In 2017, Matthew Peltier walked barefoot into a pitch meeting with venture capitalists. Young, male, man bun intact, he certainly resembled the stereotypical successful entrepreneur, but it was his startup, an app designed to bring social media stars and their fans into conversation, that drew skepticism.

Shimmur, as it was called, ultimately succeeded in raising about $7 million from Greycroft, Arena Ventures, Luma Launch, Right Side Capital Management and Techstars, according to PitchBook, but the business never took off. That is until a pivot to direct messaging in 2018 attracted the support of Hollywood talent manager Guy Oseary and his Sound Ventures investment partner Ashton Kutcher, who jumped on board to relaunch Shimmur, now known as Community.

The Santa Monica-based company has raised nearly $35 million in the form of two convertible notes following a recapitalization that occurred alongside its rebranding earlier this year, TechCrunch has learned. Investors, including the Sony Innovation Fund, have valued the text marketing platform at upwards of $200 million, sources tell TechCrunch. A spokesperson for Community, however, said there is currently “no valuation attached to the company” because of the nature of the recap and convertible notes, and declined to comment further on fundraising activity.

Community has yet to complete a public launch and is in the process of onboarding both companies and celebrities. We’re told efforts to generate attention for the business will increase in the next couple of weeks.

Shimmur was initially conceived of in 2014 as a Reddit-style mobile application that encouraged users to join “Tribes,” or groups, where they could create and upload content about their favorite YouTube or Instagram stars. Social media accounts affiliated with Shimmur went dark in 2017, and in early 2018 the site began redirecting to Digits.Chat, a service currently in private beta assumedly linked to Community. Now in their second act, Peltier and Community co-founder Josh Rosenheck are committed to building a platform for influencers and fans to interact at scale.

Questions of Community’s business began to surface in January 2019, when Ashton Kutcher took to Twitter to subtly promote the service with a phone number and a simple request to text him. Naturally, many assumed the tweet included the actor and investor’s personal cell number. In reality, he’d been working with Community to develop a better method of communication with his followers. This week, the actor resurfaced on Twitter to promote the service again. This time stating that the phone number included in the tweet would be “the only place [he] responds to public queries” because the “open web has just become too toxic.”

Just text me it’s easier. +1 (319) 519-0576

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) July 23, 2019

This reporter, of course, followed up Kutcher on his offer and sent a text to his now preferred contact. Instantaneously, I received this reply: “Ashton here. This is an auto-text to let you know I got your message, the rest will be from me. Click the link so I can respond to you. I likely can’t respond to everything but I’ll try to be in touch. Dream bigger.” The message was accompanied by a link to a Community sign-up page for Kutcher-specific updates. The fine print read that the personal messages and automated text alerts from Kutcher “may be marketing in nature,” but little other information was provided.

While Kutcher has used his large Twitter following to spread awareness for Community, Guy Oseary has remained mum. Sources tell TechCrunch, however, that Oseary is a “co-founder” of Community, further evidence he’s put money in the business and perhaps adopted a co-founder title because of the nature of his investment. Oseary is not only a co-founder of Sound Ventures alongside Kutcher, but he’s also a longtime executive at Maverick, an entertainment and music management business behind the likes of Madonna and U2. His network would be much more valuable to Community than VC dollars.

Sound Ventures, Kutcher and Oseary’s venture capital fund, did not respond to a request for comment. Community declined to name its investors, but did say Oseary is “not a co-founder,” declining to provide additional details on his affiliation with the business.

On its website, Community describes itself as a tool that enables its clients, e.g. influencers, musicians, athletes, brands, actors, their agents and others, to have direct and meaningful communication with their “community members” using a 10-digit phone number provided by Community: “Imagine getting to know and interact with your audience as individuals—with names and faces, interests and opinions, hometowns and pronouns. Imagine reaching every single one of them,” the company writes.

