Chat app Line’s games business raises $110M for growth opportunities

Messaging app firm Line has given up majority control of its Line Games business after it raised outside financing to expand its collection of titles and go after global opportunities.

The Line Games business was formed earlier this year when Line merged its existing gaming division from NextFloor, the Korea-based game publisher that it acquired in 2017. Now the business has taken on capital from Anchor Equity Partners, which has provided 125 billion KRW ($110 million) in financing via its Lungo Entertainment entity, according to a disclosure from Line.

A Line spokesperson clarified that the deal will see Anchor acquire 144,743 newly-created shares to take a 27.55 percent stake in Line Games. That increase means Line Corp’s own shareholding is diluted from 57.6 percent to a minority 41.73 percent stake.

Korea-based Anchor is best known for a number of deals in its homeland including investments in e-commerce giant Ticket Monster, Korean chat giant Kakao’s Podotree content business and fashion retail group E-Land.

Line operates its eponymous chat app which is the most popular messaging platform in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, and also significantly used in Indonesia, but gaming is a major source of income. This year to date, Line has made 28.5 billion JPY ($250 million) from its content division, which is primarily virtual goods and in-app purchases from its social games. That division accounts for 19 percent of Line’s total revenue, and it is a figure that is only better by its advertising unit, which has grossed 79.3 billion JPY, or $700 million, in 2018 to date.

The games business is currently focused on Japan, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan, but it said that the new capital will go towards finding new IP for future titles and identifying games with global potential. It is also open to more strategic deals to broaden its focus.

While Line has always been big on games, Line Games isn’t just building for its own service. The company said earlier this year that it plans to focus on non-mobile platforms, which will include the Nintendo Switch among others consoles.

That comes from the addition of NextFloor, which is best known for titles like Dragon Flight and Destiny Child. Dragon Flight has racked up 14 million users since its 2012 launch, at its peak it saw $1 million in daily revenue. Destiny Child, a newer release in 2016, topped the charts in Korea and has been popular in Japan, North America and beyond.

Line went public in 2016 via a dual U.S.-Japan IPO that raised over $1 billion.

Note: the original version of this article was updated to clarify that Lungo Entertainment is buying newly-issued shares.

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Three days left to save big on Disrupt Berlin 2018 tickets

The early-bird clock is winding down, and you have just three days left to save up to €500 on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2018. You’d be cuckoo to miss this deal (pun intended). The early-bird price flies away on 2 November, and your savings fly with it. Don’t miss out on the best possible price. Buy your ticket today.

Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on 29-30 November, provides incredible opportunities, and one of them is the chance to hear some of the most brilliant minds in the startup, technology and investment worlds speaking on our Main Stage. We keep expanding our roster of outstanding speakers and presentations, and you can keep tabs on updates on the full Disrupt Berlin agenda. Here’s a quick sample of what we have in store for you:

• When is e-commerce not exactly e-commerce? When it’s Threads, a unique luxury fashion shopping experience driven by chat apps and actual human shopping assistants. We’re thrilled that founder Sophie Hill, who recently closed a $20 million round of funding, will join us in Berlin to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping.
• Babbel is a European success story and the top-grossing language learning app in the world. Sit in with Julie Hansen and Markus Witte to hear how the company plans to take on its next challenge, the United States.
• The auto industry’s in overdrive, and everyone’s working on the car of the future — that perfect combination of automation, connectivity, electric motors and mobility services. Join Laurin Hahn (Sono Motors) and Ole Harms (MOIA) to hear their perspective on who has the edge — startups or car giants in the process of reinventing themselves?

These great Main Stage talks often lead to even more questions, and that’s why we created Q&A Sessions. These smaller, more intimate, 45-minute moderated discussions give attendees the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and go deeper on crucial technologies and emerging trends.

Of course, Disrupt offers more than the chance to listen and learn. Network with more than 400 early-stage startups in Startup Alley, and don’t forget to use CrunchMatch — our free business match-making service. It makes connecting with the right people fast and efficient.

Take in the adrenaline ride that is Startup Battlefield. Watch as exceptional startups launch their companies to the world and compete for $50,000 cash, the coveted Disrupt cup and investor love.

