In the document, Apple outlines techniques to identify an actual App Store or iTunes email, which the company says will always include a current billing address, something scammers are unlikely to have access to.

Apple recommends that customers who receive emails asking them to update their account or payment information do so directly in the Settings app on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, in iTunes or the App Store on a Mac, or in iTunes on a PC rather than through any kind of web interface.

Customers who receive a suspicious email can forward it to reportphishing@apple.com, and any customer who may have entered personal information on a scam website should update their Apple ID password immediately.

Scam and phishing emails like those Apple describes in this support document are not new, but at the current time, there’s a new wave of legitimate-looking emails going around that look much like Apple emails that can easily fool customers who don’t know what to look for.

Spotify’s “Family Plan,” a variation of which launched in 2014, as well as its “Student Plan” appear to be driving a significant portion of the company’s growth and improving retention, as the company points to it multiple times in its filing for a direct listing on public markets today.

But that also comes at a cost of decreasing the amount of revenue it actually gets from each premium subscriber. In the filing, Spotify indicates that the fee for a family plan — which costs $14.99 per month — can be actualized over as many as six accounts total (though it might not always be six). The premium user consists of the one master premium account, which pays for the subscription, and up to five sub-accounts for family members. Spotify is also pointing to its student plan, which costs $4.99 a month, as another contributing factor to those pressures. This means that even though Spotify is gathering more premium users, the actual revenue it generates from those users can drop over time.

And, indeed, that’s what’s happening, according to the filing. Spotify said its premium average revenue per user was around €5.24 in 2017, compared to €6.00 in 2016 and €7.06 in 2015. Spotify recognizes in the filing (“Family Plan” is mentioned nearly three dozen times) that this is partly due to the family plan. But at the same time, churn — a significant metric for subscription services that shows how many users are coming and going — is dropping each year and the number of hours users are listening are significantly increasing. Churn was 7.5 percent in 2015, and it’s down to 5.1 percent in 2017; content hours have more than doubled in that time, from 5.4 billion hours to 11.4 billion hours.

Here’s the boilerplate from the filing:

The rate of net growth in Premium Subscribers also is affected by our ability to retain our existing Premium Subscribers and the mix of subscription pricing plans. We have increased retention over time, as new features and functionality have led to increased User engagement and satisfaction. From a product perspective, while the launches of our Family Plan and our Student Plan have decreased Premium ARPU (as further described below) due to the lower price points per Premium Subscriber for these Premium pricing plans, each of these Plans has helped improve retention across the Premium Service. As a result, while Premium ARPU declined by 9% from 2015 to 2016 and 14% from 2016 to 2017, in part due to the launch of the Family Plan in 2016, Premium Churn declined by 1.1% from 7.7% in 2015 to 6.6% in 2016 and declined by an additional 1.1% from 6.6% in 2016 to 5.5% in 2017. With the growth in higher retention products, such as our Family Plan and Student Plan, we believe these trends will continue in the future.

All this is more or less part of a long game for Spotify, which is looking to go public in the U.S. amid significant and increasing competition for premium subscribers from companies like Apple or Google. Those two companies also own the App Store platform and therefore could be the decision-makers in the economics of operating on mobile devices, which means there’s pressure for Spotify to snap up as many users as possible — even if it means making less money per user. Spotify has acknowledged in its public filing, too, that Apple and Google represent a significant risk in this sense.

Because there are so many apps available on the iOS App Store, it can be hard to find new content, and it’s also easy to overlook great older apps. Our app lists are designed to include apps — both new and old — that we personally recommend and have used over the course of the month.

• Hooked (Free) – Hooked is actually a book app that offers up short stories in a unique format — chat messages. Hooked stories are all presented as text message conversations, so it’s a little bit like you’re reading someone else’s chat history. With Hooked, you can read little bits at a time in moments when you have a free minute or two, and the stories are always engaging. Hooked is free to download with a free trial period, but unlimited access costs $14.99 per month.
• App in the Air (Free) – Whether you’re a frequent or infrequent traveler, App in the Air is a useful app that serves up details like real time flight status, airport maps, security wait times, walk time to your gate, airline point tracking, and more. It works with more than 1,000 airlines around the world, and key information like gate changes and updates to flight status are delivered via SMS. The app is free, but there are premium features like real-time flight status updates that require a subscription, which is priced at $34.99 per year.
• Timepage (Free) – Timepage is a calendar app from Moleskine, the company that makes those handy notebooks. Timepage combines data like events, maps, contacts, weather and more into a simple interface that’s easy to parse at a glance. There are monthly, weekly, and daily views, along with a heat map that lets you know when you’re busiest. Timepage is a free download, but only on a trial basis. A monthly subscription is priced at $1.99, or you can pay $11.99 for the year.
• Confide (Free) – Confide is a private and secure messaging app that’s a great way to communicate with people when you want to keep your messages entirely private. Messages sent through Confide use end-to-end encryption and disappear after a set period of time, plus there’s screenshot protection so no one can snap an image of what you’ve written. Confide is a free download, but access to features like unlimited attachments and themes requires Confide Plus, priced at $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a year.
• Alto’s Odyssey ($4.99) – Alto’s Odyssey is the highly-anticipated sequel to popular 2015 game Alto’s Adventure. Like the original, Alto’s Odyssey is an endless runner with gorgeous graphics, but this time it takes place in the sand instead of the snow.

If you’re looking for great Mac apps that are worth downloading, make sure to check out our February list of essential apps for the Mac. And if you have favorite iOS apps, make sure to share them with us — we’ll be highlighting interesting, useful iOS apps on a monthly basis.

Spotify just filed for a direct listing in the U.S., sidestepping the traditional IPO process, and now we’re starting to see some of the true financial guts of the company — and some of the significant risks it faces from challenging services from Apple and Google.

Apple, for example, charges apps a percentage of revenue for subscriptions processed through the App Store. Apple Music, meanwhile, will always deliver Apple 100% of the subscription revenue that it receives from subscribers (sans record fees and all that kind of stuff, of course). Apple, too, has a direct integration with its iOS devices and also a huge amount of brand recognition even though Spotify is a massive service. Spotify says it has 159 million monthly active users and 71 million premium subscribers, while Apple has 36 million paying subscribers as of February 2018.