Peltier, in the company’s first blog post published in June, emphasized the power of text messaging, citing an Adobe statistic that 90% of text messages are read within three seconds. Peltier also described Community’s business model, noting that they are not an ads business, rather, clients pay Community monthly or annual service fees “for 100% audience reach and limitless segmentation, in a climate free from bullying and toxicity.” Community’s terms of service agreement additionally states that once a subscription is initiated, clients can create and send text marketing campaigns to promote themselves or products with members of their community.

If Community sounds familiar — it should. Its efforts to leverage SMS to facilitate celebrity-fan relationships is akin to SuperPhone. Founded by musician Ryan Leslie in 2015, SuperPhone is a mobile messaging platform designed to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, entertainers and anyone else that juggles clients or sales contacts.

“SuperPhone is the first foray into personal relationship management,” Leslie told TechCrunch last year. The startup has raised a total of roughly $5 million at a $10 million valuation, according to PitchBook. In a blog post addressing Kutcher’s January tweet, Leslie welcomed the competition to the text marketing space.

“The game is changing, messaging is here to stay, and platforms are stepping up to help you leverage the power of this currently undervalued direct communication channel,” Leslie wrote. “This is my game. SuperPhone was conceived, developed, deployed, and battle-tested years before this week’s A-list endorsement of text over social.”

We reached out to SuperPhone for comment and in a very on-brand reply, a spokesperson for the business told me to submit my phone number to Leslie here and “unlike Ashton, Ry will text you right back once you introduce yourself.”

Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its annual Mobility Sessions event, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles.

Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts key panels and conversations from the event, including our panel on micromobility where TechCrunch VC reporter Kate Clark was joined by investors Sarah Smith of Bain Capital Ventures, Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, and Ted Serbinski of TechStars Detroit.

The panelists walk through their mobility investment theses and how they’ve changed over the last few years. The group also compares the business models of scooters, e-bikes, e-motorcycles, rideshare and more, while discussing Uber and Lyft’s role in tomorrow’s mobility ecosystem.

Sarah Smith: It was very clear last summer, that there was essentially a near-vertical demand curve developing with consumer adoption of scooters. E-bikes had been around, but scooters, for Lime just to give you perspective, had only hit the road in February. So by the time we were really looking at things, they only had really six months of data. But we could look at the traction and the adoption, and really just what this was doing for consumers.

At the time, consumers had learned through Uber and Lyft and others that you can just grab your cell phone and press a button, and that equates to transportation. And then we see through the sharing economy like Airbnb, people don’t necessarily expect to own every single asset that they use throughout the day. So there’s this confluence of a lot of different consumer trends that suggested that this wasn’t just a fad. This wasn’t something that was going to go away.

For access to the full transcription below and for the opportunity to read through additional event transcripts and recaps, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Kate Clark: One of the first panels of the day, I think we should take a moment to define mobility. As VCs in this space, how do you define this always-evolving sector?

Michael Granoff: Well, the way I like to put it is that there have been four eras in mobility. The first was walking and we did that for thousands of years. Then we harnessed animal power for thousands of years.

And then there was a date — and I saw Ken Washington from Ford here — September 1st, 1908, which was when the Model T came out. And through the next 100 years, mobility is really defined as the personally owned and operated individual operated internal combustion engine car.

And what’s interesting is to go exactly 100 years later, September 2008, the financial crisis that affects the auto industry tremendously, but also a time where we had the first third-party apps, and you had Waze and you had Uber, and then you had Lime and Bird, and so forth. And really, I think what we’re in now is the age of digital mobility and I think that’s what defines what this day is about.

Ted Serbinski: Yeah, I think just to add to that, I think mobility is the movement of people and goods. But that last part of digital mobility, I really look at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. And it’s really that intersection, which is enabling all these new ways to move around.

Clark: So Ted you run TechStars Detroit, but it was once known as TechStars Mobility. So why did you decide to drop the mobility?

Serbinski: So I’m at a mobility conference, and we no longer call ourselves mobility. So five years ago, when we launched the mobility program at TechStars, we were working very closely with Ford’s group and at the time, five years ago, 2014, where it started with the connected car, auto and [people saying] “you should use the word mobility.”

