A new digital media company is making its debut with a splashy acquisition: RBmedia, a new entity formed by combining eight brands focused on digital magazine..
A new digital media company is making its debut with a splashy acquisition: RBmedia , a new entity formed by combining eight brands focused on digital magazine and audio content, will acquire Audiobooks.com, the audiobook streaming and download service the offers access to over 100,000 books via apps for various devices and platforms.
The company’s reach already includes spoken audio content, but the audiobook acquisition opens up a whole new audience, including listeners on platforms like Sonos, CarPlay, Android Auto and across over 10,000 libraries worldwide that use Audiobooks.com for book lending.. The Maryland-based company had already enjoyed a strong library business, but the Audiobook.com acquisition represents its direct-to-consumer efforts.
“The biggest picture is that audiobooks are really exploding,” explained RBmedia CEO Tom McIsaac in an interview. “They’re benefiting from a bunch of other trends in the market, and we’re really trying to take advantage of that; we’re trying to build a category-killer in the space. Print book and ebook growth is especially flat. Depending on who you listen to, audiobook growth is 20 to 30 percent per year. We think that’s for two principal reasons – one is the growth of podcasts.”
“We think of podcasts as training wheels for audiobooks,” McIsaac continued. “When consumers get accustomed to listening to short-form content, it basically conditions them and gets them excited to embrace listening to long-form content. That dynamic has really, really helped the growth of audiobooks.”
The other big contributing factor to the rise of audiobooks, McIssac says, is the growth of voice-based interaction, via connected homes and connected vehicles. Use of voice assistants like Siri, and devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, have primed consumers for audio content delivery. Likewise, in-car platforms like Android Auto and CarPlay, and growing use of smartphone-based content delivery apps for in-car listening, have helped grow the amount of time and attention users have to dedicate to listening to long-form audio.
While RBmedia’s spoken audio business focuses on book-length content, the company is also in regular discussion with dedicated podcast businesses regarding potential collaboration where their models and interests intersect. McIsaac said that they often talk to “Gimlet, PodcastOne” and others and that they’re “going to be announcing ways in which we collaborate with them” at some point in the future.
The new media distribution company also offers distribution for digital magazines, games, language learning, continuing education courses and more. Basically, it partners with platforms and operates its own wherever there’s a demand for getting digital editions out to the masses. Spoken audio is a key growth area, however, and one where it’s clear McIsaac and company see a lot of new opportunity.

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Sprinklr, the unicorn startup with a valuation of $1.8 billion, announced a major update today, which shifts the company’s focus from a pure social signals..
Sprinklr , the unicorn startup with a valuation of $1.8 billion, announced a major update today, which shifts the company’s focus from a pure social signals platform to customer experience management. While it still uses social as a central processing point, the idea is to bring a typical set of marketing tasks under a single umbrella they are calling the Experience Cloud.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Adobe released a product with the same name a few weeks ago. Sprinklr is taking a similar approach with a unified platform, but with the goal of being able to manage the customer through what you know about them from a social perspective.
For CEO Ragy Thomas, it’s about finding more creative ways to use the social information they have been collecting for the past 7.5 years the company has been around.
The newly expanded platform adds five modules including marketing, advertising, research, customer care and eCommerce, in addition to the social component that has been at the center of the company’s approach up until now.
It’s worth noting that the company released the platform notion in 2015, but it had just the social piece back then. This is an entirely new bundle of options, according to the company. Being a platform play, as you would expect there is a set of shared capabilities underpinning each of the categories such as asset management, APIs, reporting, security and collaboration.
Thomas doesn’t actually see his company competing with Adobe’s product in spite of the identical names. Instead, he sees it as complementary, something that could work alongside Adobe’s offering. “When you think about Adobe’s Experience Cloud, when you take their core offering, they’ve got content creation capabilities, web management, web analytics and campaign and email capability,” he said.
He contrasts that with the offerings on his platform. “For influencer marketing, we have included content marketing, listening insights, visual insights and community care. These are things you don’t find in other places,” he claimed.
