Current ascent rate – good to keep an eye on when you are surfacing from your dive to ensure you are ascending at a reasonable rate
Percentage battery left in the Apple Watch Ultra – the battery life on this thing is extraordinary, but it’s good to be able to check

Compass screen:

This is a super helpful screen; underwater compasses are crucial, and often one of the only ways to know which way you are facing underwater. Traditional compasses are a royal pain in the wetsuit to use, and the Oceanic+ app has one of the best implementations I’ve ever seen.

Current compass bearing
Target compass heading (set using the Action button)

Air screen:

This screen confused me a little; I doubt it’d come in all that helpful most of the time, but it’s neat to be able to verify that your watch is using the settings you thought it was.

Conservatism
Gas settings – air vs Nitrox, and oxygen percentage if you’re diving on Nitrox
Max oxygen partial pressure setting. This is good to know, as oxygen can become toxic to the central nervous system at high partial pressures. Here’s a “fun” fact for you: Oxygen can be toxic to humans if you breathe pure 100% oxygen at as little as 6 meters/20 feet deep.

In addition, the watch will use a powerful haptic signal, easily felt through a wetsuit, to draw your attention to it when it needs to tell you something.

It can give safety warnings such as decompression limits, excessive ascent rates and safety stops. It can also warn you if you’re at your maximum operating depth (which varies based on what gas you are breathing), and buzz you with any depth or time alarms you have set.

The alarms are very well color coded: Red for things that need immediate action, yellow for warnings, and blue if the water temperature drops below your configured threshold. And the large, bright screen and prominent haptics means you’re not going to miss anything.

Below are some examples of the warning screens: too-rapid ascent warning; safety stop reminder; target depth alarm; and temperature alarm. The green lines across the middle of the screen is the tissue loading. If it goes all the way down, you are out of no-deco time, and it’s time to surface to avoid unnecessary risk of decompression sickness.

Image Credit: Apple.

Once in the water, there is remarkably little to say about the Apple Watch Ultra as a dive computer: It’s easy to use; the crown and buttons are phenomenal as far as user interfaces go, the screens are well-designed; and the important information is clear and very easy to read.

I brought my trusty old Suunto that has been with me on many a dive to serve as my secondary dive computer for these test dives. The readouts from the two dive computers were almost identical all the way through. The small differences can be attributed to having the Suunto in my pocket while the Apple Watch was on my wrist.

The Suunto also uses a slightly different algorithm. Having said that, trying to compare the dive profiles on the two devices reminded me why the Oceanic+ was such a great leap forward. Even figuring out how to step through a logged dive on the Suunto is an unmitigated, miserable disaster. We’ve come a long way in dive tech.

Easy to read underwater. Image Credit: Apple

What is missing?

Apple Watch Ultra plus Oceanic+ is a hell of a combo. It’s heads and shoulders above the competition in terms of screen and user interface, and the automatic syncing and logging to my phone is a fantastic perk. Which isn’t to say that the Apple Watch does quite everythingyet.

Most high-end dive computers are “air integrated,” meaning that a transmitter can be added to your first-stage regulator, which transmits how much air you have left in your tank to your dive computer. Rumor has it that Oceanic+ and Apple Watch Ultra might have something in the works to add air integration at some point in the future, although both companies remained tight-lipped on if and when when this might be available.

As you climb closer to the $1,000 mark, dive computers are also able to do more exotic gas mixes, mostly used for technical diving. They are also better at doing decompression diving, which is dives where you exceed your no-deco time, and need to stay underwater for longer to off-gas.

I suspect the Oceanic+ app has deco algorithms in place to save your bacon in case divers accidentally overstay your no-deco time, but I wasn’t able to verify this before this article was published. Again, not something you would expect recreational divers to run into on the regular. For context, in my hundreds of dives, I have only ever once had to do a decompression dive; it involved staying at 10 meters for 6-7 minutes extra.

