Month: July 2018

The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to use Facebook’s ad targeting tools.

The ads were run prior to Facebook having any disclosure rules for political ads. So there was no way for anyone other than each target recipient to know a particular ad existed or who it was being targeted at.

The targeting of the ads was carried out on Facebook’s platform by AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica/SCL — aka the political consultancy at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse storm, including by Facebook itself, which earlier this year told the UK parliament it had found billing and administration connections between the two.

Aggregate IQ is now under joint investigation by Canadian data watchdogs. But in 2016 the data firm was paid £3.5M by a number of Brexit supporting campaigns to spend on targeted social media advertising using Facebook as the primary conduit.

Facebook was asked by the UK parliament’s DCMS committee to disclose the Brexit ads — as part of its multi-month enquiry investigating fake news and the impact of online disinformation on democratic processes. The company eventually did so, releasing ads run by AIQ for the official Vote Leave campaign, BeLeave/Brexit Central, and DUP Vote Leave.

Several of the Brexit campaigns whose ads have now been made public were also recently found to have broken UK election law by breaching campaign spending limits. Most notably the Electoral Commission found that the youth-focused campaign, BeLeave, had been joint-working with the official Vote Leave campaign — yet the pair had not jointly declared spending thereby enabling the official campaign to overspend by almost half a million pounds. And that overspend went straight to Aggregate IQ to run targeted Facebook ads.

The committee has now published the Brexit ads that Facebook disclosed to it, more than two years after the referendum vote took place. Facebook also provided it with ad impression ranges and some targeting data which it has also published. The committee’s enquiry remains ongoing.

In a letter to the committee, Facebook says it’s unable to disclose ads run by AIQ for another Brexit campaign, Veterans for Britain, saying that campaign “has not permitted us to disclose that information to you”. So the view of the Brexit political ads we’re finally getting is by no means complete. Facebook’s platform also essentially enables anyone to be an advertiser — so it’s entirely possible other Brexit related messages were distributed using its ad tools.

In the case of the Brexit ads run by AIQ specifically, it’s not clear how many ad impressions they racked up in all. But total impressions look very sizable.

While some of what runs to many thousands of distinctly targeted ads which AIQ distributed via Facebook’s platform are listed as only garnering between 0-999 impressions apiece, according to Facebook’s data, others racked up far more views. Commonly listed ranges include 50,000 to 99,999 and 100,000 to 199,999 — with even higher ranges like 2M-4.9M and 5M-9.9M also listed.

One ad that generated ad impressions of between 2M-4.9M was targeted almost exclusively (99%) at English Facebook users — and included the claim that: “EU protectionism has prevented our generation from benefiting from key global trade deals. It is time we unite to give our country the freedom to be a prosperous and competitive nation!”

A spokesperson for the DCMS committee told us it hadn’t had a chance to compiled the thousands of ad impression ranges into a total ad impression range — but had rather published the data as it had received it from Facebook. We’ve also asked the company to prove an estimate on the total ad impressions and will update this story with any response.

The ad creative used by these campaigns has been published as well and — across all of them — the adverts display a mixture of (roundly debunked) claims about suddenly being able to spend ‘£350M a week on the NHS’, rousing calls to ‘take back control’ (including a bunch of ‘hero’ shots of Boris Johnson), coupled with ample fearmongering about EU regulations ‘holding the UK back’ or posing a risk to UK jobs and wages; plus a lot of out-and-out ‘project fear’ messaging — with the official Vote Leave campaign especially deploying direct dogwhistle racism to stir up fear among voters about foreigners coming to the UK if it can’t control its own border or if the EU expands to add more countries…

 

At a glance, the Brexit ad creative is not as ‘out there’ as some of the wilder stuff the Kremlin was pumping onto Facebook’s platform to try to skew the 2016 U.S. election.

But the blatant xenophobia leaves a very bad taste.

In the case of Brexit Central/BeLeave, their ad creative was more subtle in its xenophobia — urging target recipients to back a “fair immigration system” or an “Australian-style points based system” but without making any direct references to any specific non-EU countries.

The youth campaign also created a couple of ads (below) which invoked consumer technology as a reason to back Brexit — with one appealing to users of ride-hailing and another to users of video streaming apps to reject the EU by suggesting its regulations might interfere with access to the services they use.

Ironically enough, it was London’s transport authority that withdrew Uber’s license to operate last year — in a regulatory decision that had absolutely nothing to do with the EU. (Uber has since appealed and got a 15-month reprieve.)

Though, also last year, the EU’s top court judged that a spade is a spade — and Uber is a transport company, not a mere technology platform. Though the ruling has not prevented Uber from continuing to operate and even expand ride-hailing services in Europe. Sure, it has to work more closely with city authorities now, but that means meshing with local priorities rather than seeking to override what local people want.