Here’s the full boilerplate from the filing:

Our current and future competitors may have higher brand recognition, more established relationships with music and other content licensors and mobile device manufacturers, greater financial, technical, and other resources, more sophisticated technologies, and/or more experience in the markets in which we compete.

In addition, Apple and Google also own application store platforms and are charging in-application purchase fees, which are not being levied on their own applications, thus creating a competitive advantage for themselves against us. As the market for on-demand music on the internet and mobile and connected devices increases, new competitors, business models, and solutions are likely to emerge.

Apple has finally agreed to open a new Chinese data center next month to comply with the country’s latest controversial data protection law.

Apple will now move the cryptographic keys of its Chinese iCloud users in data centers run by a state-owned company called Cloud Big Data Industrial Development Co, despite concerns from human rights activists.

In 2017, China passed a Cybersecurity Law that requires “critical information infrastructure operators” to store Chinese users’ data within the country’s borders, which likely forced Apple to partner with the new Chinese data center.

And the icing on the cake is that Chinese government already has legislation called National Security Law, passed in 2015, which gives police the authority to demand companies help them bypass encryption or other security tools to access personal data.

This is the first time when Apple is going to store encryption keys required to unlock iCloud accounts of its users outside the United States.

In theory, Chinese law enforcement agencies won’t have to ask US courts for compelling Apple to give them access to the Chinese users’ data.

Instead, they’ll simply use their legal system to demand access to cryptographic keys required to unlock iCloud accounts stored within their nation, making it far easier to access users’ data, such as messages, emails, and photos.

However, Apple has said the company alone would have access to the iCloud encryption keys and that Chinese authorities will have no backdoor into its data troves.

Apple said the company had not given any of its customers account information to Chinese authorities despite receiving 176 requests from 2013 to 2017, Reuters reported, though all requests were made before the new cybersecurity laws took effect.

If Apple thinks it would comply with one law, i.e., storing users data in China, but could stand without complying with other stringent Chinese regulations, then the company should reconsider its decision.

The company has severely been implementing various aspects of Chinese laws in recent months for its regional operations in the most populated country.

Last year, Apple controversially removed VPN apps from its official App Store in China to comply with Chinese cyberspace regulations, making it harder for internet users to bypass its Great Firewall.

Earlier last year, Apple removed the New York Times (NYT) app from its Chinese App Store because the app was in “violation of local regulations.”

In Apple’s new interview with Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt — the pair of entrepreneurs who founded MoviePass seven years ago — the conversation eventually focuses on where the idea for MoviePass emerged. According to Spikes, the kernel of the idea that would become MoviePass originated from art-house theaters in New York City that let customers see unlimited movies for a flat donation fee.

He tried to install a similar model for his own Urbanworld Film Festival in the late 1990s, but admitted it was “too early,” and that iPhones, apps, and the advances in development that emerged from this technology were all needed to address the technical roadblocks of such a service.

“The idea was almost too early,” says Spikes. “We didn’t have iPhones and apps to figure out payment and interfacing. If it weren’t for that development, MoviePass would never have happened.”

MoviePass works through the use of both the iPhone app and a paired debit card that is sent to subscribers through the mail after they sign up. If you want to see a movie, you travel to your local theater (MoviePass is supported at over 90 percent of theaters nationwide), select a 2D showtime, “check in,” and at that time MoviePass transfers the exact cost of the showing to your MoviePass card. Then you can buy a ticket at the box office or a kiosk like any normal ticket purchase.

Although the service is growing, many reports in the months following its August price drop have questioned how long the company can keep up the $9.95/month subscription fee (currently $7.95/month paid annually), as well as its public conflict with theater chain AMC. What MoviePass lacks in profit it hopes to make up for in accrued user data, selling a majority stake of itself to data company Helios and Matheson Analytics, which sees “big potential in the type of information it can glean from MoviePass members,” with “no plans to sell user data to outside parties.”

As of January 2018, MoviePass had 1.5 million subscribers. According to CEO Mitch Lowe, MoviePass will hit three million subscribers by the end of April, and turn a profit once four million subscribers sign up for the service.

MoviePass updated its iOS app [Direct Link] to support the iPhone X this month, providing a revamped user interface with more emphasis on images from popular films, better navigation, and an updated screen for the check in process. If you want to read the full interview with the creators of MoviePass, you can find the discussion with Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt at the top of the Today tab on the iOS 11 App Store on iPhone or iPad.

Porsche is readying its Mission E for launch, with a 2019 target sales date. The all-electric Tesla Model S competitor has a lot of car fans excited, and has been drawing covetous looks since the concept’s unveiling back in 2015. Now that launch is drawing closer, however, we have some new info about the car, how it charges and its performance.

Porsche EV lead Stefan Weckbach told a group of journalists that Porsche, unlike Tesla, is developing its car as a performance vehicle that can maintain top speed and reproduce acceleration reliably, specifically calling out Tesla’s vehicles’ ability to do 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds “only twice – the third attempt will fail,” reports Autoblog.

He’s likely referring to a software-based restriction on use of Tesla’s Launch Control and aggressive acceleration features, which was limited both in terms of total uses and times it could be used successively to limit its impact on vehicle powertrain parts, as well as the Tesla’s battery. Tesla lifted this limitation in response to customer complaints, however.

Besides throwing some mildly outdated shade Tesla’s way, Weckbach also talked about how the vehicle will quick-charge, aging back 250 miles of range during a 20 minute charging session, though that will take a lot of infrastructure expansion in the U.S. and abroad. Tesla’s investment in its Supercharger network begins to look like a smart hedge and early lead in this context.

Porsche’s Mission E arrives next year, as mentioned, so it’s basically time to get excited. Tesla fans likely be swayed by cheap shots at their beloved cars, but a battle on performance merits does look to be brewing.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has offered to recognise the Taliban as a legitimate political group, as part of a proposed process he said could lead to talks aimed at ending more than 16 years of war. 

Ghani’s offer on Wednesday, made at the start of an international conference aimed at creating a platform for peace talks, adds to a series of signals from both the Western-backed government and the Taliban suggesting a greater willingness to consider dialogue. 

Ghani proposed a ceasefire and prisoner release as part of a range of options, including new elections involving the armed group, and a constitutional review as part of a pact with the Taliban. 

“We are making this offer without preconditions in order to lead to a peace agreement,” Ghani said in opening remarks at the conference, attended by officials from about 25 countries involved in the so-called Kabul Process. 