One advantage the Apple Watch Ultra has over traditional dive computers, however, is that most dive computers spend 11 months of the year in a drawer, whereas Apple’s device can be used for, well, the hundreds of things that people use Apple Watches for, including making calls, fall detection, health tracking, notifications and much more. On a cost-per-day-used basis, the Apple Watch Ultra is an absolute bargain compared to every dive computer on the market today.

I can’t help but wonder if we have entered a similar space for dive computers that we saw for sat-nav devices some 15 years ago. If you’ll recall, in the time before iPhones, there was a period where everyone had dedicated sat-nav devices from manufacturers like TomTom and Garmin. When the iPhone came along, they delayed their own demise in this space by releasing mapping apps for the new phone platform with significant price tags, before they were all destroyed by the likes of Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze and other free mapping apps with live traffic data.

It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the non-too-distant future, as prices of Apple Watch Ultra and similar devices come down, dive computers will seem as anachronistic as using a suction-cup to put a Garmin device on your windshield does today.

Sup. Image Credit: Bang Bang Media.

Should you take the plunge?

Time will tell if an $800 watch is accessible enough to put a major dent in dive computer sales. After all, $500 buys you a great entry-level dive computer. It is admittedly far larger than the Apple Watch Ultra, and not nearly as nice or as easy to use as the Apple/Oceanic+ combo. A higher-end dive computer, however, like Suunto’s D5 or Oceanic’s own ProPlus 4 computer, cost about the same as the Apple Watch Ultra.

Would I recommend that you trust your dive holiday to an Apple Watch and an Oceanic+ app? Yes, with a caveat. I would need a few more dives with a backup dive computer in my BCD pocket before I would rely on the Oceanic+ app by itself.

I’d trust it as long as Huish Outdoors ensures that the stability and reliability of the app remain its No. 1 priority over all the fun bells and whistles it could be tempted to add over the next months and years. And if the app continues to stay stable, I can’t imagine it will take very long before the skeptic in me fully embraces it.

Thanks for reading, see you on the reef! Video credit: Bang Bang Media

We went diving with the Apple Watch Ultra by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

UK expands Online Safety Bill to criminalize encouraging self harm

The UK government has said it will further expand the scope of online safety legislation by criminalizing the encouragement of self-harm — in a bid to tackle what it describes as “tragic and avoidable deaths caused by people seeing self-harm content online”.

The latest amendment to the controversial but populist Online Safety Bill will mean in-scope platforms will be required to remove content that deliberately encourages somebody to physically injure themselves — or else risk penalties under the legislation.

Individuals posting such content online could also face prosecution under the new offence of encouraging self harm and the secretary of state for digital said the government wants to target “abhorrent trolls encouraging the young and vulnerable to self-harm”.

The government said the maximum penalties will be set out in due course.

It is already illegal to encourage or assist suicide, online or offline, in the UK so the creation of the new offence is intended to bring self harm content in line with an existing prohibition on communications encouraging suicide.

The Online Safety Bill’s passage through parliament remains on pause following an interruption this summer linked to political turmoil in the governing Conservative Party. But the reshuffled UK government has said it will bring the bill back to parliament next month after making tweaks to the legislation.

Just last week the Ministry of Justice announced some incoming additions to the Online Safety Bill, which are focused on tackling abuse of intimate imagery. However further changes are slated around ‘legal but harmful’ content so the full shape of the legislation remains tbc.

The latest changes — making it illegal to send online communications encouraging self harm — come a few months after the government said it would respond to concerns over the bill’s impact on freedom of expression online, with the (new) secretary of state, Michelle Donelan, saying in Septembershe would be “editing” the bill to reduce concern about its impact on ‘legal but harmful’ speech for adults.

Since then child safety groups, which have been campaigning for years for the government to pass online safety legislation, have raised concerns about the bill being weakened — so the government’s move to make encouraging self harm an offence looks intended to respond to that concern.

Yesterday the BBC reported Donelan saying the latest changes were influenced by the case of Molly Russell: The 14-year-old schoolgirl who took her own life five years ago after viewing thousands of pieces of online content about self-harm and suicide on platforms including Instagram and Pinterest.