And I was like “What does that mean?” And so when we launched TechStars Mobility, we got all this stuff but we were like “this isn’t what we’re looking for. What does this word mean?” And then Cruise gets acquired for a billion dollars. And everyone’s like “Mobility! This is the next big gold rush! Mobility, mobility, mobility!”

And because I invest early-stage companies anywhere in the world, what started to happen last year is we’d be going after a company and they’d say, “well, we’re not interested in your program. We’re not mobility.” And I’d be scratching my head like, “No, you are mobility. This is where the future is going. You’re this digital way of moving around. And no, we’re artificial intelligence, we’re robotics.”

And as we started talking to more and more entrepreneurs, and hundreds of startups around the world, it became pretty clear that the word mobility is actually becoming too limiting, depending on your vantage where you are in the world.

And so this year, we actually dropped the word mobility and we just call it TechStars Detroit, and it’s really just intersection of those physical and digital worlds. And so now we don’t have a word, but I think we found more mobility companies by dropping the word mobility.

Get ready to experience world-class networking TechCrunch-style at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019. On September 5, more than 1,000 of the top enterprise software minds and makers, movers and shakers will descend on San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It’s a day-long conference featuring distinguished speakers, panel discussions, demos and workshops.

It’s also a prime opportunity to connect and build relationships with enterprise software founders, technologists and investors. Make the most of that opportunity by using CrunchMatch, our free business match-making service.

The automated platform lets you find people based on specific mutual business criteria, goals and interests. It helps you sift through the noise and make the most of your valuable time. After all, connecting with the right people produces better results.

Here’s how CrunchMatch (powered by Brella) works. When CrunchMatch goes live — several weeks before the main event — we’ll email a sign-up link to all ticket holders. You’ll be able to access the platform and create a profile with your specific details — your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and a description of the types of people you want to connect with at the event.

CrunchMatch works its algorithmic magic and suggests meetings, which you can then vet, approve and schedule or decline. It’s an efficient and productive way to network. Take a look at how CrunchMatch helped Yoolox increase distribution.

All that time-saving efficiency will free you up to enjoy more of the presentations and hear from speakers like the renowned founder, investor, AI expert and Stanford professor, Andrew Ng. You won’t want to miss his take on how AI will transform the enterprise world — like nothing else since the cloud and SaaS. And that’s just a taste of what you can expect.

If you haven’t already done so, buy your tickets now and save $100 before the prices go up on August 9. Early-bird tickets cost $249 and student tickets sell for $75. Buy 4+ tickets to get the group rate and save another 20%.

ROI tip: For every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019.

We can’t wait to see you at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 in San Francisco on September 5. Join your community, explore the top enterprise trends and companies and make productive connections with the influential people who can help you reach your goals. Buy your ticket today.

Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million.

Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, the company has installed its hardware in five stores in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand globally using the new investment. Standard Cognition co-founder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal tells TechCrunch the company is counting on support from European VC firm EQT Ventures, which led the deal, to launch its technology in Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the Standard Cognition autonomous checkout experience: A customer walks into one of Standard Cognition’s partners’ stores and one of 27 overhead cameras (more or less depending on the size of the store) will identify you by shape and movement, not facial recognition. The customer then opens the company’s iOS or Android app and a special light pattern flashes, allowing the cameras to tie you to your account and payment method. Finally, grab whatever items you need and leave the store. No checkout is required for Standard Cognition to bill you. It even works without an app: Shop like normal and then walk up to a kiosk screen, the cameras identify what items you have chosen and you can pay with cash or credit card.

News of Standard Cognition’s Series B comes shortly after Amazon confirmed plans to open three additional Amazon Go stores, the e-commerce giant’s cashierless convenience stores. Amazon opened its first Amazon Go store in Seattle in 2016, though Standard Cognition, which operates only one branded brick-and-mortar store of its own, was first to plant roots in San Francisco. Standard Cognition, however, has no plans to open any more of its own stores because “running stores takes a lot of effort,” said Suswal. Instead, the company plans to bring its cashierless experience to other retail chains with the fresh funds.

