Technology

With just over one month to go until its official launch date, the short-form, subscription streaming service Quibi has closed on $750 million in new financing, according to a report in the companyprivate PR firm The Wall Street Journal.

The company declined to disclose exactly who invested in the new round (which is always a great sign) and didn&t comment on how the new investment would effect the companyvaluation.

Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman told the Journal that the new financing was made to ensure that the company would have the financial flexibility and runway to build a long-term business, but itlikely that companies as diverse as Brandless and WeWork said the same thing about their goals when raising capital, as well.

Despite the doubt surrounding its success, Quibi managed to sell out of the initial $150 million in available advertising for the servicefirst year.

Whether itas big of a hit with potential subscribers as with advertisers remains to be seen. The service could still become the Mike Bloomberg campaign of streaming media — a lot of money and no discernible result.

Enterprise software startups are changing how they infiltrate companies, and investors are taking note.

Last week, I chatted with Lerer Hippeau‘s Ben Lerer after his firm had just led a seed round in Air, a digital asset management platform. I used the opportunity to pick his brain about what hesearching for in early-stage investments and which trends he believes are shaking up enterprise software.

Below is a chunk of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: What kinds of things are you looking at recently? Anything notable?

Ben Lerer: The market is always shifting, but 40,000 feet up, nothing has changed in that we&re always just focused on investing in people. But, beyond people, therecertainly been various areas of opportunity that over the years we have had different kinds of focus on. One that I&ve been most focused on traditionally has been a category that would&ve been called direct-to-consumer brands. Now you would probably just call it &future of consumer& or &future of retail.& Now, I think direct-to-consumer is not the entire pie but just a piece of the pie. So generally my focus is doing consumer deals and then sometimes I focus on deals that are not necessarily consumer, but they&re SaaS businesses, often SaaS businesses that my consumer companies are current or potential customers of.

For the first time in eight months, people in Kashmir can use WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other social media services without any fear or use of specialized software — though things are not back to normal yet.

India said on Wednesday that it has temporarily lifted the ban on social media services and on the much broader internet, giving some relief to people and tens of thousands of businesses in the Himalayan region for two weeks.

New Delhi imposed a total communications blackout in the India-controlled territory in early August last year after withdrawing the special rights of Jammu and Kashmir. The government said the move was necessary to maintain peace in the region.

The move, which eventually became the biggest internet shutdown and crackdown of social media in any democracy, received wide criticism from human rights activists around the globe, as well as from lawmakers in the U.K. and the U.S.

The region, home to more than 7 million people, faced many challenges without access to the internet. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that at least 150,000 jobs were lost.

Indiatop court ruled in January that the Narendra Modi -controlled governmentmove to enforce an &indefinite& communications blackout amounted to abuse of power, and sought an explanation.

In the wake of the order, India opened access to about 300 websites, which did not include social media services, and capped mobile data speeds at 2G level. One analysis had found that more than a third of the whitelisted websites were largely inaccessible.

To bypass the censorship, some users began to use VPN apps on their smartphone, an act that local authority quickly deemed &unlawful& and moved to open cases against hundreds of citizens.

On Wednesday evening (local time), several people in Kashmir confirmed that they were able to access WhatsApp and other social media services again — though there remains restriction on their mobile data speed.

According to a notice issued by the regionhome secretary, the restoration of the internet will remain in effect till March 17.

GM revealed Wednesday a new electric architecture that will be the foundation of the automakerfuture EV plans and support a wide range of products across its brands, including compact cars, work trucks, large premium SUVs, performance vehicles and a new Bolt EUV crossover that will come to market next summer.

This modular architecture, called &Ultium,& will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front-, rear- and all-wheel drive configurations.

GMfocus on making this EV architecture modular underlines the automakerdesire to electrify a wide variety of its business lines, from the Cruise Origin autonomous taxi and compact Chevrolet Bolt EUV to the GMC HUMMER electric truck and SUV and the newly-announced Cadillac Lyriq SUV. GM also showed a variety of electric vehicles that had not yet been announced or revealed in public on Wednesday, to show how this modularity will be exploited further out in their product plan, including a massive Cadillac flagship sedan called Celestiq .

The Celestiq will be hand-built in the Detroit area, GM President Mark Reuss said, joining a large electric SUV in Cadillacfuture lineup. A pair of future Buick crossovers showed that brandstyling moving in decidedly Tesla -inspired direction, while a mid-sized Chevrolet crossover hinted at a more affordable option in GMotherwise premium-focused future EV lineup.

Using a single architecture for such a wide variety of vehicles provides much-needed scale and capital-efficiency to what has been a small-volume and profitability-challenged EV market. GM sees this scale driving reductions in the cost and complexity of its battery packs, eliminating 80% of the pack wiring compared to the current Chevrolet Bolt and enabling it to drive battery cell costs below the $100/kWh level.

At the heart of the new modular architecture, will be large-format pouch battery cells manufactured as part of a joint manufacturing venture between LG Chem and GM. The companies announced in December plans to mass produce battery cells for GMelectric vehicles at a plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

While the automaker has used LG Chem as a lithium-ion and electronics supplier for at least a decade, the joint venture marks a shift that aims to accelerate the automakerability to win in the electric vehicle space.

