U.K. Police Making One Comms Data Request Every Two Minutes — Report

U.K. civil rights group Big Brother Watch has obtained data revealing the extent of domestic police forces’ access to web users’ communications data.

In a report published today the organisation says U.K. police forces made more than 733,000 requests for comms data over a three year period (between 2012 and 2014) — which is says is the equivalent of one request being made every two minutes.

On average, 96 per cent of requests were internally approved — so just four per cent of all requests were declined. The report is based on data Big Brother Watch obtained by making Freedom of Information requests to U.K. police forces.

The type of comms data police forces are accessing typically refers to metadata such as sender and recipient details for text messages, emails, phone calls. However Big Brother Watch says it can also include a person’s location, via the GPS on their mobile phone or IP address of their home computer; websites visited; web searches undertaken; and the method of communications used.

The organization notes wider criticisms that the expansive umbrella of metadata has itself become deeply intrusive — even before the new U.K. government’s push to expand state surveillance capabilities, via a forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill that aims to sanction capturing the content of communications too, is taken into account.

A key argument being made by the government to justify new legislation is a so-called “capability gap” for digital data capture. But Big Brother Watch says its report shows the vast majority of requests made by police forces are approved — “potentially giving law enforcement access to a vast amount of information” — which it argues casts doubt on Home Office claims of a lack of data being the problem.

It argues greater transparency is needed to ensure an informed debate ahead of any new state surveillance powers, noting:

Currently, if the public want to know about how their communications can be accessed by law enforcement, their only source of information is from the transparency reports published by a handful of technology companies. It is unacceptable that law enforcement agencies that access and use our personal data are so lacking in transparency and are so reluctant to express the purpose and process of this element of policing.

A statistical analysis of how often these powers are requested, how often they are refused and how effective they are when used, would assist in increasing public understanding of why Communications Data plays a crucial role in 21st century policing.

As well as supporting calls for new definitions of comms data, to better reflect differing levels of intrusiveness, the organization argues that judicial approval should be a required last step in any request for comms data:

Currently the system culminates with the sign-off from an internal Single Point of Contact (SPoC). Whilst law enforcement have worked hard at promoting the benefit of the internal SPoC system, based on the findings of our report and the sheer volume of communications data requests approved, we believe that a further independent level of approval is necessary to ensure that a standardised procedure exists across all police forces.

This system would ensure an independent assessment of the necessity and proportionality of the request. It would act as an extra safeguard. Should a problem occur during an investigation external approval will be of benefit in ensuring that independence was maintained whenever a request for personal data was made.

Other changes it is calling for are a requirement that police forces publish transparency reports detailing how requests are approved, the number of individuals affected and the type of crime comms data is used for.

It also wants to see a “clear, standardised procedure” for access to comms data, and proof that data that’s more than six months old is regularly used “in order to establish a proportionate approach to data retention”.

Only one U.K. police force, Humberside, provided Big Brother Watch with a breakdown (below) of the offense categories attached to its comms data requests.

The crime category generating the most requests between 2009 and 2012 for this police force was drugs. Categories generating the least requests include auto crime, criminal damage and rape.

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Windows 10 Is Available July 29

Microsoft kicked off June with news that Windows 10 will ship on July 29, just a little under two months from now. The next big update for MS is designed as a unifying platform that will offer continuity across mobile, desktop, tablets and even the Xbox One gaming console, and it will be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8 users for the first year. To help ensure easy updates (and probably as a way to try to get a large installed base os Windows 10 users right away), Microsoft is also using a “reservation” system that allows users to sign up to be notified when the update is available, and to schedule it to install when you want.

A big new feature addition for Windows 10 is Siri, so here’s a message the company prepared from its virtual assistant ant announcing the news.

What else do you get? Well I’m glad you asked – here’s a quick look at the highlights:

• Microsoft Edge: The successor to Internet Explorer, designed around minimalism and collaboration tools, plus with Cortana integration.
• Word, Excel and PowerPoint built in.
• Xbox Live and Xbox app for doing things like recording gameplay, interacting with your Xbox friends and also streaming Xbox games to the desktop.
• Windows Continuum, which lets you smoothly jump between multiple Windows 10 devices, and which lets you use your phones like a PC with external input accessories.
• Windows Hello, a new login method that uses face, iris or fingerprint recognition to log you in without a password, depending on hardware support.