In a further irony, the EU also took steps to liberalize passenger transport services, back in 2007, issuing a directive that makes it harder for cities authorities to place their own controls on ride-hailing services. Albeit, evidently facts didn’t get a starring role in the vote leave Brexit ads.

As for quotas on streaming services, it’s a curious thing to complain about — especially to a youth-focused audience which you’re also targeting with ads claiming they’ll have better job prospects outside the EU.

The EU has merely suggested online streaming services should provide for and subsidize up to a third of their output of films and TV as being made in Europe.

Which seems unlikely to have a deleterious impact on European creative industries, given platforms would be contributing to the development of local audiovisual production. So — in plainer English — it should mean more money to support more creative jobs in Europe which many young people would probably love to have a crack at…

The publication of the Brexit ads is, above all, a reminder that online political advertising has been allowed to be a blackhole — and at times a cesspit — because cash-rich entities have been able to unaccountably exploit the obscurity of Facebook’s systemically dark ad targeting tools for their own ends, leaving no right of public objection let alone reply for the people as a whole whose lives are affected by political outcomes such as referendums.

Facebook has been making some voluntary changes to offer a degree of political ad disclosure, as it seeks to stave off regulatory rule. Whether its changes — which at best offer partial visibility — will go far enough remains to be seen. And of course they come too late to change the conversation around Brexit.

Which is why, earlier this month, the UK’s data watchdog calling for an ethical pause of political ad ops — saying there’s a risk of democracy being digitally undermined.

“It is important that there is greater and genuine transparency about the use of such techniques to ensure that people have control over their own data and that the law is upheld,” it wrote. “Without a high level of transparency – and therefore trust amongst citizens that their data is being used appropriately – we are at risk of developing a system of voter surveillance by default.”

IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Instead, the long-form video hub is a bit more distant, located in a standalone app as well as behind a static orange button on the main app’s homescreen. That means users can go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos that range up to an hour.

IGTV has only been out a month and Instagram’s feed has been around for 8 years so it makes sense to try to push views from the app’s core feature to this new one. That’s why Instagram is experimenting with a way to show off a carousel of IGTV videos in its main app’s feed. Spotted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, we asked Instagram about it. A spokesperson confirmed it was testing the carousel, and provided this statement: “We’re always testing new and different ways to surface interesting content for people on Instagram.”

The IGTV carousel appears below the Stories tray, pushing down the traditional feed so less of the first photo or video immediately appears on the screen. It shows a preview tile of the IGTV videos with overlaid titles and lengths, plus the creator’s name and profile pic. They look similar to Snapchat’s Discover page and the carousels of “Recent Stories” Instagram began running mid-feed last year.

By teasing IGTV’s actual content rather than just slapping a logo buton atop the screen, Instagram might get more users to check out the feature and standalone app. More views could in turn lure more content from creators. If they don’t see IGTV’s audience as significant, they won’t go to the trouble of shooting long-form vertical video for the platform or editing their landscape Instagram feed and YouTube videos for the format.

Given yesterday’s bloodbath of a Facebook earnings report, there’s more pressure than ever on Instagram to pull its weight. Facebook sunk to its slowest growth rate in history, losing users in Europe and going flat in North America. In fact, it revealed a new “family of apps audience” metric of 2.5 billion people using at least one of Facebook’s apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger) to distract from the bad news. That stat will let Facebook hide how younger users are abandoning it in favor of Instagram.

The big concern is that vertical videos and Stories are the future of content creation and consumption, but Facebook hasn’t figured out how to monetize these formats as well as its tried-and-true News Feed ads. Concerns about eyeballs shifting away from feeds faster than ad dollars contributed to Facebook’s 20 percent share price drop erasing $120 billion in market cap.

But Facebook’s saving grace, and the reason the stock might bounce back, is that it ruthlessly cloned Snapchat Stories for two years before it was obvious that it had to and now has 1.1 billion daily Stories users across its apps. If Facebook said Stories were the future but it was way behind, it could have been beaten down even worse by Wall Street.

Still, short-form Stories are best paired with short-form Stories ads. If it can make IGTV a hit, it could run longer o unskippable ads that earn it more. So you can expect to see more and more of IGTV in the Instagram feed.

This week we’re excited to announce another addition to the TechCrunch Disrupt SF program — the Q&A agenda.

This is new for Disrupt. After chats on the Main and Next stages, select speakers will take questions from the audience in special, extended Q&A sessions.

These panels will last 30-45 minutes and be open to Disrupt attendees. Talk to Kai-Fu Lee about the evolution of artificial intelligence. Dive deeper into CRISPR by posing questions to Rachel Haurwitz. Ask Avichal Garg for advice on launching an ICO. Sessions will feature speakers across all key topics and it’s your chance to ask questions to some of the greatest minds in technology.