Disrupt Berlin 2018 takes place on 29-30 November, and we hope you’ll join us at the best possible price. You have until 2 November to save up to €500 and be an early bird, not a cuckoo bird. Go buy your ticket and come to Berlin!

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In search of an ORM alternative: Creating a SQL-speaking object

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Another hour!

It's October 31, 2018 at 03:15PM

All You Need to Know About Blockchain Testing

From 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto implemented blockchain technology as a core component in Bitcoin, blockchain has been the buzzword in the industry. Bitcoin’s success proved the capabilities of blockchain-based transactions, and now, everyone is planning to implement blockchain technology in almost everything. According to the World Economic Forum survey, by 2027, 10 percent of the global GDP may be stored using none other than blockchain-based technology. Interesting, isn’t it?

As you can see, from digital transactions to the voting process, or from storing documents and transactions to making data transfer decentralized, blockchain tech is going to be everywhere. So for developers working this space, here’s the main question: how do you know that your blockchain app is working the way you want it to work? In simpler terms, how can you test blockchain?

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Migrating Java Applications to Azure App Service (Part 1 - DataSources and Credentials)

Running on the cloud is not only for cool new applications following 12-factor principles and coded to be cloud-native. Many applications could be converted to be cloud-ready with minimal adjustments — just to be able to run in the cloud environment. In the following few articles we will demonstrate how to address the most common migration items in legacy Spring applications — handling JNDI, and credentials, externalizing configuration, remote debugging, logging, and monitoring.

This article demonstrates how to migrate Java Spring/Hibernate applications using JNDI settings to cloud environment, externalize configuration, and how to keep credentials out of code by using Azure Managed Service Identity.

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10 Easy-to-Use Modules in Ansible

Ansible is all about using modules in its Playbook. This article talks about my top ten most used modules.

Before reading this blog, I would like to explain some terminologies used below.

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Iterating/Loop Through Your Component Property in Render Function in React

Introduction

I understand that you need to build some UI elements dynamically in your component’s render function in React. Yes! The only way is to loop through the items; you can either use a for loop or a map function to do so. But the real question is, are we allowed to do that in React? Unfortunately, not in a direct way, you may face some difficulty, especially if you come from an Angular background. You were probably getting an error as like "unused expression, expected an assignment or function call," and now you are here on this page for an easy solution. It isn’t that hard to achieve, I will explain how. I hope you will like it.

Background

I have an array of addresses and I need to show this in a print template, so I thought about creating a separate component which iterates through the item property. And each array element has its own property and I wanted to generate labels for each item. Here I am going to explain how I did it.

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How to Write Software: 5 Lessons Learned from Running Businesses

I used to write software for a living. I did that for a lot of years, as a matter of fact. And, in doing so, I learned a lot about how to write software.

But I learned this from the perspective of, well, a wage software developer. Today, I'd like to reflect on how my view has evolved over the last number of years.

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Free webinar for Python with an industrial expert (Here we can give a clear information about the PYTHON)

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API - Using Wikipedia API to fetch articles and suggestions | Javascript tutorials

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Basic Git Commands Every Developer Should Know

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Regarding HTTP Connection header and WebSockets

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Alan Kay thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming

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Another hour!

It's October 31, 2018 at 02:15PM

When you inherit horrible old code, don't blame computer programmer right away. Old code can reveal much more.

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Imposition and Dark Agile

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Indirection Is Not Abstraction

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The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri

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What makes a great developer? A story of an extraordinary blacksmith

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JavaScript dominates open source, Java trails behind

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Tutorial: Managing Compiler Warnings with CMake

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Ruby on Rails Security – The Set List

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Another hour!

It's October 31, 2018 at 01:15PM

Beginner’s Guide to Web Development Part 1 : Introduction to HTML (video)

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DevOps Chat: Security in the Cloud with Dome9's Zolar Alon

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Progressive Web Applications (PWA) - Only a temporary hype or a real chance to replace native applications?