Microsoft is doing everything it can to make the transition smooth, like ensuring it’ll work with your existing applications. Windows 8 was sort of an awkward generation, so here’s hoping the skipped numeral results in something that suits everyone’s needs.

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GoPro Outs The Hero+LCD, A $299 Entry Level Camera With A Touchscreen

Meet the GoPro Hero+LCD. The new camera is part of the company’s growing entry-level Hero line that sports capabilities perfect for YouTube. As the product’s name suggests, it features a LCD touchscreen, which is a handy feature for GoPro cameras.

The Hero+LCD will cost $299 when it’s released on June 6th. Don’t expect breakthrough technological features, though. This isn’t the next generation of GoPro cameras.

Instead, the Hero+LCD features video recording capability that tops off at 1080p60 instead of the 4k recording found on the top-of-line GoPro cameras. And that’s perfectly fine for most users. Video that’s recorded at 1080p60 is broadcast quality and perfectly suited for YouTube and Facebook.

The camera also includes Wifi and Bluetooth allowing it to connect to the GoPro remote and smartphone app. GoPros says the battery lasts two hours on a charge.

This latest camera should be a good seller for GoPro. It sports capabilities that’s perfect for most users and is available for at least a hundred less than the higher-end models. Yet, since it’s a GoPro, it will still work with the firm’s massive line of accessories and mounts, which is one of the best reasons to opt for a GoPro camera instead of one from a different company.

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SoftBank Buys Another 23% Of Supercell Shares, Now Owns 73% Of The Mobile Gaming Giant

Some ownership changes afoot at Supercell, the mobile gaming giant out of Finland behind blockbuster titles like Clash of Clans and Hay Day. SoftBank has upped its stake in the startup to 73.2%, after buying an additional 22.7% of shares from existing external investors, with VC Accel exiting the company completely. SoftBank says that Supercell will continue to be run as an independent company, with existing CEO Ilkka Paananen staying on post-transaction.

SoftBank and existing investors are not disclosing the valuation of the shares, or of the company, but we are trying to find out. As context, In 2013, SoftBank bought into Supercell by teaming up with game developer GungHo (another Softbank portfolio company) to pay $1.53 billion for a 51% stake in the company.

That transaction took a large chunk of money off the table for both existing investors and employees, in contrast to this latest share purchase which is specified as solely from other external investors. In addition to Accel, other investors include, Index, Atomico, and IVP, and it’s not clear which of these have also sold shares as part of the deal.

While SoftBank says it will be giving the company a long least operationally, it also sees the investment as core to its wider mobile strategy.

“Supercell is expected to continue to be a leader in the mobile games industry,” SoftBank notes. “SoftBank positions its partnership with Supercell as core to its mobile content strategy and believes that strengthening its relationship with Supercell through the transaction will further contribute to the SoftBank Group’s growth over the long-term.” SoftBank says the transaction closed on May 29.

Supercell last raised outside funding in 2013, a $130 million round from Atomico, Index and Institutional Venture Partners. The company builds its games around a “freemium” model, where it is free to download a game, and then users buy extras within the games themselves.

The combination of that model and the generally engrossing nature of the games resulted in a jackpot for the company. At that time of that Series B round in 2013, Supercell was making $2.4 million per day on 8.5 million daily active users.

We’re trying to see if we can dig up some more recent metrics. It’s not clear why Accel decided to cash out altogether; we’re trying to find out a reason for that, too.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Supercell has been one of the most successful mobile gaming startups of all time, with Clash of Clans, Hay Day and Boom Beach all among some of the highest-grossing games globally. App Annie says that as of June 1, 2015, the three have been ranked as number-one among the highest grossing games for iPad respectively in 149, 128 and 112 countries.

But as we have seen with the likes of Zynga, King.com, and Angry Birds maker Rovio being number one in gaming is not always a position that can be held indefinitely, as consumers’ tastes change and they move on to the next big thing. What Supercell has been very clever about is managing growth on a relatively small pool of content, and tying usage very closely to revenue generation, so it will be interesting to see if and how it will prove to be more sustainable than some of its rivals.