An inquest into Russell’s death concluded in September that social media had been a factor in her demise. While, last month, the coroner’s ‘prevention of future deaths’ report recommended a series of measures be taken to regulate and monitor minors’ access to social media content.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said the move to add an offence of encouraging self harm will make illegal “one of the most concerning and pervasive online harms that currently falls below the threshold of criminal behaviour”.

In a statement, Donelan added:

“I am determined that the abhorrent trolls encouraging the young and vulnerable to self-harm are brought to justice.

“So I am strengthening our online safety laws to make sure these vile acts are stamped out and the perpetrators face jail time.

“Social media firms can no longer remain silent bystanders either and they’ll face fines for allowing this abusive and destructive behaviour to continue on their platforms under our laws.”

Other priority illegal offences already listed in the bill include hate crimes; provisions around revenge porn (and sharing deepfake porn without content); harassment and cyberstalking.

Following the coroner’s report into Russell’s death, Donelan said measures for safeguarding children would be beefed up as part of tweaks being made to the bill. So by making encouraging self harm illegal the government will — on paper — remove that particular type of problem content out of the ‘legal but harmful’ bucket, which may make it easier for ministers to reduce the level of regulation applied to this type of speech without being accused of undermining essential child protection provisions.

However, regardless of what the bill says on paper, huge questions remain over how platforms will respond to legal duties being placed on them to regulate all sorts of speech — and whether it will boost safety for web users as claimed.

Meanwhile, major freedom of expression concerns remain over a regime with penalties that scale up to 10% of global annual turnover — and even the risk of jail time for non-cooperative senior execs — with critics worried it will have a chilling effect by setting up platforms as defacto speech police and encouraging them to overblock content to shrink their legal risk of a hefty fine.

Since the controversial speech regulation legislation was published in full last year, kicking off over a year of parliamentary scrutiny, the government’s approach has faced plenty of criticism and concern from inside parliament that the bill falls short of its stated aims and claims, even as mainstream child safety groups and campaigners (and a majority of lawmakers on both sides of the house) continue to press for online safety legislation to be passed.

Outside parliament, rights campaigners, legal and technical experts are among those continuing to warn of a looming mess which they argue will apply the biggest penalties to UK web users faced with access restrictions like age verification pop-ups and and homegrown startups faced with impossibly fuzzy demands and expensive compliance costs, with many also arguing the bill won’t do what’s claimed and protect kids either.

The a tug of war between controversy over the government’s entire approach and loud populist support for child safety claims attached to the bill has not reduced ministers’ claimed commitment to passing the legislation — despite the rebooted UK government expressing some freedom of expression qualms — but it remains to be seen how extensively it will rethink the regulation of ‘legal but harmful’ speech.

The bill is due to return to parliament on Monday December 5.

Another growing controversy attached to the bill relates to the potentially disastrous impact on messaging apps’ use of end-to-end encryption — since another recent government amendment puts a requirement on private messaging apps to be able to detect and remove child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content in both public and private communications between users which raises questions about how they can do so if they have implemented E2EE on the service — and, therefore, what the legislation will do to the strong security that exists to protect all users?

Last week a legal opinion written by a leading UK barrister, commissioned by the free speech campaign group Index on Censorship, also questioned whether the bill is compatible with the UK’s human rights obligations — warning over the extent of the proposed surveillance of app users’ communications being mandated on the private sector by a government appointed regulatory body and without independent oversight.

UK expands Online Safety Bill to criminalize encouraging self harm by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

WhatsApp rolls out a feature that makes it easier to message yourself

WhatsApp has started rolling out a feature to let you chat with yourself. Sending messages to your own account can be a way to keep a piece of information easily accessible, right next to your other WhatsApp conversations.

Called ‘Message Yourself’, the feature lets users send notes, reminders and shopping lists to themselves on WhatsApp.