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KKR’s latest Southeast Asia bet is a $144M investment in PropertyGuru

Global investment giant KKR is warming up to Southeast Asia after it made a third high-profile investment. The firm — which has nearly $150 billion in assets under management — has cut a SG$200 million (US$144 million) check for PropertyGuru, the region’s largest property listings group.

Founded in 2006, PropertyGuru operates rental and sale listing sites in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Prior to today’s deal (its Series D), its most recent investment came in 2015, when it raised SG$175 million from backers including TPG and Australia’s Square Peg. This new financing takes it to SG$440 million (or around $320 million) thus far. You’d imagine that the deal values PropertyGuru at/above $1 billion — the much-vaunted unicorn milestone — but the company has declined to reveal its valuation at this point.

It isn’t talking about its valuation, but PropertyGuru CEO Hari V. Krishnan did say in a statement, however, that the company is profitable, cash flow positive and seeing revenue grow at 25 percent per year. The firm claims to have a dominant 55 percent market share in the countries it operates in and it is actively working to expand that reach in Southeast Asia, a region of over 600 million consumers which has more internet users than the population of the U.S.

Indeed, in tandem with the funding news, PropertyGuru said it has completed the buyout of Vietnam-based property portal Batdongsan.com.vn, which it claims is the country’s largest property portal with over four million unique visitors per month. The site will join PropertyGuru’s collection of business through the deal, which is undisclosed and follows a strategic investment back in 2016.

Singapore is one of five markets in Southeast Asia where PropertyGuru operates

For KKR, this investment in the latest in a series of early bets that the firm has made on digital startups in Southeast Asia. The firm has put money into Indonesian ride-sharing giant Go-Jek, which is backed by the likes of Tencent and Google and now said to be worth $9 billion, and Philippines-based fintech venture Voyager, which is also backed by Tencent following a recent $175 million deal. It also invested in Thailand-based e-commerce enabler aCommerce via its Emerald Media fund last year.

In a statement, KKR’s head of Southeast Asia, Ashish Shastry, paid tribute to PropertyGuru which he said has “clearly established itself as the Southeast Asian champion in the online property space.”

PropertyGuru is not alone in digitizing real estate, and its rivals in Southeast Asia include iProperty, a business that’s listed on the ASX in Australia and Singapore-based startup 99.co — which counts Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin among its backers and had a litigation battle with PropertyGuru. There, of course, plenty of single-market businesses that operate across various Southeast Asian countries.

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My somewhat complete salary history as a software engineer

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The Payara Platform's Journey to Jakarta EE 8 Compatibility

At Java One last year, Oracle announced that they had made the monumental decision to open source Java EE and move it to the Eclipse Foundation. As Oracle Code One (the successor conference to Java One) comes around, I thought it would be good to reflect on where we are and how far we still have to go.

For the Payara team, this has been a very interesting year. Payara has become strategic members of the Eclipse Foundation in order to drive both MicroProfile and Jakarta EE forward. I personally have become a director of the Eclipse Foundation and many of our team members have become committers and project leads on many of the Jakarta EE projects. As a team, we have had to rapidly become familiar with the Eclipse way of working in a multi-vendor collaborative organization with committees, paperwork, global conference calls at odd hours, as well as tracking and responding on many different mailing lists. These are the necessary evils that come with organizational collaboration, and at times, it can be frustrating and seem a little fruitless. On the flip side, I have also found all the organizations involved open and welcoming and everyone involved is acting in good faith for the best interests of developers and end users that want a free, open, and standards-based platform on which to develop business applications. We have all been feeling our way in this process, but now, things are gathering pace more rapidly.

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5 Effective Ways to Reduce Custom Software Development Costs

Too many software projects fail. Yup, we did it! Someone had to address the elephant in the room. Planning inadequacies and lack of communication are the essential reasons for the failure of custom software development, way more than technical incompetencies or unattainable requirements. Custom software development is far from quintessential and thus, the word “custom.” There might be a few similarities between some projects, but each project is a cluster of innovative ideas and business logic.