Standard Cognition announces its Series B financing just eight months after closing a $40 million Series A. Suswal, justifying the lightning-fast growth, said 2019 has been Standard’s “year of deployment,” next year will be “the year of repeatability” and 2021 will be “the year of scale.” The company has raised a total of $86 million in venture capital funding.

“Traditional brick and mortar retailers are caught in a perfect storm,” EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell said in a statement. “From the encroachment of behemoths like Amazon into every inch of the market to changing consumer attitudes, as busy people demand an ever more efficient shopping experience, margins are being squeezed like never before. The talented and driven Standard Cognition team have worked quickly to build a product that allows physical retailers, of all sizes, to tackle these challenges.”

Sramana Mitra: I’m still missing what is the delta. Let’s say we’re building on Salesforce’s PaaS. Is that not a complete solution to go online as a SaaS product? Do people still need you to be in...

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Today’s 451st FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, July 25 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Amazon’s Alexa ushered in a new dawn of user interfaces, bringing voice into the mix as a viable option. Dozens of companies have sprouted because of this, not least of which being Airbud.io.

Airbud allows any company to add a voice interface to its website. The company just closed a $4 million round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from ERA and Spider Capital.

Airbud was co-founded by Israel Krush, Uri Valevski and Rom Cohen after the team saw the growth of voice interfaces and wondered how to capitalize on it.

By allowing companies to add voice/chat bot utility to their websites, Airbud hopes to increase retention of end-users on sites and give them easier access to the information they seek. Krush says that Airbud is focusing on websites that you have to be on, rather than the ones you want to be on.

That means Airbud clients are mostly in the healthcare space and travel space, helping end-users find a physician or book a flight using their voice.

Most importantly, Airbud operates on a plug and play system, meaning that clients don’t have to do the usual heavy lifting involved in creating a chat bot. Most of the time, folks who implement chatbots have to build a conversation tree. Airbud uses existing information scraped from the website, paired with an easy plug-and-play system for clients, to automatically build out a knowledge graph and have conversations with end-users.

Airbud charges based on the number of indexed pages and traffic to those pages.

The company plans to use the funding to increase the size of its team from seven to 15.

Today’s 451st FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, July 25, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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Space startup ispace, which is headquartered in Japan but has a European subsidiary based in Luxembourg, will take part in PROSPECT, a program run by the European Space Agency (ESA) that intends to extract water from the Moon’s southern pole, with a target mission date of 2024 or 2025.

PROSPECT isn’t just a cool reference to the actual act of prospecting — in typical space science style, it stands for something. Specifically, “Package for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation,” which is clearly a mouthful. But it describes more fully what the project is: a payload that the ESA is creating to be delivered via a lunar mission planned by Russia’s Roscosmos. ESA’s payload will in fact prospect, looking for lunar water ice in the regions of lunar pole permanently bathed in shadow.

ispace’s contribution will take the form of providing talent via three members of the company selected to help plan, operate and make sense of data retrieved by the mission. ispace Europe’s Carlos Espejel, a Space & Earth Mine Planning Engineer, will lead a key element of the mission tasked with investigating in-situ resource exploration (meaning using the resources on-site for future Moon missions) from a prospecting perspective.

Founded in 2010 in Tokyo, ispace raised more than $100 million in funding in 2018, which it will put toward two lunar missions planned for 2020 and 2021 launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

When it comes to turning the wheels of the internet, crowdsourcing is a key component of the engine: the power of people can fund big ideas and good causes; it can help you decide what (or what not) to buy, read, watch or listen to when faced with too much choice; it can help unite opinion; or it can aid in misleading us.

Now, a startup founded in Poland using crowdsourcing for information gathering and e-learning is announcing a growth round of funding. Brainly, a Quora-style platform that helps students find and contribute answers to typical homework questions in subjects like math, history, science and social studies, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in funding — money that speaks to the momentum both of the company and the concept.

The funding was led by Naspers, which was also an investor in the company’s $14 million round in 2017, with participation also from Runa Capital and Manta Ray. It brings the total raised by the company to $68.5 million. Valuation is not being disclosed, including whether this was an up  or down round. For some context, the company was estimated to have a post-money valuation of $134 million in its last round, per PitchBook.