On Monday, the Meta-owned instant messaging app announced the rollout of the new messaging feature that will reach all its Android and iPhone users in the coming weeks. It was initially tested with some beta testers, WhatsApp beta tracker WABetaInfo reported in late October. The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature has begun rolling out globally.

Users will see their contact at the top of the contacts list on WhatsApp when they create a new chat. Tapping that contact will take them to the chat screen they can use to send messages to themselves.

Although the native feature to message yourself is new on WhatsApp, some users have already been using a workaround for some time. You could already send messages to yourself using the app’s ‘click to chat’ feature. Nonetheless, the new offering removes the additional steps that users needed to self-chat using the wa.me URL.

Users can also pin their self-chat messages to the top of the conversation list if they don’t want to search them in their widely polluted chats list.

WhatsApp rival Signal has a feature named Note to Self that addresses the same use case — it lets you create messages for personal use. However, unlike WhatsApp’s newly launched feature that is accessible from the top of the contact list on the app, Signal doesn’t suggest your own profile at the top of the recipient list. Users need to search and select the contact entry ‘Note to Self’ to use the feature.

Similarly, community platform Slack has a dedicated space titled “Jot Something Down” to let users send notes to themselves.

Telegram also offers a similar feature called Saved Messages that lets users bookmark any important messages as well as save their notes and reminders that can be accessed in the future. Messages once saved can be accessed from the top of the chats screen. However, Telegram users initially need to access the feature by tapping the hamburger menu on Android or through the settings menu on iOS.

WhatsApp rolls out a feature that makes it easier to message yourself by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Amie grabbed $7 million for its opinionated calendar and todo app

Amie raised a $7 million seed round led by Spark Capital. The round closed in June 2022 and the startup is disclosing it today. The company is building a productivity app anchored around your calendar. It helps you stay on top of your schedule, connect with your team and manage your upcoming tasks.

Other investors in the round include Creandum, Guillermo Rauch, Hanno Renner and Quick Coffee Ventures. Amie competes with a new wave of calendar startups, including Vimcal, Magical, Fantastical, Cron and Rise. It’s a crowded space but Amie thinks it can provide a better user experience.

As I wrote in my first article on Amie, the app combines your calendar with your todos. By default, your unscheduled todos appear in the left-side column next to your calendar.

You can drag tasks from the sidebar and drop them in your calendar at a certain date and time. This way, you can see both your events and tasks in a week view. Many people already use their calendar as a sort of todo app so that they don’t forget about things they have to do.

Amie supports that use case natively and even encourages you to work this way. It is an opinionated take on the calendar. But that’s the right approach if you’re building an app that competes with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar.

Image Credits: Amie

There are also social and multiplayer components to Amie. If your team uses Amie, you can see their profile pictures on the left side and check their availabilities by hovering over their avatars. It’s also a good way to see if someone is available or busy in real time.

Amie lets you join an upcoming video call in a single click as well. People can also use Amie to send a link with multiple availabilities so that others can book a meeting.

Up next, Amie wants to integrate with all the tools and apps that you already use to become your main productivity hub. The company first started with Spotify so that you can see what your coworkers are listening to.

But Amie also has plans for more business-oriented integrations with products like GitHub, Stripe and Typeform. The idea is that Amie could eventually replace more tools.

Users who want to try out Amie have to sign up to a waitlist. The company onboards new users every week and plans to launch publicly at some point in 2023.

Right now, there are 11 people working for Amie. The startup wants to grow to a team of 20. The next product release will be a revamped todo list.

Amie grabbed $7 million for its opinionated calendar and todo app by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon shutting down wholesale distribution in third business exit in India

Amazon is shutting down its wholesale distribution business in India, the latest in a series of retreats for the retailer in the key overseas market where it has deployed over $7 billion in the past decade.

The American e-commerce giant said Monday that it is discontinuing Amazon Distribution, its wholesale e-commerce website available in small neighborhood stores in Bengaluru, Mysore and Hubli.

