More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets.

A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand note” of $6.2 million, including $5 million in cash that the company borrowed. It goes on to explain:

The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Company’s merchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass, Inc. (“MoviePass”), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018.

In other words, it looks like MoviePass wasn’t able to pay one of its service providers, which led to the outage. In order to make those payments, it borrowed $5 million.

This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in MoviePass’ finances. A Helios & Matheson filing from earlier this month suggested that the company was looking to raise up to $1.2 billion in equity and debt financing to fund MoviePass’ operations and growth.

Meanwhile, although the service is best-known for offering access to unlimited movie tickets for $9.95 per month, the specifics of the pricing model have been changing pretty frequently.

Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company.

Daisie will offer a way for filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers and other creators to showcase their work and find collaborators. The startup has already picked an initial 100 creators to kick things off.

Williams and Santry also gave us a quick runthrough of the app. At first glance, it might look like other social media services, but there are no follower counts, as Williams (who has no shortage of followers) explained: “If you have follower counts it then becomes about a competition, like a popularity contest between who can get the most.”

In addition, she noted that social media followings are generally one-sided, whereas Daisie is all about enabling “chains” of users who aren’t just viewing your profile, but can actually view your projects and contribute.

“A chain is where you reach out to someone who is in your area — or maybe even not,” she said. “So connecting with someone you’re inspired by, reaching out to them and saying, ‘Hey, I have this 30-second video of me singing the song, but I realized I’m actually a better lyricist than I am a songwriter, a musician. And I really love what you play, I wonder if you could make me a melody and we could sort of work together on this.'”

Ultimately, Williams is hoping that people’s Daisie profiles becomes an “online résumé or portfolio of work that they’re really proud of, that can be shown to the world.” And that, in turn, could help them find paying work, ideally on their own terms.

“We want to basically give the power back to the creator,” Williams said. “Instead of them having to market themselves to fit someone else’s idea of what their job would be, they can let their art speak for themselves.”

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Sramana Mitra: You emphasized geography greatly. Pacific Northwest is the sweet spot of the fund. You don’t invest outside? Corey Schmid: We do. We call it the Mountain West. One of our newest deals...

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Facebook’s (Nasdaq: FB) recently announced second quarter results are making the market wonder if the company has finally lost its charm. The company has been dealing with controversy around fake...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix.

First up we had zero choice but to talk about Facebook. The social company’s epic repricing in the middle of the week blotted out the news sun. It may keep us in the shade for another week, too. Facebook’s dive has implications for social startups and competing public companies alike. Like, say, Reddit.

Moving along, Crunchbase News recently dropped a report digging into the rise of $100 million and larger rounds. From a turning point in 2013 to today, megarounds have been on the rise. Why? When does it stop? Whose fault is it really? And is going public really that bad? We worked through each question, even tagging the structure of the stock market along the way. (Even more data here.)

From there we took a quick pivot to a company that is known for raising megarounds — Slack — and its new IRL BFF Atlassian. Yes, the Slack-Atlassian deal dropped right before we recorded. Our take is that the agreement makes sense, especially in light of a competitive landscape that keeps getting tougher for Slack.

That said, everyone agreed that Slack is one hell of a business.

And then we ran out of time. But, happily, we also worked in an advertisement for Melbourne and riffed one of Ohanian’s recent investments.

Thanks for comin’ round, and we’ll see you all in a week!

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a slightly different question. Given what you are doing, it sounds like there must be tons and tons of niche use cases out there of your model. We’re in 2018....

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During this week’s roundtable, we had several wonderful social impact projects. Humaniq We started with Andrey Gidaspov, pitching London and Luxembourg-based Humaniq, a mobile banking project...

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Startup financing is not a one-way street. While entrepreneurs are looking for the right investors to fund their startups, VCs are also looking for the right startups to fund. Yet the process of...

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Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which snagged Meg Whitman as CEO in January, has now closed on $1 billion in funding, according to a report out today in CNN. Investors in the round include Disney, 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, Entertainment One and other media companies, with a combined $200 million investment, while institutional investors from the U.S. and China made up the rest.

The news follows a May report from Bloomberg, which said NewTV had then raised around $800 million. It had also said 21st Century Fox and Warner Bros. were investors.

Last fall, an SEC filing revealed WndrCo was looking to raise as much as $2 billion. That could indicate that the round CNN is reporting is still in the process of raising.

NewTV declined to comment, when TechCrunch reached them for confirmation.