It’s likely that number is up: Brainly currently has 150 million users in 35 markets, growing 50% from 2018, when it had 100 million users. And the company is now turning its focus to a lucrative market for e-learning. The plan — according to CEO and co-founder Michał Borkowski — will be to use some of the funds to help the company break into the U.S., which today only accounts for about 10 million of its user base, but in total has some 76 million students overall.

He added that another area of focus will be monetization. The company today operates a freemium-style service, where the majority of users do not pay to access the site but in turn get served ads, while others choose to pay $3 per month for more features and no ads. Borkowski would not say how many paying users the company has today.

Brainly’s focus — to become a reliable and helpful network for students when they get stuck on a problem in their homework — was surprisingly an area that hadn’t really been tapped when Brainly was founded in 2009. Borkowski said that he and his co-founders — Lukasz Haluch and Tomasz Kraus — came up with the idea when they were already in college. “We would have loved to have had something like this in high school,” he recalled. (Brainly’s original name in Poland when it started out was “Zadane,” which means homework.)

Reliable is the key word here. There may not be many apps on the market today directly competing with Brainly; there is the wider internet and specifically Google, where you can enter anything from natural language questions to actual equations to get answers and explanations of those answers.

The problem today is that you also can get a lot of irrelevant or incorrect or incomplete information in those searches, too, and that is the opportunity for Brainly: to provide a more curated selection of responses specifically to the kinds of questions that students might come across in their homework.

That’s not to say that Brainly is perfect today. In my quick test of searching on a few topics in history and math, I saw a mixed bag of results, some accurate and some obviously plagiarised and some just wrong.

Borkowski said that the company uses a few levers to moderate questions and answers: users can report incorrect information, a team of human moderators also assess reported and other content and there are algorithms that scan recently uploaded questions and answers. (Contributing is unpaid, but regular contributors get invited into a program where they are paid to provide answers, he said.) Borkowski wouldn’t specify what the “strike rate” was for legit postings versus those that needed to be modified or removed, but presumably as Brainly continues to grow, the need to manage the quality of the platform’s content will only grow, too. 

There are a lot of opportunities for how Brainly might shape its product over time: for example, specific markets often have core curricula that students will learn, and standardised tests that they are being taught to take (AP exams in the U.S., for example; or GCSEs and A-levels in the U.K.). Systematically working on making sure that Brainly covers those comprehensively could make it a really coveted and used app for students taking those classes and preparing for those exams.

Another is doubling down on the company’s global remit. A lot of e-learning has been focused around English, and it’s notable that Brainly has been working across a number of other languages, too, from Polish and Russian to Spanish and a number of Asian languages. This gives the company an opportunity not just to expand its user base, but its usefulness in educational initiatives globally.

“We have been impressed by Brainly’s growth over the past 10 years, particularly in the U.S. and high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil,” said Larry Illg, CEO of Naspers Ventures, in a statement. “At Naspers, we back companies seeking to address big societal needs like education, helping them fulfill their vision with the ultimate aim of achieving global scale. Brainly has the potential to serve the needs of hundreds of millions of students around the world and Michał and the team are building an invaluable service for learners everywhere.”

With a successful launch from the Gobi Desert blasting off at around 1:10 PM Beijing time (1:10 AM ET), Chinese space launch startup ispace (which, awesomely, is also called StarCraft Glory Space Technology Co.) became the first private Chinese commercial space launch provider. The company’s SQX-1 Y1 rocket delivered two commercial satellites to an orbit of about 300 km (about 186 miles) above Earth.

The launch is the first successful commercial mission for the SQX-1 Y1 solid-propellant rocket developed by ispace, which is a four-stage design that can carry up to 260 kg (around 575 lbs) and weights around 68,000 lbs.

This is a major milestone for the Chinese space industry, and ispace beats out a healthy crop of competitors, including LandSpace and OneSpace, both of which did not succeed in earlier attempts to be the first in China to the private launch market.