“The Taliban are expected to give input to the peace-making process, the goal of which is to draw the Taliban, as an organisation, to peace talks,” he said. 

The comments represented a significant shift for Ghani, who, in the past, has regularly called the Taliban “terrorists” and “rebels”, although he has also offered to talk to parts of the movement that accepted peace. 

The Taliban, fighting to return to power after its 2001 removal by US-led forces, has offered to begin talks with the US, but has, so far, refused direct discussions with Kabul. It was unclear whether the group would be prepared to shift its stance, despite growing international pressure. 

“I think that what they are saying is that the door is still open. They have shown a softness in their stand,” said political analyst Habib Wadark.

“Not just the Taliban, but the Afghan government and its international counterparts, and I think it is a perfect time not for a peace deal to be struck at this stage but probably a temporary ceasefire, which can then pave the path of a sustainable peace in the long term,” he told Al Jazeera.

Ghani, who recently helped launch the latest stage of a major, regional gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, said the momentum for peace was building from neighbouring countries that increasingly saw the necessity of a stable Afghanistan. 

“The Taliban show awareness of these contextual shifts and seem to be engaged in a debate on the implications of acts of violence for their future,” he said. 

Political office 

Ghani said a framework for peace negotiations should be created with the Taliban recognised as a legitimate group, with their own political office to handle negotiations in Kabul or another agreed location. 

Taliban officials have acknowledged they have faced pressure from friendly countries to accept talks, and said their recent offers to talk to the US reflected concern that they could be seen to be standing in the way of peace. 

Ghani said the process would be accompanied by coordinated diplomatic support, including a global effort to persuade neighbouring Pakistan, which Kabul has regularly accused of aiding the Taliban, of the advantages of a stable Afghanistan. 

He renewed an offer of talks with Pakistan, which rejects the accusations and points to the thousands of its citizens who have been killed by armed groups over the years.

In return for Ghani’s offer, the Taliban would have to recognise the Afghan government and respect the rule of law, he said. 

In addition, Taliban prisoners could be released and their names removed from international blacklists, while security arrangements could be made for the Taliban members agreeing to join a process of reconciliation. Former fighters and refugees could be reintegrated and provided with jobs. 

The US last year stepped up its military assistance to Afghanistan, notably through a sharp increase in air attacks, with the aim of breaking a stalemate with the fighters and forcing them to the negotiating table. 

While the US military says the strategy has hit the Taliban hard, the group still controls or contests much of the country and continues to inflict severe casualties on Afghan forces. 

The Taliban also claimed responsibility for two major attacks in Kabul last month that killed or wounded hundreds of civilians.

LinkedIn wasn’t built for low-skilled job seekers, so Facebook is barging in. Today Facebook is rolling out job posts to 40 more countries to make itself more meaningful to people’s lives while laying the foundation for a lucrative business.

Businesses will be able to post job openings to a Jobs tab on their Page, Jobs dashboard, Facebook Marketplace, and the News Feed that they can promote with ads. Meanwhile, job seekers can discover openings, auto-fill applications with their Facebook profile information, edit and submit their application, and communicate via Messenger to schedule interviews.

TechCrunch first spotted Facebook testing the Jobs tab in late 2016 before it rolled out in the U.S. and Canada last year. Facebook partnered with ZipRecruiter to bring more job openings to its platform. And now the features are rolling out in Brazil, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain on iOS, Android, and the web.

“One in four people in the US have searched for or found a job using Facebook” writes Facebook’s VP of Local Alex Himel. “But 40% of US small businesses report that filling jobs was more difficult than they expected. We think Facebook can play a part in closing this gap.”

Now users in the new countries will be able to use the Jobs dashboard found in the Facebook web sidebar or mobile app’s More section to discover jobs using filters like proximity, industry, and whether they want a full-time or part-time gig.

The Job posts rollout could help Facebook steal some of the $1.1 billion in revenue LinkedIn earned for Microsoft in Q4 2017. But the bigger opportunity is developing a similar business where companies pay to promote their job openings and land hires, but for lower-skilled local companies in industries like retail and food service.

In this space, job applicants often don’t have glowing resumes and education histories that look good on LinkedIn. They might not even be on the site, and if they are, they probably don’t spend much time there. But they may already have their limited professional experience listed and they spend a ton of time casually browsing the site. This lets Facebook connect them with job even if they weren’t actively seeking a position, and quickly apply to lots of different positions by piggybacking off their profile info.

“Troy, the owner of Striper Sniper Tackle in North Carolina had trouble finding people with the specific skills he needed until he posted the job on his Facebook Page. He received 27 applications immediately, and hired 10 people” Facebook writes. Those jobs probably wouldn’t appeal to LinkedIn users, and some of those who applied probably didn’t think they were job hunting when they opened Facebook.

“Since 2011, Facebook has invested more than $1 billion to help local businesses grow and help people find jobs” Himel writes., referencing the Community Boost program that trains businesses and job seekers to better use the Internet…including Facebook. “In 2018 we plan to invest the same amount in more teams, technology, and new programs. Because when businesses succeed, communities thrive.”

The challenge for Facebook may be convincing users that they can still be themselves on the social network. Facebook stresses that potential employers can only see what’s public on an applicant’s profile. But some users still might be paranoid that their party pics or niche hobbies could scare away hirers.

The move again proves how powerful being a default daily destination is. Over the past few years, Facebook built a giant business by becoming an alternative to YouTube where people serendipitously discover videos instead of purposefully coming to watch certain ones. That same strategy could make Facebook a massive gateway to local jobs. And it’s coming at a time when Facebook is desperate to prove it can be meaningful to people and make their lives better, rather than just being a time sink.

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Third-party apps snoww, Slopes, Squaw Alpine, Snocru, and Ski Tracks have each been updated to take advantage of custom workout APIs released in watchOS 4.2 that enable tracking of specialized metrics:

• Total vertical descent and horizontal distance
• Number of runs
• Average and maximum speeds
• Total time spent
• Calories burned

The apps integrate with the Activity app on Apple Watch Series 3, including credit towards Activity rings, while workout information can also be recorded to the Health app on an iPhone with user permission.

We’re thrilled with the updates Apple Watch Series 3 and watchOS 4.2 allow us to make” said Eddy Healey, developer of snoww. “We designed snoww thinking about quick interactions and glances while out on the mountain, so these updates have helped us make it easy to record accurate, relevant metrics as well as create a fun and social experience for our users.