The moves come amid bigger management changes at SoftBank. Nikesh Arora was appointed president at SoftBank last month, with the ex-Google, ex-T-Mobile executive previously having been head of its internet and media division. There he made several very aggressive moves to invest in several startups in India and further afield, bolstered by proceeds from SoftBank’s Alibaba stake. This move to solidify SoftBank’s Supercell holdings could point to how Arora plans to continue business as usual at the company under his watch.

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Didi Kuaidi, China’s Dominant Taxi App Firm, Launches Carpooling Service

Uber launched a nonprofit car-pooling service in China called People’s Uber last year, and now its biggest rival — and China’s largest ride-sharing service — has followed suit with a service of its own.

‘Didi Shun Feng Che’ is the new car-pooling service from Didi Kuaidi, the entity created from the billion dollar merger between Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, two organizations estimated to account for over 95 percent of China’s taxi-hailing app industry.

Like other carpooling services, Didi Shun Feng Che uses a smartphone app and “big data and advanced matching techniques” to match car owners with customers looking for a ride. It is initially live in Beijing — from today — and the company said it plans to expand to cover 26 Chinese cities by the end of this month.

Didi Kuaidi claimed it has already recruited one million drivers to the platform, while it is using a varying price structure based on each city. The standard fee will be 5-10 CNY ($0.80-$1.60) with an additional 1 CNY ($0.16) added per kilometer — Didi Kuaidi will make no money from the service, initially at least. The company claimed registered drivers are motivated by “cost sharing during their commutes” rather than making profit, hence the low fees.

The organization landed investment from China’s top microblogging site — Weibo — last week, and it’s interesting to note that the Didi Shun Feng Che will be bound to WeChat, China’s top messaging app which is owned by Didi Kuaidi investor Tencent. That’s to say that users will need to log in to the service using their WeChat account, while payment will be handed by the messaging app too.

That’s a double win for Tencent, which could see boosted engagement and more users adding their payment details, while Didi Kuaidi stands to benefit from WeChat’s fairly advanced payments system, and the verification and accountability that come with using a person’s own account.

Finally, the company is pushing this new program as a ‘green’ initiative that could help cut down on China’s chronic urban pollution problems. It has partnered with the Civilization Office of Beijing’s Haidian District, to launch the service today.

It’s worth recalling that carpooling is a very different proposition to tax-hailing, and it’s still very much in its infancy in China. For now, neither Uber nor Didi Kuaidi is charging for its respective service, its about brand and platform building at this point.

In other news, and further proof of its ambition, Didi Kuaidi recently pledged to spend $161 million to give its customers two 15 RMB (US$2.42) discount per day if they use its new ‘Express’ service. That’ll make Uber’s (already stiff) challenge of denting its rival’s dominance in China even harder.

Featured Image: Marianna/Flickr UNDER A CC BY 2.0 LICENSE

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Klook Lands $1.2M To Help Travelers Find Activities Across Asia

Klook, a service that helps tourists find interesting activities to do when they travel overseas in Asia, is in the money today, after closing a $1.5 million seed investment round.

The financing is led by Xiaoguang Wu, a senior executive vice president with Chinese internet giant Tencent — he is CEO of the company’s e-commerce division. Another notable investor is Shuren Hu, formerly Vice-Chairman of Strategy and Planning at the China National Tourism Administration, who joined the company as an advisor.

Hong Kong-based Klook was founded in September 2014 with the aim of providing English-speaking and Chinese travel enthusiasts with a platform to discover interesting activities — from diving in Bali, to Disneyland Tokyo, and race track driving in Singapore — which it offers up with up with discounts of up to 50 percent.

Klook doesn’t cover hotel or flight bookings because there’s already a myriad of companies in that space, instead it covers how you spend your time in 21 destinations across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Nepal and Mauritius. Many of these countries are travel hotspots for Chinese tourists right now, which is no coincidence since Klook is looking to capitalize on the growth of Chinese tourism.

For example, if you want to visit Bangkok — it’s a great place, trust me on that — then you can pull up the city on the Klook platform and get a range of activity ideas: from popular picks, to unique activities, and deals.

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Klook — which recently released dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android — claims to have over 1,000 “carefully handpicked experiences”. It uses a combination of deal selecting and local teams to bring together discounted tickets and more unique local experiences.

Now that it has mobile apps, Klook said that its customers can browse activities and make bookings after they arrive at their departure. Klook’s mobile app can handle mobile ticketing and entry to destinations, so there’s no need to worry about paper tickets and queues.

