Thursday, December 4, 2014

• Saavn partners with Twitter - will play requests tweeted to @SaavnRadio, other social features coming: Saavn is upping its social game after it partnered with Twitter to introduce a tweet-powered radio station for its users. Saavn launched its radio mode one year ago, and now it is taking requests from users who tweet to the @SaavnRadio account. The station will also mix in tracks that Saavn users are sharing to Twitter from the service, although the company said specific requests will be prioritized over social shares. Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra told TechCrunch in an interview that the radio feature already accounts for over half of all activity on the service and, since a large number of users are already active on Twitter, the union was a no-brainer for him. “Music streaming has always been an inherently social service, we [at Saavn] already see lots of activity from users worldwide and identified a natural opportunity to create a radio station. This puts the power of programming into our users’ hands,” he said. Malhotra also hinted that Saavn is preparing more social features next year, but he said that these new releases will be within the Saavn service itself, such as collaborative playlists.

• Amazon maybe on the hook for in-app purchases made by kids without parental authorization - burden of proof rests with Amazon: A federal judge won't dismiss the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Amazon over the company's practice of billing parents for in-app purchases their children made without parental approval. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon failed to stop children from spending millions of dollars of their parents' money for virtual items in online games and other apps on devices such as Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. Some of these individual purchases cost as much as $100 each. Amazon argues that it adequately warns customers when an app allows for in-app purchases. It also says that the FTC couldn't prove that the bills that the kids racked up were "unauthorized" by parents. But Judge John C. Coughenour disagreed with that reasoning Monday, saying Amazon may still have violated federal laws against unfair billing, whether the charges were authorized or not. In any event, Coughenour added, it's Amazon's responsibility to prove that the charges were authorized, and it has not done that.

• SoftBank Invests $250M In GrabTaxi, Uber’s Archrival In Southeast Asia; valuation > $1B: Neither party has confirmed what the deal values GrabTaxi at, but the company’s valuation is likely to exceed the $1 billion mark. The duo did confirm that SoftBank has become GrabTaxi’s largest investor. The round is the highest raise for a startup in Southeast Asia to date — Rocket Internet companies aside — and it is GrabTaxi’s fourth funding activity this calendar year, taking it past $320 million in capital from investors. GrabTaxi’s previous $65 million round closed in October and was led by Tiger Global — which also invested in Uber rival Ola — while GGV Capital led a $15 million raise in May. Its $10 million-plus Series A was announced in April. GrabTaxi was founded in Malaysia in 2012, has over 500 staff and is live in 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Its core offering is a service that connects registered taxis with would-be passengers via its app — thus working with the existing industry rather than against it — but it also offers an Uber-like private car service and is trialling motorbike taxis in Vietnam.

• Uber's take on hiring tech talent: tie up with a collective - then hire the team and open an engineering office around them: To spearhead its mobile growth, Uber is setting up a mobile development shop in Amsterdam, led by one of its earliest employees and staffed by a set of new hires: a team of Dutch developers who originally worked on Uber’s Spotify integration and have served as advisors to the company since 2009. Uber has effectively taken on 10 former employees from Dutch firm Moop.me, which effectively functions as a collective of engineers and designers. Uber has not acquired the whole agency, because Moop’s people have also taken on other projects that have very little synergy with what Uber is today. Those projects, and Moop, will continue.