A recent Harvard Business Review article revealed that one in six IT projects has a cost overrun of 200%. Sounds like an industry that loves to fail. So, how can we reduce the expense of custom software development? Do it yourself? That goal is unreachable when it comes to software. And it is unimaginable to think that a modern business can prosper without software. As a result, costs skyrocket and eventually might even displace the company’s overall profit, especially for a startup and new small firm. Then, is there even a way to develop a custom software without losing all your money? Can we save costs in software development & maintenance? Absolutely.

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AWS CLI Issues and Fixes for Installation [Code Snippet]

I sat down again, for about the eight billionth time, to install AWS's CLI and get to work against some infrastructure. For at least the gazillionth time, I got a stupid error, that at this point I really feel the installation process ought to ignore, mitigate, or otherwise handle. But anyway, here's one very common issue that keeps popping up over and over if you've got six installed already that isn't the version that awscli wants (or doesn't want).

The quick solution to this is to just tell pip to ignore the existing six installations.

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Create Dynamics 365 Reports on JasperReports Server

The CData JDBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Sales enables you to provide access to Dynamics 365 Sales data across the enterprise. This article shows how to deploy the driver on JasperReports server and create a simple report based on a reporting domain, a business view of Dynamics 365 Sales data.

Deploy the Driver JAR

Follow the steps below to deploy the driver JAR on JasperReports Server. The instructions below contain specifics for Dynamics 365 Sales and the Tomcat server bundled with JasperReports Server. If you are using JBoss AS 7 instead of Tomcat, you can follow the standard process to deploy the Dynamics 365 Sales JDBC Driver on JBoss.

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DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 — The Best Yet?

Its already over again — the annual get-together of the brightest DevOps minds (well, the brightest who could make it to Vegas). And in this instance, I want to make sure that what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas by sharing my highlights with all of you. It was a great event with a slightly higher focus on operations than last time.

The four trends that I picked up on:

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Microservices Automation Deployment Using AWS and Docker

Using Docker + AWS to Build, Deploy, and Scale Your Application

For this tutorial, you'll have a Docker application that automatically builds your software on commit and deploys it to an Elastic beanstalk sitting behind a load balancer for scalability. This continuous integration pipeline will allow you to worry less about your deployments and get back to focusing on feature development within your application.

Components:

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Making a Stand Alone Executable from a Python Script Using PyInstaller

There are plenty of tools available for converting Python script into an executable. For example, check out:

• PyInstaller
• py2exe

For Python 2, I used to prefer py2exe. It's a neat tool that does the trick by making a stand alone executable from a Python script. The one problem I faced was, py2exe used to support only Python 2! Then I moved on to PyInstaller. The good thing is, py2exe now provides support to Python 3 as well! I might share my py2exe experience as well but, that will be in another article.

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How The Cloud is Changing IT's Role

Great having the opportunity to meet with Raj Sabhlok, President of ManageEngine at their Chicago user conference and learn more his vision for the role of IT in the cloud era. 

ManageEngine has been providing IT operations and service management since 2001. Their offerings include Active Directory management, operations management, analytics, service management, endpoint management, and security. Zoho's operating system for business with more than 40 business apps to run entire businesses.

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Perl6::Math::Matrix (Part 5: Patient With Docs)

If you write any software package, you have to document it. This simple truth drives more than few developers into despair. But there is also a way to craft good documentation and make the writing of it a useful part of the development. This is the closing part about authoring a Perl 6 module and Math::Matrix in particular (part: one, two, three, and four).

iPOD

Since Perl 5.0, we have been able to use a markup language called Plain Old Documentation, that can be embedded into code. Since Perl 6 is a complete overhaul, the power of POD was also extended. One of the most interesting expansions is the metamodel-method HOW that can recall the documentation associated (written in front of) with a routine (sub or method). However, I did not use this feature yet, because this topic contains math that requires much longer explanations and examples than I would not want to see as a quick help output in the shell. I plan to supply these kinds of docs later, as a summary of the well-rounded documentation we will have then.

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Apache Kafka Security: Features and Uses of Kafka

Apache Kafka Security

There are a number of features added in Kafka community in release 0.9.0.0. There is a flexibility for their usage, either separately or together, that enhances security in a Kafka cluster.