The updated apps are now available on the App Store and require watchOS 4.2 or later. The ski and snowboard tracking is limited to Apple Watch Series 3 models, which are the only ones with a built-in altimeter.

TechCrunch‘s Katie Roof has shared a closer look at some of the updated apps.

Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash App — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on a potentially $1 billion run rate.

That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending cash between users. While popularized by Venmo, many companies have gone after this space — including Apple, where you can send money over iMessage — and its massive popularity through services abroad are showing the appeal for a company like Square. The rest of the report was largely above analyst expectations, though it got a slight dig for missing a near-term forecast for its earnings.

Square is looking less and less like just the point-of-sale system that it was when it went public, though that still accounts for a significant portion of its business. But as it diversifies into new services revenue, especially with new products like Square Capital and the Cash App, it’s finding new ways to sell a growth (and stability) story to Wall Street that’s so far delivered for its shares over the past year. Those subscription- and services-based components generated $253 million in 2017, according to the company.

For the most part, the stock went nowhere after today’s earnings report, which more or less equates to a continuing run that’s sent its shares skyrocketing in the past year. Square’s shares have risen more than 150 percent over the past 12 months, sending it to a valuation north of $17.8 billion — a valuation wildly higher than its initial public offering when there were many questions about whether it could be a successful business.

Here’s the final slash line:

• Q4 adjusted earnings: 8 cents per share, compared to analyst expectations of 7 cents per share.
• Q4 adjusted revenue: $283 million, compared to Wall Street estimates of $266.3 million (up 47 percent year-over-year).
• Q1 revenue forecast: $292.5 million midpoint, compared to analyst estimates of $271.9 million.
• Q1 adjusted earnings forecast: 4 cents per share (midpoint), compared to analyst estimates of 8 cents per share.
• FY2017 subscription and services- based revenue (including Caviar, Cash and Square Capital): $253 million (up 95 percent year-over-year).
• Q4 gross payment volume: $17.9 billion (up 31 percent year-over-year).
• Cash App users: 7 million monthly active customers.

For one of the first times, as Square recently opened up bitcoin buying and selling in its Cash App, cryptocurrency operations are now falling under the “risk factors” for the company — a set of boilerplate statements made about the general risks it faces that it thinks it needs to disclose to investors. A significant part of that risk seems to stem from the evolving state of regulation around cryptocurrency. There’s a pretty meaty section in the risk factors in its main filing, which we’ve included below:

We recently introduced a feature to the Cash App that permits our customers to buy and sell bitcoin. Bitcoin is not considered legal tender or backed by any government, and it has experienced price volatility, technological glitches and various law enforcement and regulatory interventions. We do not believe that the bitcoin platform involves offering participants securities that are subject to the registration or other provisions of the federal or state securities laws. We also do not believe the feature subjects us to regulation under the federal securities laws, including as a broker-dealer or an investment adviser, or registration under the federal commodities laws. However, the regulation of cryptocurrency and crypto platforms is still an evolving area and it is possible that a court or a federal or state regulator could disagree with one or more of these conclusions. If we fail to comply with regulations or prohibitions applicable to us, we could face regulatory or other enforcement actions and potential fines and other consequences. Further, we might not be able to continue operating the feature, at least in current form, and to the extent that the feature is viewed by the market as a valuable asset to Square, the price of our Class A common stock could decrease. Additionally, there is no specific accounting guidance in U.S. GAAP covering accounting for cryptocurrencies, which means the accounting can be complex and subject to challenge or scrutiny. The final conclusions on the accounting treatment for our cryptocurrency transactions could affect the presentation of our results of operations.

Square’s revenue continued to grow at a pretty decent clip year-over-year, and we’re starting to see some trends of it beginning to look more and more healthy even as it looks to diversify its business beyond just its point-of-sale through services like the Cash App, its meal delivery service Caviar and Square Capital. Subscription revenue — which includes those services — accounted for $253 million in revenue, and Square Capital in the fourth quarter had 47,000 business loans totaling $305 million.

Featured Image: (Photo by Louis Ascui/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)/Getty Images

Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same.

Sprint’s first 5G networks will go live in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Houston.

T-Mobile will fire up 5G in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas first, promising to have it up and running in 30 cities total by the end of the year.

So what does this mean for you? Right now… not much. Eventually, 5G will mean waaaaay faster speeds on your various compatible smart devices. How fast, exactly, is still sort of up in the air as telecoms groups nail down and finalize the standards — but it’s fast. Companies have already demonstrated connections upwards of 500 megabytes (not megabits) per second.

The catch: Even if you live in any of the aforementioned cities, you’ll need a 5G-compatible phone to get on that network… and, well, those won’t be available until next year.

Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the convention center. It’s a bit like the smartphone farm system, the company’s hoping it can gin up enough awareness to rise above the din of news from the world’s largest mobile companies.

It’s a big ask from a company still really taking its first baby steps toward global recognition. Founded in 2013, Doogee’s been building up an odd assortment of international markets. The company believes it’s cracked the top five in places like Hungary, the Czech Republic and Algeria. It’s also using this trip to Barcelona to help gain a foothold in Spain, through local big box store,  MediaMarkt.

The company’s CEO Xinchao told TechCrunch that the US is on the company’s radar as well — though it acknowledges that carriers are going to be a major hurdle, particularly in light of the recent issues with fellow Chinese companies ZTE and OnePlus have been running into here in the States.

In fact, the young company appears to be actively looking into practically all markets, save for its native China, where full access to Google services is barred. The company says it’s using its forums actively engaging demand in various markets to engage its user base. It’s a strategy that’s certainly worked for OnePlus in the past.

This year’s big announcement was the Doogee V — the company’s low-cost iPhone X knockoff. The product borrows more than a few design cues from Apple’s latest flagship, and a rep for the company quickly invoked the device when describing the company’s new phone.

When the device launches at the end of April, it will be considerably less expensive than Apple and Samsung’s flagships (though exact pricing is still TBD). And honestly, in person the device (or a prototype of the device, at least) looks considerably less slick than those devices. What it does feature, however, is a fingerprint sensor built into the display. The system essentially shines a bright OLED on the fingerprint, sending the image to the sensor.