The only way to get involved is to snag a ticket to Disrupt SF. Click here to get a special early-bird discount until August 1. General admission and exhibitor packages are still available. For the full Disrupt SF agenda, click here. The Q&A agenda is below. We’ll be adding speakers in the weeks leading up to Disrupt, so check back often for updates.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH

Morning

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• Exploring Private and Public Space Exploration and book signing with Alan Stern (NASA)
• Uniting Under Unity with John Riccitiello (Unity Technologies)

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Afternoon

• Building Brands with Emily Heyward (Red Antler), Philip Krim (Casper) and Tina Sharkey (Brandless)
• Why is Hardware Hard with Cyril Ebersweiler (SOSV) and others to be announced
  
• Space, the Final Fund Tier with Natalya Bailey (Accion Systems), Peter Beck (Rocket Labs), Tess Hatch (Bessemer Venture Partners) and Will Marshall (Planet)
  
• On AI, ML & DL and book signing with Kai-Fu Lee (Sinovation)
  
• Creating Communities with Dave Baszucki (Roblox)
  
• Inside ICOs with Avichal Garg (Electric Capital), Arianna Simpson (Autonomous Partners) and others to be announced
  

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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6TH

Morning

• Investing in China with Hans Tung (GGV Capital) and Yi Wang (Lingochamp)
• Making mobility possible with Reilly Brennan (Trucks VC) and others to be announced
  
• Building for Voice with Jason Mars (Clinc) and others to be announced
  

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Afternoon

• Rebooting the Robots with Claire Delaunay (Nvidia), Rich Mahoney (Seismic) and others to be announced
  
• Creating with CRISPR with Rachel Haurwitz (Caribou Biosciences) and others to be announced
  

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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7TH

Morning

• The Future According to Quantum Computing with Dario Gil (IBM)
• Inside Y Combinator with Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel (Y Combinator)
  
• The Next Super Computers with Chad Rigetti (Rigetti Computing)
  
• HealthTech on the Horizon with Robin Berzin (Parsley Health), Aaron Patzer (Vital Software) and others to be announced

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Afternoon

• Inside Africa’s Tech Ecosystem with Fope Adelowo (Helioslip), Ken Njoroge (Cellulant) and Tayo Oviosu (Paga Payments)
  
• Building Lean Startups with David Hornik (August Capital) and Eric Ries (The Lean Startup)

As far as attention-grabbing stunts go, this is a pretty good one. The ACLU has been attempting to raise awareness of Amazon’s Rekognition software for some time, stating that it “raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.”

For its part, Amazon has brushed these off, telling TechCrunch back in May, “As a technology, Amazon Rekognition has many useful applications in the real world.” In a bid to get Congress to sit up and take notice, however, the ACLU says it used Rekognition to scan images of every current member of Congress.

The ACLU claims the software falsely matched 28 members of Congress with arrest mugshots. “The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country,” the organization writes in a statement.

Those tagged, however, “were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis,” it adds.

Amazon has, naturally, rejected the findings. The company noted that such technologies are used to narrow down results, rather than make arrests. “We remain excited about how image and video analysis can be a driver for good in the world,” it said in a statement.

That the service appears to have an outsized target on people of color, however, does add fuel to the ACLU’s existing privacy complaints. Earlier this month, Microsoft president Bradford L. Smith called for additional regulation for these technologies as they continue to become more of a mainstay for law enforcement.

“Facial recognition technology raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression,” Smith wrote. “These issues heighten responsibility for tech companies that create these products. In our view, they also call for thoughtful government regulation and for the development of norms around acceptable uses.”

Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with a more formal collaboration tool. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Redkix burst out of the gate two years ago with a $17 million seed round, a hefty seed amount by any measure. What prompted this kind of investment was a tool that combined a collaboration tool like Slack or Workplace by Facebook with email. People could collaborate in Redkix itself, or if you weren’t a registered user, you could still participate by email, providing a more seamless way to work together.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers enterprise collaboration at Constellation Research, sees this tool as providing a key missing link. “Redkix is a great solution for bridging the worlds between traditional email messaging and more modern conversational messaging. Not all enterprises are ready to simply switch from one to the other, and Redkix allows for users to work in whichever method they want, seamlessly communicating with the other,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

As is often the case with these kinds of acquisitions, the company bought the technology  itself along with the team that created it. This means that the Redikix team including the CEO and CTO will join Facebook and they will very likely be shutting down the application after the acquisition is finalized.

Lepofsky thinks that enterprises that are adopting Facebook’s enterprise tool will be able to more seamlessly transition between the two modes of communication, the Workplace by Facebook tool and email, as they prefer.