So, the list of currently-supported security measures are:

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uCUnit: a Unit Test Framework for Microcontrollers

Unit testing is a common practice for host development. But for embedded development, this still seems mostly a ‘blank’ area. This is mostly because embedded engineers are not used to unit testing or because the usual framework for unit testing requires too many resources on an embedded target.

What I have used is the μCUnit framework, which is a small and easy-to-use framework, targeting small microcontroller applications.

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Top 20 Java Interview Questions by Hiring Investment Banks

There are a lot of Java developers interviewing for Java development roles in investment banks like Barclays, Credit Suisse, and Citibank. But, many of them don’t have any idea what kinds of questions they to expect.

In this article, I’ll share a couple of frequently asked questions from investment banks for Java developers with more than three years of experience.

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Exploring the Myths and Realities of Low-Code

Forward-thinking companies are using low-code application development platforms to crush development backlogs, and accelerate digital innovation. But, according to our research around 57% of organizations are still standing on the sidelines, and afraid of disrupting their approach to application development and delivery.

Watch this webinar for help building the business case for low-code, and learn about the five myths that confuse or delay adoption:

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How To Build A Basic Salesforce Rest API Integration

Getting your app listed in the Salesforce AppExchange provides you with the ability to build your product into the Salesforce platform promptly. Though the benefits of being present within this ecosystem are evident, it is crucial to acknowledge the costs associated along. A Rest API integration revolves around sending data from your app and collecting data from Salesforce.

What we will be discussing here is a basic REST API integration where the app is going to have customer data to be sent to Salesforce, and customer data in Salesforce is to be retrieved. The three important features of the app will be:

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Align the Stars (Programmatically)

Yesterday I was ready to get some changes into master, so I merged in the latest and opened a PR. But NO, the build on my pull request broke.

The error was:

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Migrating from RavenDB 2.5 to 4.0 in 36,000 Locations

After using RavenDB 2.5 for five years, it was time to upgrade to their latest 4.0 version. Our QSR platform currently operates with RavenDB embedded in more than 36,000 locations worldwide. We wanted to take advantage of RavenDB 4.0’s improved performance, native Voron storage engine, and improved tolerance to ungraceful shutdowns.

We knew that upgrading from 2.5 straight to 4.0 would not be an easy task, but the new version presented us a huge opportunity to position our business towards accelerated innovation, modernization, and cloud capabilities.

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Endpoint Security With Browser Security Plus

Thanks to Leonard Jayakumar, Product Manager at ManageEngine, for walking me through Browser Security Plus, a browser management solution that helps organizations secure their corporate data in the cloud and protect networks from web-based cyberattacks. Browser Security Plus provides organizations with a layer of management capabilities for browsers and their add-ons to maintain enterprise security. This allows enterprises to improve network health by preventing, detecting, and fixing any browser vulnerabilities.

As modern web, portable computing devices and other technologies have enabled employees to work anywhere, there's been a surge in cloud adoption among organizations, and browsers have evolved to be silent entry points for accessing corporate data. According to Statista, browsers have accounted for 23.47 percent of exploit attacks in 2018 as of Q1. This has a serious impact on enterprise security, as attackers leverage unsecured browsers and web applications to create lasting business repercussions.

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Doing Business In Real Time, Responding To What Matters As It Occurs

Technologists are good at technology, but they aren't always aware of the impacts it has on business in real-time. When it comes to delivering APIs and event-driven architecture, many developers focus on the technical details, as they should, but often times at the cost of what actually matters to the business being served by the APIs and event-driven approaches. This reality often results in a misalignment between IT and business groups, something that has been playing out for decades and results in the legacy technical debt that almost every company of a certain size suffers from.

After spending time assessing the companies that are making the biggest impact with APIs and streaming technology, you begin to see that event-driven APIs aren't just about being able to technically deliver in real-time, it is about being able to do business in real-time and responding to what matters as it occurs. Something that isn't always evident to the technologists delivering the underlying technology, and dialing in the details of event-driven approaches to doing APIs. All of this isn't just about responding to inserts, updates, and deletes in a system, it is about identifying the most significant and meaningful changes in the underlying systems that a business depends on to get things done each day.