“We don’t take these decisions lightly. We are discontinuing this programme in a phased manner to take care of current customers and partners,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

Amazon Distribution was designed to help kiranas, the neighborhood stores in India, pharmacies and department stores secure inventory from the e-commerce giant.

“We offer a wide range of products at competitive prices and the convenience of next day delivery at your door-step. As a member, you can purchase thousands of items for resale at any time of the day at competitive prices and in bulk quantities, pay via the various payment options available, get GST bill for your order, and convenient and reliable door-step deliveries the next day,” the company describes on Amazon Distribution website.

Amazon did not say why it was shutting down the wholesale distribution offering, but the move follows company shutting two other businesses — food delivery and online learning platform Academy — in the country amid a global restructuring of its business.

The series of announcements have nonetheless prompted many to speculate that Amazon, which has deployed over $6.5 billion in its local business in the country, is slowly scaling down its operations in the South Asian market. The firm has seen several of its senior executives depart in recent months.

India is a key overseas market for Amazon. But the company is lagging Walmart’s Flipkart andstruggling to make inroads in smaller Indian cities and towns, according to a recent report by Sanford C. Bernstein. Amazon’s 2021 gross merchandise value in the country stood between $18 billion to $20 billion, lagging Flipkart’s $23 billion, the analysts said in a report to clients.

Amazon also faces competition from billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, which launched grocery shopping on WhatsApp, and social commerce startups SoftBank-backed MeeshoandTiger Global-backed DealShare. It has so far offered “a weaker proposition in ‘new’ commerce” in the country, the report added.

At stake is one of the world’s last great growth markets. The e-commerce spending in India, the world’s second largest internet market, is expected to double in size to over $130 billion by 2025. Amazon has been attempting to increase its presence in India through stakes in local firms and has alsoaggressively explored partnerships with neighborhood stores.

The company attempted to acquire Future Retail, India’s second largest retail chain, but wasoutwitted by Ambani’s firm. (Amazon accused the estranged Indian partner and Relianceof fraud in newspaper ads.)

Amazon did not immediately say if it plans to close any other business line in the country.

Amazon shutting down wholesale distribution in third business exit in India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter

Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

The demonstrations are largely a result of China’s zero-tolerance approach toward COVID-19, a rare show of defiance amongst the people. The country’s stringent COVID restrictions have led to prolonged lockdowns across the country, obstructing life, business, and manufacturing activities.

Protests erupted last week at Apple’s biggest iPhone factory in China as workers were roiled by delayed bonuses and concerns over COVID spread.

Discussion of the new nationwide protests is strictly censored on Chinese social media and protestors have turned to foreign platforms like Twitter and Telegram for communication. All major Western social networks are banned in China and access requires the use of VPNs, which are also nearly extinct in local app stores.

The bot content on Twitter, which is thought to be government-connected, makes it even harder for Chinese citizens to organize demonstrations. As part of his massive layoff plan, Elon Musk abruptly axed Twitter’s anti-propaganda staff. That’s a stark contrast to 2019 when Twitter took down around 1,000 accounts that it determined were part of a state-directed effort to undermine protests in Hong Kong.

Chinese-language location-based escort ads aren’t new on the social media platform, but the frequency at which they are obscuring searches of Chinese cities in the last few days is unusual, as the data analyst noted:

This is also true when I search for 上海 (Shanghai).

Note that these are just a small sample of the search results — go and search 北京/上海 and you’ll see new spam tweets come up every few seconds. So the number of spam accounts is way larger than a few hundred. pic.twitter.com/FhtX6N2mZV

— Air-Moving Device (@AirMovingDevice) November 28, 2022

Twitter “was aware” of the spam issue and “was working to resolve it,” The Washington Post reported on Sunday evening, ET. And so should Musk be paying heed to the problem, given the billionaire was clearly concerned about Twitter bots, which prompted him to temporarily put the acquisition deal on hold in May. Of course, the world is still waiting to see how he plans to fix the issue after removing the key teams responsible for battling misinformation.

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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