Founded in October 2016, ispace secured a Series A funding round of an undisclosed amount in June, including investment from CDH Investment, Matrix Partners China and Shunwei Capital . The company completed sub-orbital flights in 2018 as precursors to the SQX-1 Y1 rocket.

GDPR, the European data privacy regulations, have been in effect for more than a year, but it’s still a challenge for companies to comply. Ethyca, a New York City startup, has created a solution from the ground up to help customers adhere to the regulations, and today it announced a $4.2 million investment led by IA Ventures and Founder Collective.

Table Management, Sinai Ventures, Cheddar founder Jon Steinberg and Moat co-founder Jonah Goodhart also participated.

At its heart, Ethyca is a data platform that helps companies discover sensitive data, then provides a mechanism for customers to see, edit or delete their data from the system. Finally, the solution enables companies to define who can see particular types of data across the organization to control access. All of these components are designed to help companies comply with GDPR regulations.

Company co-founder Cillian Kieran says that the automation component is key and should greatly reduce the complexity and cost associated with complying with GDPR rules. From his perspective, current solutions that involve either expensive consultants or solutions that require some manual intervention don’t get companies all the way there.

“These solutions don’t actually solve the issue from an infrastructure point of view. I think that’s the distinction. You can go and use the consultants, or you can use a control panel that tells you what you need to do. But ultimately, at some point you’re either going to have to build or deploy code that fixes some issues, or indeed manually manage or remediate those [issues]. Ethyca is designed for that and takes away those risks because it is managing privacy by design at the infrastructure level,” Kieran explained.

If you’re worried about the privacy of providing information like this to a third-party vendor, Kieran says that his company never actually sees the raw data. “We are a suite of tools that sits between business processes. We don’t capture raw data, We don’t see personal information. We find information based on unique identifiers,” he said.

The company has been around for more than a year, but has been spending its first year developing the solution. He sees this investment as validation of the problem his startup is trying to solve. “I think the investment represents the growing awareness fundamentally from both with the investor community, and also in the tech world, that data privacy as a regulatory constraint is real and will compound itself,” he said.

He also points out that GDPR is really just the tip of the privacy regulation iceberg, with laws in Australia, Brazil and Japan, as well as California and other states in the U.S. due to come online next year. He says his solution has been designed to deal with a variety of privacy frameworks beyond GDPR. If that’s so, his company could be in a good position moving forward.

According to a report by Markets and Markets, the global endpoint security industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 9.92% from $11.8 billion in 2018 to $19.69 billion by 2024. CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:...

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Sramana Mitra: What are some other examples of the kinds of platform extensions you’re seeing being delivered through the ecosystem? You mentioned difference of pricing as one. You were describing...

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Didi Chuxing announced today that it has received from Toyota Motor Corporation new investment totaling $600 million. As part of the deal, the two companies will also set up a joint venture with GAC Toyota Motor to provide vehicle-related services to drivers on Didi’s ridesharing platform. GAC Toyota itself is a joint venture between Toyota and GAC Group, one of China’s largest automakers.

Nikkei Asian Review first broke news of the deal at the end of May, reporting that Toyota was considering a $550 million investment in Didi and setting up a new mobility-services company in China.

Didi and Toyota announced last year that it would work together on services that use technology developed by Toyota for its mobility and vehicle-sharing platform, which includes autonomous driving software, a fully electric battery and the “e-Palette” or modules that can be used to build autonomous vehicles of different sizes, ranging from small ones for deliveries to passenger buses.

Toyota has also backed other vehicle-sharing companies, including Uber and JapanTaxi.

Didi’s partnership with Toyota is one of several partnerships it has made with car manufacturers and other vehicle-related companies as part of its D-Alliance, including Toyota, Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, as well as major Chinese automakers like FAW, Dongfeng and GAC, with the intention of expanding its reach beyond its ride-hailing services by creating a platform that uses new energy, AI-based and mobility technology.

Didi recently announced that it will open its ride-hailing platform to third-party service providers as part of agreements with FAW, Dongfeng and GAC, three of China’s largest auto makers.