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How to Be an AI Expert

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence has grown at a rapid pace in the last decade. You have seen it all unfold before your eyes. From self-driving cars to Google Brain, Artificial Intelligence has been at the center of these amazing huge-impact projects.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) made headlines when people started reporting that Alexa was laughing unexpectedly. Those news reports led to the usual jokes about computers taking over the world, but there’s nothing funny about considering AI as a career field. Just the fact that five out of six Americans use AI services in one form or another every day proves that this is a viable career option.

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String: Why it Is Immutable?

Why String Is Immutable?

This is one of the most popular interview questions. In this blog, we are going to talk about it and help you find the answer. String is one of the most used classes in any application. For storing the username, password, address, IP address, etc., we need to create String objects. So, it is necessary to understand why our most famous and used class is immutable.

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Hibernate Tips: How to Map Native Query Results to Entities

Hibernate Tips is a series of posts in which I describe a quick and easy solution for common Hibernate questions. Some of the most popular tips are also available as a book.

If you have a question for a future Hibernate Tip post, please leave a comment below.

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Programmer Interrupted – The Quiet Suffering in Open Floor Offices

Programmers Hate Open Floor Plans

Theoretically, open floor offices are a good idea. Sharing a spacious room would ideally provide a stage to plant fruitful discussions, develop & brainstorm ideas spontaneously and solve problems together.

Practically, however, many have a hard time concentrating in an open office – hence many sit there with headphones and listen to white noise to abstain from the distraction. As Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stackoverflow puts it, “programming is a solitary activity, and developers don’t benefit from overhearing conversations.”

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Cognitive Bias in Tests: The Most Human Side of Testing

Kick the Tires: Rust Crash Course Lesson One Exercise Solutions

Below are the solutions to the exercises from the last Rust Crash Course lesson, "Kick the Tires."

This post is part of a series based on teaching Rust at FP Complete. If you're reading this post outside of the blog, you can find links to all posts in the series at the top of the introduction post. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Blockchain and AI (Part 1): What Is Blockchain?

The Future Of The Application Stack

If you have built and deployed an application in production over the last few years, odds are that you have deployed your code in containers. You might have created and deployed individual containers (Docker, Linux LXC, etc.) directly in the beginning, but quickly switched over to a container orchestration technology like Kubernetes (K8s) or Swarm when you needed to coordinate multi-node deployments and high availability (HA). In this container-driven world, what will the future of the application stack look like? Let’s start with what we need from this “future” application stack.

What Do We Need From This Future Application Stack?

1. Cloud Agnostic

   We want to be cloud agnostic with the ability to deploy to any cloud of our choice. Ideally, we can even mix in various providers in a single deployment.

2. On-Premise

   We need to be able to run our application stack on-premise with our own custom hardware, private cloud, and internally managed datacenters.

3. Language Agnostic

   It almost goes with saying, but I’ll add it in for completeness. The future open stack needs to support all of the popular programming languages.

The Future Application Stack

The future application stack will be composed of a triad of technologies – K8s, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS):

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Brex has partnered with WeWork, AWS and more for its new rewards program

Brex, the corporate card built for startups, unveiled its new rewards program today.

The billion-dollar company, which announced its $125 million Series C three weeks ago, has partnered with Amazon Web Services, WeWork, Instacart, Google Ads, SendGrid, Salesforce Essentials, Twilio, Zendesk, Caviar, HubSpot, Orrick, Snap, Clerky and DoorDash to give entrepreneurs the ability to accrue and spend points on services and products they use regularly.

Brex is lead by a pair of 22-year-old serial entrepreneurs who are well aware of the costs associated with building a startup. They’ve been carefully crafting Brex’s list of partners over the last year and say their cardholders will earn roughly 20 percent more rewards on Brex than from any competitor program.

“We didn’t want it to be something that everyone else was doing so we thought, what’s different about startups compared to traditional small businesses?” Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told TechCrunch. “The biggest difference is where they spend money. Most credit card reward systems are designed for personal spend but startups spend a lot more on business.”