Many of the platform pieces came by way of acquisition. Sprinklr has quietly purchased 10 companies since 2014 , all with the ultimate goal of building out the social signals platform into something more.
The company wants to give customers this broad set of tools to help manage customer experience across a variety of roles. Thomas believes that each platform category can feed off of the social information, whether that’s an ad you’re delivering to the customer or a product you’re selling them online. There’s no doubt it’s ambitious and is attempting to take the company in a much more extensive direction.
There has been chatter over the past couple of months that Sprinklr itself was an acquisition target. When asked about this Thomas would only say, “We’ve not been commenting on that.” He added, “In our history, we’ve passed on multiple acquisition proposals.” For now at least, today’s release signals that the company is not sitting still waiting to be bought.
Thomas sees customer experience management, a notion that has been around for some time, finally beginning to take off, and he believes this new platform puts them in a position to capitalize on it.

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French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has become the latest high profile European politician to threaten U. S. tech companies over their use of..
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has become the latest high profile European politician to threaten U. S. tech companies over their use of end-to-end encryption, and for how digital platforms enable the spread of terrorist propaganda online.
Officially launching his presidential campaign yesterday with a five-point plan for combating terrorism, Macron said it is “no longer acceptable” that companies say they have a contractual obligation to their users to protect their communications.
Opinion polls predict Macron will be one of two candidates to reach the second round of the election next month.
“Democratic states must have access to content exchanged between terrorists on social media and instant messaging,” he said, according to a BBC report.
We’re reached out to Macron’s press team with questions and will update this story with any response.
In the 40-minute speech discussing his approach to counterterrorism, Macron describes the Internet as having become “an essential part of terrorism”, and argues it therefore “needs to be an essential part of the fight against terrorism”.
“That’s why we need to have an open discussion with big internet companies: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and others,” he said, adding: “Many terrorists went ahead after having been radicalized on social networks. They’re exposed to islamist propaganda that manipulates them and leads them to violence. It’s essential that big internet companies commit to remove this content immediately. This commitment should have an obligation of results. They can’t argue that there’s a technical incompatibility, or that they value freedom or neutrality.
“[Terrorist] organizations that threaten us take advantage of the possibilities of modern cryptography to hide their projects. They use strongly encrypted instant messengers to talk with each other and give orders. A good chunk of that internet traffic is encrypted and gets away from police forces. It’s obviously a weakness and makes the fight against terrorism harder.
“Until now, big Internet companies have refused to give their encryption keys or access to this content, saying that they have told their clients that their communications are protected. This situation is no longer acceptable. You can be strongly in favor of protecting your privacy and your conversations — and it’s my case. And it’s not incompatible with new rules so that the police can prevent terrorist attacks efficiently, with all the safeguards we need.”
If elected, Macron says he will push for a common European initiative to co-operate on encryption and push for big Internet companies to “accept a legal requisition system of their encrypted services similar to the existing one for telecom companies”.
“Governments, as long as they are democratic, should be able to access terrorist content on social networks and instant messaging services. We need to figure out the terms and the safeguards. But the goal is clear. If I’m elected, I’ll undertake this at the very beginning of my five-year mandate at the European level and within NATO,” he added.
His comments come days after a terror attack in Stockholm , Sweden in which a truck was driven at speed into pedestrians, killing four people. And several weeks after a similar attack in London , in which pedestrians and a policeman guarding parliament were killed by a lone attacker.
France has also suffered a spate of terror attacks in recent years, including in Paris in 2015 and Nice in 2016 , as has Germany — including a truck attack in Berlin last December .
Last summer interior ministers in France and Germany also called for the European Commission to consider a law change to enable courts to demand Internet companies decrypt data to afford security agencies access to messages.
And the UK passed just such a law at the end of last year — aka: the Investigatory Powers Act — which includes powers for authorities to limit or block the use of end-to-end encryption. Although that legislation hasn’t stopped current UK Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, piling very public political pressure on tech companies last month after the Westminster terror attack — apparently also calling for them to stop using end to end-to-end encryption.