Investment and stock trading app Robinhood stored some user credentials, including passwords, in plaintext on internal systems, the company revealed today. This particularly dangerous security misstep could have seriously exposed its users, though it says that it has no evidence the data was accessed improperly. Better change your password now.

Sensitive data like passwords and personal information are generally kept encrypted at all times. That way if the worst came to pass and a company’s databases were exposed, all the attacker would get is a bunch of gibberish. Unfortunately it seems that there might have been a few exceptions to that rule.

A number of users, including CNET’s Justin Cauchon, received the following notice from Robinhood in an email:

When you set a password for your Robinhood account, we use an industry-standard process that prevents anyone at our company from reading it. On Monday night, we discovered that some user credentials were stored in a readable format within our internal systems. We wanted to let you know that your password may have been included.

We resolved this issue, and after thorough review, found no evidence that this information was accessed by anyone outside of our response team.

It seems that if it were truly “industry-standard,” then the rest of the industry would also have stored passwords in plaintext. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot, since Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have all managed to make this same mistake recently.

A Robinhood representative stressed the rapidity of the company’s response to the issue, though they would not comment on how it was first discovered, nor how long the data was stored that way, nor what deviation from these industry norms caused the problem, nor how many users were affected, nor whether answers to these questions would ever be forthcoming. They did offer the following statement:

We swiftly resolved this information logging issue. After a thorough review, we found no evidence that this customer information was accessed by anyone outside of our response team. Out of an abundance of caution, we have notified customers who may have been impacted and encouraged them to reset their passwords. We take our responsibility to customers seriously and place an immense focus on working to ensure their information is secure.

If you got an email, you were among the unlucky few many majority handful some, so change your password. If you didn’t get an email… also change your password. You can never be too careful.

The open office plan was intended to help collaboration and productivity across employees and teams while better utilizing less square feet per person. But the results haven’t always proven to be very successful, based on years of analysis.

Yet it is still the norm for tech companies of all sizes, and will likely stay that way.

Based on my years of experience working with hundreds of companies, I’ll lay out a basic framework below to help you think through how to adapt an open-office situation to best meet your needs.

I’ll also walk you through the example of a growing venture-backed startup that’s staffing up in one of the tougher office markets in the world: Manhattan.

But first, take a look at the data. Studies have shown that open floor plans can inhibit productivity and health. Open office workers take 62% more sick days than those in private offices, and a mere three hours of steady noise can cause measurable distress and a decrease in motivation. Face-to-face communication has been observed to actually decrease in open plan environments, with a measurable negative impact on productivity.

Considering that 70% of Americans today work in an open office, the issue of constant noise and distraction is ubiquitous across the country. The result is a bad rap—one doesn’t need to look very far to find one of the many articles online criticizing the design.

In today’s installment of “the future is 100% subscription-based,” Toronto-based startup Rover is testing out subscriptions for its parking marketplace. Rover lets users list their unused parking spots for on-demand rental by others on the service, giving them a passive way to earn some income while hopefully increasing the utilization rate of parking spaces at the same time.

Rover has offered the spots on their platform on a per-use, on-demand basis before now, but it’s going to pilot a monthly subscription starting this summer, with a planned test phase extending into early fall. The company says it’s going to try out a few different versions of a monthly sub, including potential perks like a percentage discount versus individual on-demand parking charges, advanced booking and premium customer service.

Pricing should be in the ballpark of between $5 and $15 Canadian depending on the features you’re willing to pay for, and this should inform eventual subscription price points for the startup’s services should they move beyond this pilot phase. Rover currently offers spots in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, with plans to expand to Canada’s west coast and eventually California in the future.

Uber recently debuted a subscription pilot that rolls in its ride-hailing, Eats, bikes and scooter rental services, and Rover cites this move as an example of the move to subscriptions generally in the on-demand space. Subscriptions are a great way for consumers to easily take care of known recurring costs, but the rise of this business model across a range of industries will definitely test the limits of consumer willingness to trade cost for convenience.