GMrelationship with LG Chem has produced a new Nickel Cobalt Manganese Aluminium (NCMA) battery cell, which the automaker says will have the lowest cobalt content of any large-format pouch cell. The flat, rectangular pouch cells allow GM to stack batteries vertically, enabling more packaging flexibility and interior space than the cylindrical cells favored by Tesla, Rivian and others.

GM and LG Chem will break ground on the new $2.3 billion joint venture plant this spring, where they will have annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours of these cells with room to expand. The two firms said they will work together to eventually drive all cobalt and nickel out of its cell chemistries, develop electrolyte additives that heal cell degradation and explore solid-state cell options.

The initial wave of electric vehicles from GM will be led by an updated version of the Chevrolet Bolt later this year, followed by a Bolt EUV crossover next summer that will be the first vehicle outside of the Cadillac brand to feature the hands-free SuperCruise driver assistance system. GM will reveal two new premium electric SUVs later this year, the GMC HUMMER EV that will begin production in 2021 and the Cadillac Lyriq which will follow it to market in 2022.

GMnew EV architecture enables Level 2 and DC fast charging, with up to 100 miles of range available in the first 10 minutes of charging. But rather than launching its own in-house fast-charging network, GM is aggregating public charger networks like Chargepoint and EVgo into its myChevrolet mobile app and enabling in-app payment at EVgo chargers. GM is also partnering with Qmerit to provide accredited home charger installation because 80% of EV customers charge at home, the company said.

Lunchr has rebranded to Swile in order to expand its product offering beyond meal vouchers. The company wants to focus on everything that happens at work but that isn&t technically work — money pots for a birthday, paying back your co-workers, creating team-building events and more.

At heart, Swile provides a payment card for your lunch. French companies of a certain size have to support employees in one way or another when it comes to their lunch break. Big companies usually build out a cafeteria, while small companies hand out meal vouchers.

Companies can sign up to Swile so their employees all get a payment card for their meal vouchers. The company tops up everyonecard every month. Just like challenger banks, Swile wants to provide a better user experience. For instance, you can associate a debit card with your account so that your debit card is used if you pay for an expensive lunch above your daily limit.

Currently 200,000 employees across 7,500 companies use a Swile card to pay for lunch.

But paying for lunch is just one of the financial transaction types that you do at work. And Swile wants to capture a bigger chunk of that market.

It starts with two simple features. First, you can pay back your co-workers when they lend you some money. It isn&t limited to lunch money; you can basically associate a debit card with your account, send money and hold money.

Old habits die hard, so itgoing to be hard to convince people to switch from Lydia to Swile. People already use Lydia to send money to their friends, and the company has managed to attract millions of users in France.

Second, many companies need to collect money from the team. It could be for a gift when somebody is leaving the company, it could be in order to buy beers or grab a drink after work on a Friday evening.

Employees can create money pots and invite the team. Given that everybody in your company has already created a Swile account, you don&t need to manually add your co-workers to the app — you just have to find their name in the directory. Swile doesn&t charge any fee on those money pots when you transfer the money to a Swile account or a bank account.

In addition to payment, Swile wants to help you connect more easily with your team. You can create and join events in the app. It could be useful for a birthday party at work, a soccer match, etc.

In the future, Swile also wants to add the ability to message your friends directly in the app — at some point, all apps become messaging apps. Also coming soon, Swile will help you bookmark places and share with your co-workers a map of your favorite places around the office.

Starting in June, even if your company doesn&t use Swilemeal vouchers, you&ll be able to create an account for your team in order to use events, money pots, etc. Basic features will be free and Swile will introduce a premium tier later this year.

Just a few weeks back at CES, Google gave a sneak peek of a feature that would let your Android devices read entire web pages aloud to you — perfect for when you don&t have a hand free to scroll but still need to catch up on some text, or for when you just don&t feel like looking at your screen anymore. You&d say, &Hey Google, read this page,& and they&d spin up Google Assistantneural networks to generate a pretty dang spot-on reading of it.

Today that feature starts rolling out to all Android users.

A few interesting bits:

• It&ll highlight the text and auto scroll the page as it reads, helping you to keep track of where the reading has gotten in a story. Google had mentioned this feature as a possibility before, but they weren&t certain it would be ready for launch. Itin!
• You can tweak the read speed if the defaults are too slow/fast for you. Perfect for those people who listen to podcasts at 3x or whatever.
• It can translate! If the page you&re asking assistant to read is in a language that isn&t your default, it can automatically translate more than 40 languages into your language of choice.
• If you&re a webmaster and for some reason don&t want Assistant ever reading a page out loud (like if it contains sensitive information and you don&t want the feature somehow being triggered accidentally), they&ve built a &No page read aloud& HTML meta tag that will disable it on a page-by-page basis.

Google says this feature should work on just about every modern Android phone going back to Android 5 (Lollipop).