Like just about everyone else in the industry, the company is pushing toward an all-screen display. At present, it features a familiar iPhone X-style notch up top. The company also showed off a handful of different prototypes designed to deal with the camera “problem,” including a small one that swivels up from the back of the device (part of a growing trend, it seems) and another that pops up in a manner similar to those old-school slider cellphones.

This is also the latest in a long line to show off a bendable screen prototype. It promises to actually use that tech to deliver something to the market, in the form of a handset that closes like a clamshell and opens to reveal a larger screen, in a manner similar to ZTE’s Axon M — but hopefully without the big gap between.

Remember, if you own a second- or third-generation Apple TV, you can still use your iOS device as a remote, but you’ll need to download the dedicated Apple TV Remote app from the App Store.

Before continuing, make sure that your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is updated to iOS 11: Open the Settings app, tap General -> About, and look for the version number. If you need to update, tap back to Settings, select Software Update, and follow the onscreen instructions, then meet us back here when installation is complete.

How to Set Up Apple TV Remote in iOS 11’s Control Center

1. Turn on your Apple TV and the TV/monitor connected to it, and make sure your iOS device and Apple TV are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
   
2. Launch the Settings app on your iOS device.
   
   
3. Select Control Center from the options list.
   
4. Tap Customize Controls.
   
5. In the More Controls list, tap the entry called Apple TV Remote.
   
6. Next, launch the Control Center on your iOS device in the following manner: On iPad, double-tap the Home button; on iPhone 8 or earlier, swipe up from the bottom of the screen; or on iPhone X, swipe down from the upper right “ear”.
   
   
7. Tap the Apple TV button that now appears in the Control Center grid of options.
   
8. In the Remote overlay that appears, choose the Apple TV that you want to connect to from the list.
   
9. Enter the four-digit passcode that appears on your Apple TV’s display to connect.
   
   

The touch interface that appears on your iPhone or iPad screen will replicate the function of the original Apple TV Remote except for the volume buttons. If your Apple TV is set up to stream audio to an AirPlay/Bluetooth speaker or headset, then you can use the volume buttons on your iOS device to adjust the output volume. Otherwise, you’ll have to continue to adjust sound levels using the dedicated remote, your television, or any hi-fi equipment your Apple TV is connected to. With that in mind, here’s a quick breakdown of the touchscreen controls that are available to you.

How to Use the Apple TV Remote in iOS 11’s Control Center

• 
• The large gray space in the middle of the onscreen interface acts as the touchpad. You can swipe it to move through Apple TV menus, tap it to select items, and use both actions to rewind and fast-forward media during playback.
• The big Menu button can be used to go back a level in menu screens. A quick double tap on it will also activate the Apple TV screensaver.
• During playback, two buttons will appear on either side of the Menu button that allow you to jump forward and back 10 seconds.
• The Play/Pause button in the lower left of the interface can be used to start the selected item straight away, bypassing any associated content info screens.
• The Home button (the one with the TV icon) takes you to the Home screen where all your installed Apple TV apps live in a grid formation. It may also take you to the TV app, depending on your settings.
• The Microphone button activates Siri input, allowing you to perform a variety of voice commands from anywhere in the system. Activating a search field will also bring up a pop-up window that lets you either type using your iOS device’s keyboard or dictate your search term. Either of these options is significantly easier than navigating the Apple TV’s onscreen keyboard.

For more details on the functions you can perform using the Apple TV Remote’s controls, be sure to check out our dedicated tips and tricks guide.

Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help 10 to 15 U.S.-based metropolitan news organizations gain more digital subscribers both on and off Facebook.

“We often talk to publishers about what the future of journalism looks like and local news publishers tell us that digital subscribers are critical to the long-term sustainability of their business,” Facebook Head of News Partnerships Campbell Brown wrote in a blog post. “We know Facebook is one part of the strategy to engage readers and ultimately drive paid subscriptions.”

This comes about a month after Facebook announced it would make it easier for people to see local news and other information that is relevant to where people live. At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “local news helps build community” and plays a vital role in ensuring time spent on Facebook is valuable.

So far, publishers like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times and others are participating in Facebook’s local news accelerator. Throughout the three-month program, local news publications will meet in person once a month with “digital subscription experts” to receive tips and tricks. Publishers also will participate in weekly trainings about digital subscriptions marketing.

“This initiative is a part of our ongoing efforts to provide tools and trainings to newsrooms and journalists, and to ensure our platform connects people to the quality, trusted and local news that is most important to them,” Brown wrote. “We will be making additional investments in organizations and programs committed to strengthening and advancing the future of journalism, and sharing more on that soon.”

Meanwhile, the News Media Alliance, a newspaper industry trade group that represents more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S., launched a political action committee to ask Congress for an anti-trust safe harbor against Google and Facebook, Axios reported earlier today. The aim is to enable publishers to be able to better negotiate with Google and Facebook, which account for the vast majority of online referral traffic, around intellectual property protections, support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data.

Cybercriminals have figured out a way to abuse widely-used Memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks than their original strength, which could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure.

In recent days, security researchers at Cloudflare, Arbor Networks, and Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 noticed that hackers are now abusing “Memcached” to amplify their DDoS attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,200.

Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory and has been designed to work with a large number of open connections. Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211.

The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It’s widely used by thousands of websites, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Github.

Dubbed Memcrashed by Cloudflare, the attack apparently abuses unprotected Memcached servers that have UDP enabled in order to deliver DDoS attacks 51,200 times their original strength, making it the most prominent amplification method ever used in the wild so far.

How Memcrashed DDoS Amplification Attack Works?

Like other amplification methods where hackers send a small request from a spoofed IP address to get a much larger response in return, Memcrashed amplification attack also works by sending a forged request to the targeted server (vulnerable UDP server) on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim’s IP.

According to the researchers, just a few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server can trigger the response of tens of thousands of times bigger.

“15 bytes of request triggered 134KB of response. This is amplification factor of 10,000x! In practice we’ve seen a 15-byte request result in a 750kB response (that’s a 51,200x amplification),” Cloudflare says.

According to the researchers, most of the Memcached servers being abused for amplification DDoS attacks are hosted at OVH, Digital Ocean, Sakura and other small hosting providers.

In total, researchers have seen only 5,729 unique source IP addresses associated with vulnerable Memcached servers, but they are “expecting to see much larger attacks in future, as Shodan reports 88,000 open Memcached servers.” Cloudflare says.