“Mobile will be a game changer for this sector,” Klook co-founder Eric Gnock Fah said in a statement. “Although, according to recent data, over 80 percent of travelers research their trip online pre-departure, we believe a significant share of the bookings happen at the destination.”

Curated travel activities is not something new, and it tends to be a tough niche to play in because so many big brands dominate the travel space. It’s a large pie, though, since Asia-based tourists are tipped to become the world’s most prolific (and lucrative) travelers by 2030, with China estimated to become the world’s largest contributor.

Wu, the Tencent executive who also sits on the board eLong — the Chinese travel firm Expedia recently divested from — believes Klook is “well positioned to capture this huge market opportunity.”

Klook, which has a staff of 20, claimed it has clocked over 200,000 bookings since its September 2014 launch.

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Will Silicon Valley Or Hollywood Solve Wall Street’s Churn Problem?

In this year’s annual letter to shareholders, JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon warned that “Silicon Valley is coming.” From investing to payments and lending, the rise of fintech has left many of the big banks and brokerages worried. In a March research report, Goldman Sachs estimated that 7 percent of annual bank profits ($11 billion-plus) may be at risk to non-banking entities over the next five years.

While Silicon Valley startups may be causing some unease on Wall Street, it appears that a growing number of companies in the financial services industry are turning to the Valley, and even Hollywood, for help removing the latest thorn in their side: churn.

Wall Street’s Growing Churn Problem

The growing ease in which traders can change brokerages online, combined with large welcome bonuses offered to new customers, has resulted in a number of traders switching brokers with the same casualness as switching outfits.

The magnitude of this problem is illustrated by the fact that almost half of the talks on the first day of the upcoming IFXExpo, a major annual conference for the B2B finance industry, are on the topic of retaining traders.

In response, brokers have been forced to think outside of the box in terms of how they retain their users. As it happens, this thinking has led many of the large banks and brokerages directly to the doorsteps of Silicon Valley startups and Hollywood directors who are offering solutions to help these companies keep traders engaged.

Retention on Auto-Pilot

One of the most popular solutions for improving retention rates that’s being adopted by companies in the financial industry is marketing automation software, which allows companies to detect signs of inactivity in advance of a customer deciding to close their account.

This provides a valuable window of opportunity, where automated messages are triggered to re-engage the customers and incentivize them to stay.

Over the past five years the marketing automation software industry has grown from a value of $225 million to $1.65 billion. According to a study by Mintigo, the financial services industry are among one of the top industries to have adopted automation software.

Social Stickiness

Social trading is a relatively new concept that combines aspects of social networking websites with traditional online trading features. Most social trading platforms work by enabling users to follow and copy the trades of other users whose track records are made public on the site.

While social trading provides many benefits to traders, it has also become an attractive way for brokers to increase their customer retention rates.

In the same way that Facebook makes it difficult to leave your account, brokers are adopting social trading in the hopes that the social networking aspects will make their services ‘stickier’ and therefore harder to leave.

Will Hollywood Save the Day?

One company has decided to look beyond the Valley towards the Hollywood Hills to improve trader retention. Social trading platform TradeSocio has recently announced plans to launch a reality show featuring a group of amateur traders competing against each other for a grand prize.

The company is creating this show to try to differentiate its service from the competition while providing traders with an opportunity they can’t find elsewhere.

“The reality is that this industry is about to get upended. If brokers want to develop loyalty among their traders, they need to offer them something that they can’t get elsewhere,” TradeSocio founder Rohan Hall said. “That may be the opportunity to be in a Hollywood TV show, a better trading experience, or something else. At the end of the day, the tactics that used to work are becoming increasingly ineffective, and if brokers don’t adapt, they’ll find themselves without a sustainable customer base.”

Regardless of whether the industry gets upended or not, examples like this make it clear that brokers are taking the threat of customer indifference seriously and are willing to experiment with creative solutions from the least likely of places.

It’s Time for Brokers to Place Their Bets

The brokerages and banks of Wall Street have had a good run of being in control. The widespread adoption of the Internet and the recent surge of innovation in fintech is beginning to shift some of that control back to the users.

With less control, the established financial services companies are being forced to place their bets on different ways to regain their customer’s loyalty. From implementing marketing automation software and social networking features to hiring Hollywood TV companies, it’s unclear at this stage which bets will pay off.

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin

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