How the 22-year-old founders of Brex built a billion-dollar business in less than 2 years

Companies that use Brex exclusively will receive 7x points on rideshare, 3x on restaurants, 3x on travel, 2x on recurring software and 1x on all other expenses with no cap on points earned. Brex carriers still using other corporate cards will receive just 1x points on all expenses.

Most corporate cards offer similar benefits for travel and restaurant expenses, but Brex is in a league of its own with the rideshare benefits its offering and especially with the recurring software (SalesForce, HubSpot, etc.) benefits.

San Francisco-based Brex has raised about $200 million to date from investors including Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP.  At the time of its fundraise, the company told TechCrunch it planned to use its latest capital infusion to build out its rewards program, hire engineers and figure out how to grow the business’s client base beyond only tech startups.

“This is going to allow us to compete even more with Amex, Chase and the big banks,” Dubugras said.

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The Tissot Seastar 1000 is a low-cost and high-quality Swiss diver

In the pantheon of watches there are a few that stand out. Looking for your first automatic watch? Pick up a Seiko Orange Monster. Looking for a piece with a little history? The Omega Speedmaster is your man. Looking for an entry-level Swiss diver that won’t break the bank? Tissot’s Seastar has always had you covered.

The latest version of the Seastar is an interesting catch. A few years ago – circa 2010 – the pieces were all black with bold hands and a more staid case style. Now Tissot, a Swatch Group brand, has turned the Seastar into a chunkier diver with massive bar hands and case that looks like a steel sandwich.

The $695 Seastar 1000 contains a Powermatic 80/ETA C07.111 movement with an eighty hour power reserve which means the watch contains a massive mainspring that keeps things going for most of three days without winding. The Seastar is also water resistant to 1000 feet thanks to a huge screw down crown and thick casing. The new model has an exhibition back where you can see the rotor spinning over and balance wheel. The watch also has a ceramic bezel, a fairly top-of-the-line feature in an entry level watch.

Tissot has a long and interesting history. Best known for their high-tech T-Touch watches which had touchable crystals, allowing you to activate a compass, barometer, or altimeter with a single tap, the mechanical pieces have always seemed like an afterthought. The company also produces the classic Tissot Le Locle as well as a chronograph that I absolutely loved, the T-Navigator, but that has been discontinued. The Seastar, then, is one of the few mechanical pieces they sell and at sub-$1,000 prices you’re basically getting a Swiss watch with solid power reserve and great looks.

Watch folks I’ve talked to over the past few months see a distinct upturn in the Swiss watch market. Their belief that the Apple Watch is driving sales of mechanical watches seems to be coming true, even if it means cheaper fashion watches are being decimated. Tissot sits in that sweet spot between luxury and fashion, a spot that also contains Tag Heuer and Longines. Ultimately this is an entry level watch for the beginning collector but it’s a beautiful and beefy piece and worth a look.

[gallery ids="1739155,1739160"]

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As stock rises on a slim earnings beat, eBay tells analysts to focus on payments and ads

Despite increasing competition from traditional retailers like Walmart and Target, which have invested heavily in e-commerce, and the whupping it’s routinely taking from Amazon among pure e-commerce companies, eBay the 20-year-old lumbering Pez dispenser of an e-tailer, keeps plugging along.

Now, as it manages to eke out another earnings win by matching analysts’ expectations, the company is telling the bankers that watch it to look to advertising and payments for its future growth.

The company met analysts’ estimates of revenue totaling $2.65 billion, up from $2.41 billion in the year-ago period. That amounts to adjusted earnings of 56 cents per share, up from 48 cents per share in the year-ago period and beating analyst estimates of 54 cents per share. Profits for the company hit $720 million for the quarter.

The news sent shares up over 4 percent in trading after the market closed on Tuesday.

But more interesting than the the tepid results was its outlook for the future. Right now, eBay is at a crossroads as it tries to get a new group of users to forget about its past as a marketplace for used goods and resellers — and as a more pure e-commerce company.

“This quarter we continued to make foundational investments to improve the long-term competitiveness of our marketplace while setting the stage for significant growth opportunities,” said CEO Devin Wenig in a statement. “We will continue to innovate the customer experience while executing our growth initiatives in Payments and Advertising to position eBay for future success.”