Details are still fairly sparse on NewTV, which is being incubated by Katzenberg’s WndrCo, a holding company that’s also invested in startups including Mixcloud, Axios, Node, Flowspace, Whistle Sports, and TYT Network.

So far, we know NewTV aims to bring high-quality Hollywood production values and storytelling to mobile, but in a different format. Instead of producing regular-length TV shows, it aims to release content in “bite-sized formats of 10 minutes or less.” This will also involve custom-designed technology built specifically for mobile, it claims.

But it’s unclear why – beyond having Katzenberg and now Whitman’s names attached – this makes the company worth a billion dollar investment. The market for this type of content hasn’t really been proven out. After all, today’s youngest video consumers are happy with YouTube – their TV alternative of sorts – which is filled with short-form video.

And while YouTubers’ grasp of production values and storytelling chops may fall short of “Hollywood” standards, streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and others are filling in the gaps in terms of quality, and are growing sizable subscriber bases.

If there is actually demand for “high-quality short-form” video, it seems content producers could just sell to existing distributors directly.

It’s also unclear for now if NewTV aims to own and distribute its content to others, act as its own standalone streaming service, or plans for a mixture of both.

In any event, as CNN points out, even a large round like this is a small bet for the bigger media companies involved. In addition, they don’t want to miss a shot at backing Katzenberg’s latest – especially given his prior successes at Paramount, Disney and DreamWorks.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this series. The following interview with Corey Schmid of Seven Peaks Ventures was recorded in...

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SuperAwesome, the “kidtech” startup valued now at over $100 million, is today launching its own alternative to YouTube’s embedded video player. The technology is aimed at kids publishers – not consumers directly – and is part of the company’s larger platform of kid-safe technology. This includes tools for social engagement, parental controls, advertising, authentication, and more, all specifically designed for companies catering to kids.

The launch comes at a key time in the industry, as YouTube is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit over children’s privacy, and recently had an FTC complaint filed against it by 23 advocacy groups. The complaint says YouTube has been collecting data on children’s viewing patterns for years, in violation of federal law – meaning COPPA, aka the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

The new player provided by SuperAwesome gives kids brands another choice amid all these questions over YouTube and its respect for children’s privacy.

Explains the company, the player does not capture data on children, nor does it breach regulations like COPPA (U.S.) or GDPR-K (E.U.).

The opportunity for SuperAwesome is fairly sizable here. Already, the company counts among its customer base over 190 kids’ brands like Crayola, Topps, Spin Master, Warner Bros., Hasbro, Disney, Roald Dahl, Mattel, Dreamworks, Penguin, and others. These companies use SuperAwesome’s platform and its tools for socially engaging, advertising and connecting with their under-13 audience.

“The demand for [the video player] has come directly from our customers and the player has been in beta testing for a while,” SuperAwesome CEO Dylan Collins tells TechCrunch.

As with its other tools, the kids’ publishers will be able to embed the new player within their own websites and apps, and then manage all their social content – including video – from SuperAwesome’s “PopJam” dashboard.

“To give you a sense of scale, the PopJam Connect platform is enabling tens of millions of kid-safe social engagements every month,” Collins adds.

The platform itself offers a set of basic tools for free, but larger companies pay for premium upgrades on a SaaS (software-as-a-service) basis. Because it’s working with so many big brands, SuperAwesome is now turning a profit. It’s expecting to grow 100 percent this year to reach a revenue run rate of $50 million, it recently said.

And it also just added Tim Weller, chairman of Trustpilot and Taptica, as its Chairman a few months ago, and announced former Upworthy CRO, Ben Zagorski as its North American Chief Revenue Officer.

SuperAwesome’s platform today is addressing an underserved audience: kids brands that need to abide by federal and international regulations around children’s privacy, but have had limited options in terms of technology that helps them do so.

That was the case with video in particular – there hasn’t really been a viable alternative to YouTube’s player that suits kids publishers’ needs.

“There are over 170,000 children going online for the first time every day and the kidtech ecosystem is growing equally quickly to make the broader internet compatible with this new audience,” noted SuperAwesome CTO Joshua Wohle in a statement about the player’s launch. “Many people misinterpreted children’s appearance on the internet as a temporary blip, whereas in reality it is a structural shift that is changing the landscape,” he said.

Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with a more formal collaboration tool. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Redkix burst out of the gate two years ago with a $17 million seed round, a hefty seed amount by any measure. What prompted this kind of investment was a tool that combined a collaboration tool like Slack or Workplace by Facebook with email. People could collaborate in Redkix itself, or if you weren’t a registered user, you could still participate by email, providing a more seamless way to work together.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers enterprise collaboration at Constellation Research, sees this tool as providing a key missing link. “Redkix is a great solution for bridging the worlds between traditional email messaging and more modern conversational messaging. Not all enterprises are ready to simply switch from one to the other, and Redkix allows for users to work in whichever method they want, seamlessly communicating with the other,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

As is often the case with these kinds of acquisitions, the company bought the technology  itself along with the team that created it. This means that the Redkix team including the CEO and CTO will join Facebook and they will very likely be shutting down the application after the acquisition is finalized.

Lepofsky thinks that enterprises that are adopting Facebook’s enterprise tool will be able to more seamlessly transition between the two modes of communication, the Workplace by Facebook tool and email, as they prefer.

Although a deal like this has probably been in the works for some time, after yesterday’s earning’s debacle, Facebook could be looking for ways to enhance its revenue in areas beyond the core Facebook platform. The enterprise collaboration tool does offer a possible way to do that in the future, and if they can find a way to incorporate email into it, it could make it a more attractive and broader offering.

Facebook is competing with Slack, the darling of this space and others like Microsoft, Cisco and Google around communications and collaboration. When it launched in 2015, it was trying to take that core Facebook product and put it in a business context, something Slack had been doing since the beginning.

To succeed in business, Facebook had to think differently than as a consumer tool, driven by advertising revenue and had to convince large organizations that they understood their requirements. Today, Facebook claims 30,000 organizations are using the tool and over time they have built in integrations to other key enterprise products, and keep enhancing it.

Perhaps with today’s acquisition, they can offer a more flexible way to interact with the platform and could increase those numbers over time.

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you where I am a little bit uncomfortable with what you’re saying. I don’t feel a token angle of it. Your point is well-taken that somebody with a proven business model is a...

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Today’s 408th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, July 26, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 408th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, July 26, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Recently Linux provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) reported its first quarter results. While the quarter’s performance outpaced market expectations, its outlook was disappointing, sending its stock...

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Spotify is racing to sign up users before Apple Music can, even at the expense of its finances. Spotify’s second quarter as a public company saw mixed performance compared to estimates as it reached 83 million paid subscribers, up 40 percent year-over-year and up 8 million from its 75 million count last quarter. Spotify now has 180 million total users, coming in at the high end of its guidance with a 5.9 percent quarter-over-quarter growth rate, though it added fewer users than last quarter.

But Spotify saw trouble with its finances. The company had €1.27 billion ($1.49 billion) in revenue, up 26 percent year-over-year and in line with estimates, but it missed big on EPS, where it saw a loss of -€2.20 compared to estimates of -€0.68. Spotify saw a net loss of €394 million and operating loss of €91 million this quarter, showing it’s still a ways off from becoming profitable under the heavy strain of its high royalty payments to record labels and artists. Spotify shares were down about 0.8 percent in pre-trading hours.

For comparison, Apple Music has 40 million subscribers, though is rumored to now possibly have more in the U.S. than Spotify. Spotify now says it has 31 percent of its subscribers, or 25 million, in North America as a whole.

Forecasts for Q3 see the company expecting 188 to 193 million users and 85 to 88 million paid subscribers, with €1.2 billion to €1.4 billion in revenue. During the earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek explained that it’s not a record label, “nor do we have any interest in becoming a label,” dispelling myths that it was becoming one because it licensed music directly from artists who own their own rights. Ek said these deals were not exclusive.

Instead, Ek said that Spotify’s strategy to grow its margin beyond what’s allowed by its royalty rates is to grow the number of creators on its platform, the number of creators that use its audience management and promotion tools and the number of creators that pay for those tools. Essentially, Spotify has to use its massive audience across paid and ad-supported tiers to lure artists to pay it for help reaching them instead of the other way around.

As for podcasts, where Spotify may not have to pay as much to creators, Ek said “it’s growing really, really fast” but that it was unclear exactly how big the opportunity is long-term.

Spotify’s average revenue per user also dropped 12 percent this quarter, because it used promotions like a $13 bundled subscription with Hulu to attract more subscribers. Still, that could be a smart bet for Spotify long-term. Music isn’t going anywhere, so whichever streaming service can lock in subscribers now by gathering personalization data and getting them to build playlists could earn monthly fees from them long into the future.