“At peak we’ve seen 260Gbps of inbound UDP memcached traffic. This is massive for a new amplification vector. But the numbers don’t lie. It’s possible because all the reflected packets are very large,” Cloudflare says.

Arbor Networks noted that the Memcached priming queries used in these attacks could also be directed towards TCP port 11211 on abusable Memcached servers.

But TCP is not currently considered a high-risk Memcached reflection/amplification vector because TCP queries cannot be reliably spoofed.

The popularly known DDoS amplification attack vectors that we reported in the past include poorly secured domain name system (DNS) resolution servers, which amplify volumes by about 50 times, and network time protocol (NTP), which increases traffic volumes by nearly 58 times.

Mitigation: How to Fix Memcached Servers?

One of the easiest ways to prevent your Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors is firewalling, blocking or rate-limiting UDP on source port 11211.

Since Memcached listens on INADDR_ANY and runs with UDP support enabled by default, administrators are advised to disable UDP support if they are not using it.

The attack size potentially created by Memcached reflection cannot be easily defended against by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as long as IP spoofing is permissible on the internet.

If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application components.

That’s a huge hassle, because often times it’s hard to know where they are stored, who can access what, and how to change everything at a massive scale — especially if the company is a huge one. Dane Schneider hopes to change that with a new service called EnvKey, a way to create a kind of encrypted repository internally where a company can store all its API credentials in order to make them easy to update, as well as manage who has access to what. Think of it as a sort of LastPass or 1Password, but for important credentials within a company. EnvKey is launching out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 class.

“At the last place I worked, a coworker got fired and my manager said he said, okay, we need to change all the API keys across the infrastructure — and it was Friday at 4 p.m.,” Schneider said. “I had to tell him that’s not something we can just do right now. That’s a bit of an undertaking. I had been thinking along those lines, I had the idea in my mind, then I thought man if we had something that we could just update this in one place it’d be really simpler. We’d be able to deal with the security issue going on right now. We would share [our keys] over email or Slack, but it always felt like the wrong thing to do security-wise.”

Schneider is a solo-founder in Y Combinator, which is a bit of an anomaly, but the idea sounded smart enough given that it’s a pretty big issue among companies — especially as they scale. Engineers might run into the problem where they accidentally publish their credentials on Github while updating a code repository, which could lead to potential security issues for that application. The hope is this offers startups and companies an opportunity to not only make those keys easy to manage and update, but also locked up tight to make sure something like that doesn’t happen in the first place.

Each company has its own account, with a user interface where a company can start entering configuration information for their applications. They can also import from another system, and then invite the rest of a team through email and generate keys that Schneider calls EnvKeys. Users can create a developer level access key, for example, and then set it in a env file like one in a python project — which will always have access to the latest credentials every time someone runs that project. When an app runs, it’ll grab the latest configuration, decrypt it, and synchronize it. There are simple access levels, where someone can access it for development and staging, or servers, or administrators that can invite additional people.

EnvKey stores the API keys, which are end-to-end encrypted, and Schneider says the company doesn’t have access to the information. The hope is that companies will upload that information and feel good about it being stored securely and that they can quickly update and shift around credential information as necessary. Schneider also wants to build EnvKey to work on any platform, rather than having it pinned down to a single one, such as one Amazon might do for its web services for example.

There is going to be plenty of competition for this kind of low-hanging fruit for managing this information, given that it can lead to massive headaches for companies. Already there are startups like Hashicorp, which raised $40 million in October last year, and of course the major infrastructure providers may look to build something similar in their own ecosystems. But Schneider’s hope is that EnvKey can have a simpler approach and work in most environments, which can help convince engineers — especially as the companies grow up — to start using it.

“[Products like Hashicorp’s vault] take a pretty high level of developer operations expertise to set up and run it,” Schneider said. “Unless you’re prepared to do a pretty substantial project, it’s pretty tough to work with. Another is AWS has a service called parameter store, which can work pretty well if you’re again, pretty savvy, with AWS and you’re using AWS services for everything else. That makes sense, but it also comes along with the complexity and baggage AWS has in general. There’s a lot of things to configure. There’s a pretty high learning curve with that.”

Average wait times for a new battery have jumped up to 2.7 to 4.5 weeks based on a series of Apple Store checks conducted by Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz (via Business Insider). That’s up from around 2.3 to 4.5 weeks earlier in the year.

MacRumors has received complaints from customers who are facing long wait times for replacements and who have, in some cases, been waiting for weeks to hear back from Apple about previously requested battery replacements.

When you initiate a battery replacement from Apple, stores typically need to order the part from Apple and then let you know when the new battery arrives, so getting a fresh battery isn’t as simple as scheduling a Genius Bar appointment.

Wait times vary based on location and by the device that needs the battery replacement. Batteries for devices like the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s are harder to come by than batteries for the iPhone 7, and for some devices, like the iPhone 6 Plus, battery wait times have ranged into months.

Back in January, Apple said that for the iPhone 6 Plus, which is no longer being sold, replacement batteries are in such short supply that customers will need to wait until March or April for a new battery.

Customers who are seeking Genius Bar appointments for battery replacements are also crowding out appointment slots for customers with other issues, which is a problem in areas with few Apple Stores.

According to Barclays, the increased battery wait time suggests demand for replacement batteries remains strong, and it indicates an increasing number of iPhone users are opting to take advantage of Apple’s $29 battery replacements instead of purchasing a new iPhone.

Barclays previously said that Apple’s program could result in millions of fewer iPhone purchases during 2018, something Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said Apple did not take into account when choosing to implement the program in the first place. From Cook:

We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do for our customers. I don’t know what effect it will have for our investors. It was not in our thought process of deciding to do what we’ve done.

Apple has been offering $29 battery replacements for the iPhone 6 and newer since the beginning of the year. Apple implemented the program after facing backlash from power management features that were introduced in iOS 10.2.1.

The power management features have the potential to slow down older iPhones with degraded batteries in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns, and after the issue faced widespread media attention in late 2017, Apple apologized for its lack of transparency and implemented new policies.

In addition to offering reduced cost battery replacements through the end of 2018, Apple is also introducing a new Battery Health feature in iOS 11.3 that lets customers see more detailed information about the status of their iPhone’s battery.

Power management features impact the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus, and for any affected iPhone, a new battery effectively fixes the issue.

When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it.