The fact is, eBay is growing. It saw the number of active buyers across the platform increase by 4 percent, and has 177 million global active buyers. While that number is dwarfed by Amazon’s over 300 million global buyers (as of 2017), it’s one of the largest retailers in the U.S. The company’s StubHub business saw revenues of $291 million, up 7 percent from the year-ago period and sales of $1.2 billion. Its classified payments also grew.

As eBay looks ahead, payments and advertising are going to receive a bulk of the company’s internal investment dollars as it tries to complete the rollout of a new payment experience in the wake of its divorce from PayPal and its embrace of Adyen, Apple Pay, and the technology-based financial services company, Square.

Ebay to add support for Apple Pay, partners with Square Capital on seller financing

The company has already processed $38 million in payments and through the partnership with Apple Pay has grown that payment method to 12 percent on the platform. Advertising on eBay has seen 400,000 sellers promote over 160 million listings.

“We continue to grow the inventory on the marketplace,” Schenkel. “Just recently we rolled out a direct from brand and direct from authorized resellers… Brands want choice and they want to sell on a marketplace with 177 million users that doesn’t compete with them.”

The company will also continue to have an aggressive investment and mergers and acquisitions strategy, the executives said. Especially since the company found its earnings buoyed by the $1 billion it brought in from the sale of its stake in Flipkart, href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/09/walmart-confirms-16b-flipkart-investment-giving-it-77-in-indias-e-commerce-leader/"> when it was bought by Walmart for $16 billion.

Walmart confirms $16B Flipkart investment, giving it 77% in India’s e-commerce leader

What’s somewhat interesting is that there are new companies in the retail space that are making a mint doing things that eBay once dominated. Vinted and DePop are both used-clothing e-tailers that have enviable cache and significant revenues, while LetGo and OfferUp are also raiding used goods to turn trash into treasure.

A quick trip to eBay’s homepage shows that the company has all but consigned its collectible past to the trash heap. Given the death and dissolution of so many of its peers from the first generation of internet giants, it’s worth keeping an eye on eBay if only to see how the 20-something company approaches middle age as an independent entity.

“We have a unique situation. [The] eBay brand is very well recognized and not as well understood. We’re seeing this; that new buyers are responding really well to the changes that we made in the last few years and we need more of them and part of that is messaging our brand,” said Wenig on the earnings call with investment analysts.

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Facebook bans the Proud Boys, cutting the group off from its main recruitment platform

Facebook is moving to ban the Proud Boys, a far-right men’s organization with ties to white supremacist groups. Business Insider first reported the decision. Facebook confirmed the decision to ban the Proud Boys from Facebook and Instagram to TechCrunch, indicating that the group (and presumably its leader Gavin McInnes) now meet the company’s definition of a hate organization or figure.

Facebook provided the following statement:

“Our team continues to study trends in organized hate and hate speech and works with partners to better understand hate organizations as they evolve. We ban these organizations and individuals from our platforms and also remove all praise and support when we become aware of it. We will continue to review content, Pages, and people that violate our policies, take action against hate speech and hate organizations to help keep our community safe.”

Facebook’s policy on white supremacy plays right into a racist agenda

Even compared to other groups on the far right with online origins, the Proud Boys maximize their impact through social networking. The organization, founded by provocateur and Vice founder McInnes, relies on Facebook as its primary recruitment tool. As we reported in August, the Proud Boys operate a surprisingly sophisticated network for getting new members into the fold via many local and regional Facebook groups. All of it relies on Facebook — the Proud Boys homepage even links out to the web of Facebook groups to guide potential recruits toward next steps.

At the time of writing, Facebook’s ban appeared to affect some Proud Boys groups and not others. The profile of Proud Boys founder McInnes appears to still be functional. Facebook’s decision to act against the organization is likely tied to the recent arrest of five Proud Boys members in New York City on charges including assault, criminal possession of a weapon and gang assault.

Facebook is the recruiting tool of choice for far-right group the Proud Boys

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