“We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other,” said Rudd last month. “It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or just listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warranty. But on this situation we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”
Rudd’s criticism of end-to-end encryption was followed by a meeting with major tech firms in which the discussion apparently centered on how they could do more to limit the spread of terrorist propaganda on their public platforms. (Something Germany has also been pushing for, including via new legislation .) So the pressure in the UK on WhatsApp et al’s use of e2e encryption appears to have evaporated at least for now — or at least publicly.
At the Europe-wide level, EU Member State justice ministers remain unclear on whether to push for a decrypt law according to the European Commission — although the idea is being actively discussed. Another meeting of the justice ministers group is due to take place in June. And while some interior ministers are clearly supportive of the notion of a decrypt law, the EC’s digital minister is not.
The global nature of technology and the inability of politicians in one jurisdiction to control access to software or algorithms developed elsewhere makes political attempts to outlaw encryption as futile as they are historically repetitious. Though the frequency and speed with which politicians seeking to sound tough on terrorism point the finger of blame at tech companies probably boils down to a calculation of what plays best with domestic voters (and, in Macron’s case, on the campaign trail).
After all, no politicians are talking about banning cars and trucks from cities despite a wave of terror attacks in which lone attackers have repurposed vehicles as killing machines.
However the exact nature of counterterrorism discussions between commercial tech firms and governments remains unknown, given they are held behind closed doors. Which is why closed source deployments of robust encryption still require users to trust the company making the secure messaging claims, given there’s no way to externally verify their software does not contain government mandated backdoors. Open source software can provide the disinfectant for that doubt.
TechCrunch’s Roman Dillet contributed to this report

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Synack, a startup that combines software security tools with a network of white-hat hackers to help keep its customers secure, announced a $21.25 million..
Synack , a startup that combines software security tools with a network of white-hat hackers to help keep its customers secure, announced a $21.25 million Series C funding round today.
The round was led by Microsoft Ventures with participation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Singtel Innov8. Previous investors GGV Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $55 million, according to the company.
It’s hard not to notice that is an impressive combination of company and traditional venture capital attention.
Perhaps that’s because Synack takes an unusual approach to enterprise security, going on offense instead of defense, according to company CTO Mark Kuhr. He and his co-founder CEO Jay Kaplan might know a thing or two about going on offense, having previously worked for the NSA before starting Synack in 2013.
Kuhr says they decided to start the company when they saw the defensive tactics companies were using simply weren’t working — as Sony, JP Morgan Chase, OPM, Ashley Madison, Adobe, Target and many others can attest.
“Jay Kaplan and I left the NSA to come up with a different way for offensive security for the enterprise. We noticed at NSA that hackers were coming through all the defenses, taking data and putting malware on the systems,” he said.
Kuhr say his company uses a three-pronged strategy to help protect systems and IP — Command, control and action. “We couple the human element with machines. It’s a man and machine story. We bring in people when we need to,” he said.
In fact the command piece starts with a community of several hundred white-hat hackers from around the world whom the company has vetted to be sure they are ethical and pass a background check.
The control piece is their penetration testing service, which looks for vulnerabilities in an automated way. The action is the plan they come up with to help protect the system once they find a problem. For instance, if they find an open back door in the code, they would recommend that the client close it up.
Kuhr says it’s similar to the strategy they employed at the NSA where they went on offense, getting in the shoes of the adversary and trying to understand what they were doing. But he understands that most private companies don’t have access to the talent they had at the NSA. That’s why they are trying to package that kind of support and protection as a service.
They work on a flat-fee subscription model, running the automated systems and bringing in a team of expert hackers when necessary to root out vulnerabilities. While the friendly hacker approach sounds a lot like the HackerOne strategy, Kuhr says the difference is that HackerOne uses an open model and his company a private one.
The company has around 100 employees plus the network of hackers. That will probably increase this year with the new funding as they look to expand into new markets in Europe and Asia. Currently, they have 100 customers mostly in the enterprise. Kuhr says company revenue has been doubling every year and today’s investment is about keeping that momentum going.

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