That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for engineers that’s designed to teach them how to handle these kinds of breaches in a more hands-on way. Hunter2 aims to spin up training labs centered around real-world scenarios to teach engineers exactly why something broke in a web app, and how to fix it. Engineers work through responsive web apps, which are spun up on a fully functional server, that include some scenarios built off of real-world events — like the Equifax hack. It’s essentially like a game, where they try to break it and fix it, except it isn’t happening quite in the real world. Hunter2 is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class.

“We try to keep every lesson in the context of what’s happening in the industry and what’s happening in the wild,” Heisler said. “We spin up a lab in 20 minutes that perfectly replicates the vulnerability. Engineers can get hands on practice. We train them — here’s what happens, here’s what they should have done, here are the best practices that should have been followed and gonna patch the code. It’s one thing to teach a topic in the abstract and say, beware of SQL injection, it’s another to tie this to something that’s happened.”

Hunter2 was in some ways born as a response to training programs for engineers within companies where they check in for a few hours every year to ensure that they are somewhat up-to-date with the current security environment on the Web. But as development languages continue to evolve rapidly and new frameworks like NodeJS become more and more popular, these programs are sometimes finding themselves in catch-up mode, Heisler said. That, and the approach needs to be more hands-on, rather than just a typical video class.

Engineers then go through a number of challenges to identify their strengths and weaknesses. If they run into problems, they go more in depth into the skills where they need some work. Think of it like the sorts of compliance training you might need for larger organizations, except it’s a routine check-in on making sure you know all the right skills in order to deal with issues as they arise.

There are plenty of industries that need to be more conscious about security, like healthcare for example, and need to make sure their engineers are trained and ready for new scenarios as they emerge. Hunter2 aims to be a sort of ramp-up for joining those companies, and one an engineer will check back in for a couple of hours every month to make sure they’re still working those muscles, so to speak. Companies can customize the content they are seeing with their own kinds of vulnerabilities, and Hunter2 helps create content for them for their engineers to work through.

“[We have a problem with] traditional training because it’s based in slide decks and videos is a lot harder to update,” Heisler said. “It takes a lot of time to keep up to date with new tech. It’s not like we’re gonna miraculously create half a million cyber security experts in the next year or two. What we can do is teach those basic skills to a number of people who are becoming not just developers but tech workers in general. That’ll become a much more fundamental piece of every role in the next couple years. That way we can save a lot of time and money upfront by giving those security skills to the right people working in tech or getting into tech but bringing the right mindsets.”

That idea of teaching in a simulated or more hands-on environment is an area that’s gathering more and more interest. If you look at sites like Codecademy, there are some places that are trying to focus on the do rather than the watch in order to teach people how to code and start dealing with more real-world scenarios.

After all, if you’re in the process of learning how to program, one of the pieces of advice people will give you is probably “go work on a project” — and that kind of freezing up to figure out what kind of a project can be a big barrier to entry to learn how to apply those skills. Hunter2 aims to build its own virtual environment to handle these kinds of scenarios, rather than just simulations, in order to offer its own flavor of how to teach how to handle these problems.

“You don’t actually have the full control over your access. What we’ve done is put lessons on the left and a server on the right,” Heisler said. “There are a couple similar platforms, but they sill simulate access. The difference is there’s time for hands on keyboard training. Having time to exploit or patch seems to be the right way to teach the lessons hand on. I think a lot of security education coming from traditional security is coming from the fact or academic spaces that.”

Featured Image: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Apple will apparently have every kind of show from anyone with any kind of name working in Hollywood when it launches its updated approach to original video content: The latest original on its slate is a 10-episode, half-hour thriller series order that will be executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, who is also going to direct the first installment (via Variety).

The thriller is being written by writer Tony Basgallop, who wrote 24: Live Another Day and 24: Legacy (so he is familiar with action-packed TV productions). There’s not much else we know about the show at this stage, beyond that it’s described as a “psychological thriller,” which makes sense given that Shyamalan is attached.

The Unbreakable director’s latest foray into TV, ‘Wayward Pines,’ just ended after a two-season run, but last year’s Split  was a hit and will lead into the forthcoming sequel Glass.

Meanwhile, Apple’s upcoming original TV slate is looking positively packed, and includes a Reese Witherspoon/Jennifer Aniston hour-long drama about morning news shows, a sci-fi show from the creator of ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ an ‘Amazing Stories’ reboot from Steven Spielberg and a bunch more.

Sonos One users in Canada can now join their peers south of the border in yelling requests at their connected speakers – a free update issued today enables Amazon Alexa on the Sonos One. The One launched with Alexa support in the U.S., but while the speaker has been available to Canadian buyers since late last year, Alexa voice commands are new with the update.

That means Canadians will be able to do tremendously Canadian things like ask for updates from The Weather Network, get flight info from Air Canada, listen to news reports from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and more. I know what all of these things mean because I am, in fact, Canadian myself.

Canadians also have relatively few options when it comes to premium smart speakers on the market: The Apple HomePod and the Google Home Max have yet to launch in country. Still, an Alexa-enabled Sonos One should be all that most Canadians need – in fact, I recently called the Sonos One the best option out there all around in a smart speaker, and that remains true.

“Ring is committed to our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods by providing effective yet affordable home security tools to our neighbors that make a positive impact on our homes, our communities, and the world,” a Ring spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ll be able to achieve even more by partnering with an inventive, customer-centric company like Amazon. We look forward to being a part of the Amazon team as we work toward our vision for safer neighborhoods.”

Many customers who own Ring products have been eagerly awaiting integration with Apple’s HomeKit platform, and though Amazon is purchasing the company, Ring has this afternoon promised on Twitter that support is still coming. According to Ring, HomeKit support is being tested for Ring Pro and the Floodlight Cam, with the company promising to offer details on a release date following once testing is completed.

HomeKit support is a feature that Ring has been promising for some time. In October, for example, Ring said bringing HomeKit support to its Ring Pro and Floodlight Cam was an “ongoing project” but had “been delayed.” Ring support for Amazon’s Alexa products has been available for months now.

Amazon has recently become interested in smart home-related companies, and back in December, purchased Blink, another company that offers home security cameras and video doorbells. Amazon has also released its own home security camera, the Cloud Cam.

Amazon’s interest in smart home products stems from its Amazon Echo line of products, which offer Alexa integration and allow users to control their third-party smart home devices. Alexa works with many of the smart home products on the market today.

Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language, was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year.

As the company announced today, Flutter is now officially in beta and a number of developers have already used it to build and publish apps that have hit top spots in both the Google Play and Apple App Store.

Seth Ladd, Google’s product manager for Flutter, told me that it’s no surprise that the company is making this announcement during MWC. The company wants to use this opportunity to engage with mobile developers and to highlight the advances it made over the course of the last year. For the most part, that means better tooling, like support for Android Studio and Visual Studio Code for writing Flutter apps.

Since launching its alpha, the Flutter team added support for new phones like the iPhone X, a number of accessibility features, right-to-left text support and worked on localization and internationalization, as well as the ability to run Flutter code in the background.

What’s probably even more interesting for developers, though, is Flutter’s support for stateful hot reloads. That means you can make changes to your source code and within a second, you can see that change reflected in the app on your phone. As Ladd noted, that not only makes the development process faster, but also reduces the need for prototyping tools.

With its focus on Dart, Flutter relies on what is still a bit of a niche programming language. Ladd, however, argues that Dart is the just the right language for Flutter. “We didn’t find another language that hit this sweet spot of fast development cycle plus the standard stuff devs expect and love like object orientation, a rich core library and very easy onboarding. With this beta, Flutter now supports the pre-release version of Dart 2, which offers better support for client-side development, too.

Ladd also noted that unlike some rival frameworks like React Native, Flutter uses its own GPU-accelerated graphics and rendering engine and not a web view. “There is a huge benefit to this in that the design that your designers envision and what they delivered to your developers are the exact some pixels and designs that your users will experience,” said Ladd. “By shipping our own graphics engine, we offer consistent design as your designers envisioned.”

The Flutter team also stresses that Flutter plays nice with existing parts of an app. You don’t need to write your complete app in Flutter. Indeed, many of the developers that have already used it have simply added new Flutter-based screens to their existing apps. As for apps that are fully based on the new toolkit,Google notes that the Hamilton app is among the most popular app to have been built with Flutter.

Featured Image: Getty Images

German robotics firm Magazino, creator of robots meant to work alongside people in warehouses and the like, has raised $24.8 million to continue development and deployment of its TORU and SOTO robots.

The bots are made for the kind of repetitive fetching and transport work that is so common in e-commerce distribution and storage facilities. They’re considerably larger than people, but are designed to move about and interact with the same spaces — ordinary shelves, lanes and tables.

The heavy-duty SOTO, which was just recently introduced, can handle boxes of more than 20 pounds and two feet across. TORU was recently redesigned but is intended for smaller payloads (think shoe boxes). The two robots load multiple target boxes into their internal storage, then navigate to their destinations to drop them off. It’s the kind of thing human warehouse workers tend to get really tired of doing.

It’s also done autonomously with 3D imaging in real time — not a simple by-wire system where it might grab at empty air and then plow through people in its path. Magazino is investing heavily into the sensing and real-time operation stack, which it calls ACROS (Advanced Cooperative Robotic Operating System).

The company was started in 2014, and by 2016 had landed major clients like Fiege, which now uses Magazino robots for some of its warehouse work, and recently ordered 30 more. Fiege also joined Körber, Cellcom and Zalando in the funding round (Körber leading).

Featured Image: Magazino

Back in 2016, Amazon’s Japanese rival Rakuten acquired Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup that it had previously invested in, to help it work on blockchain technology and applications. Today, one of the first fruits of that deal has come to light. The company is planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain technology and the company’s existing loyalty program, Rakuten Super Points — which it plans to use to encourage loyalty services globally and to help customers to buy goods across different Rakuten services and markets.

The news was announced by Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani on stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where he described Rakuten Coin as a “borderless” currency. Neither he nor a Rakuten spokesperson we followed up with would give a launch date for the service.

The news comes on the heels of a big wave of companies trying to figure out their cryptocurrency strategies, to tap into the current hype around decentralised financial services and the seemingly endless appetite of people to hear about and buy into them as their price skyrockets in the absence of much regulatory control.

Crypto is being used for a wide range of reasons — as a new funding platform, for currency speculation, international remittances, as a new payment currency and more. In the case of Rakuten, it seems that there are two things at play here.

First, the company wants to see if it can drive more transactions from people internationally by cutting out some of the exchange rate fees and other issues if they buy in fiat currencies. Second, there is simply the buzz of crypto today: people who might not have been all that interested in loyalty programs before might turn on to them if they see their reward as blockchain buy-in.

Even before Rakuten has launched Rakuten Coin, it’s notable and interesting to see a major e-commerce company — which has billions of users globally and reported $8.8 billion in revenues in 2017 — coming out with a move into how it might use cryptocurrency on its platform.

Interestingly, while Amazon has yet to make any significant moves in the area of cryptocurrency, there some speculate the company could get more involved, based on some recent domain purchases and bigger trends.

There have been over 1 trillion Super Points awarded to users since the program was launched 15 years ago, equivalent to $9.1 billion, and the idea will be to now give users more ways of applying those loyalty points to more purchases, as a way of driving more purchasing to collect them in the first place.

Points currently are collected each time you buy — or, in certain markets where Rakuten runs marketplaces, sell — items or services on the site. As with its rival Amazon, Rakuten has a payment also has an MVNO mobile service with plans to launch its own full-blown mobile carrier — all of which become ways of spending more money as part of the loyalty program.

A spokesperson said that there is a decent funnel of people who are already interested in buying items across regions. “People want special items that you can’t get anywhere else,” she said. There are some 44,000 merchants selling goods on Rakuten in Japan, its biggest market. Other holdings include PriceMinister in France (which is now rebranding to Rakuten) and Ebates, the rebates website operator in the US that Rakuten acquired for $1 billion in 2014. The logic will be to add Rakuten Coin to all of Rakuten’s businesses — some of which today have loyalty programs, and some of which do not.

Mikitani used his appearance at MWC to run through a range of other developments at the company, including yesterday’s news that the company planned to apply to become Japan’s fourth mobile operator, and an expansion of the social features on messaging app Viber, which now has around one billion registered users.

Mickitani stressed that Rakuten was “very different from Amazon.”

“Basically, our concept is to recreate the network of retailers and merchants,” he said. “We do not want to disconnect [them from their customers] but function as a catalyst. That is our philosophy, how to empower society not just provide more convenience.”

Featured Image: Photo Olivier Alluis