Although a deal like this has probably been in the works for some time, after yesterday’s earning’s debacle, Facebook could be looking for ways to enhance its revenue in areas beyond the core Facebook platform. The enterprise collaboration tool does offer a possible way to do that in the future, and if they can find a way to incorporate email into it, it could make it a more attractive and broader offering.

Facebook is competing with Slack, the darling of this space and others like Microsoft, Cisco and Google around communications and collaboration. When it launched in 2015, it was trying to take that core Facebook product and put it in a business context, something Slack had been doing since the beginning.

To succeed in business, Facebook had to think differently than as a consumer tool, driven by advertising revenue and had to convince large organizations that they understood their requirements. Today, Facebook claims 30,000 organizations are using the tool and over time they have built in integrations to other key enterprise products, and keep enhancing it.

Perhaps with today’s acquisition, they can offer a more flexible way to interact with platform and could increase those numbers over time.

Root Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture firm that closed its debut fund with $30 million in 2015, has raised a second fund, closing it with $76.7269 million dollars in capital commitments. Why? Because Root is proudly composed of engineering nerds, and 767.269 miles per hour is the speed of sound. In dry air. At 20 degrees Celsius.

Of course, more mathematically significant to its investors is how the firm is faring, and on that front, Root’s backers must like what they see.

Though Root’s investments are mostly too new to judge yet — its debut fund took stakes in 27 companies — it can easily back up claims that it invests in “deeply technical founders” who are tackling “interdisciplinary engineering problems,” including in robotics, machine learning and software for physical industries.

Among Root’s many interesting bets to date: Creator, a hamburger-making robot that can craft a burger from start to finish in five minutes; Nautilus Labs, which sells machine learning-based analytics to maritime shipping companies, including to help them reduce their fuel costs; NordSense, whose ultra low-cost sensors sit inside garbage bins to monitor how full they are; and Wild Type, a young startup focused on creating lab-grown meat.

Firm co-founder Avidan Ross tells us that with the firm’s new fund, he and investing partners Chrissy Meyer and Kane Hsieh will be writing slightly larger initial checks, ranging from $1 million to $2 million, up from the $500,000 checks it was writing with its first fund. He adds that the firm plans to stay firmly rooted (ahem) to its mission of supporting seed-stage founders whose companies may ultimately require a lot of resources, yet which Root can help because of its collective engineering and investing muscle.

Ross is himself a trained engineer who was previously CTO of the private equity firm CIM Group. Meyer was an engineering program manager at both Apple and Square before becoming the director of hardware product development at Pearl Automation. (The three-year-old company was founded by numerous Apple employees and set out to make automotive back-up cameras, but it shut down last year.)

Meanwhile, Hsieh, who studied computer science at Harvard, spent a couple of years as a senior associate with RRE Ventures in New York before co-founding a bike company focused on low cost and high design. Then, shortly after Root was founded, Ross talked him into joining. “Kane is obsessed with optimization and automation,” says Ross.

Root has seen a few exits already, among them Preact, a cloud-based platform and service aimed at helping subscription-model businesses reduce churn; it was acquired for undisclosed terms by Spotify in late 2016.  Root also saw Cape Networks, a startup that used sensors to provide service assurance and test network and application performance, sell to Hewlett Packard Enterprise earlier this year for undisclosed terms.

As for its investors, like most venture firms, Root doesn’t discuss these. Still, we’re aware that one of Root’s backers, in both its first and second vehicles, is the fund of funds manager Cendana Capital, based in San Francisco.

Cendana has been an early investor in many promising seed-stage firms, some that have since graduated from Cendana’s sweet spot, which is groups that raise sub $100 million funds. Some of its other investments over the years have included Forerunner Ventures, Uncork Capital, Bolt, Notation Capital and IA Ventures.

Smart speakers have come a long way over the past few years as Amazon, Google and Apple have delivered pretty noteworthy strides in the IQs of their assistants. Where speakers haven’t advanced as much is in how they offer users choices; Google Assistant can only list out so many options before you get sick of listening, so throwing a screen onto these devices was a pretty inevitable evolution.

At CES earlier this year, Google showcased what it called Smart Displays, basically an answer to Amazon’s Echo Show. Today, Lenovo’s device, the first of the bunch, goes on sale.

The device, to be clear, pretty much just looks like an Android tablet that you plug in with Google Assistant on it. What’s interesting is how the device handles visual feedback for audio commands, giving lightweight visual context for some queries and more robust video/photo content for others. Google clearly doesn’t have all of the core tenets of its Smart Display interface philosophy hammered out, and yet for the most part this is a very pleasant product that strikes all of the right notes on design.

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The device comes in two flavors, a $249 10-inch 1080p version and a $199 8-inch 720p version. There aren’t any differences beyond the screen size, so it really depends on where you’re keeping it. I’d imagine that people who are putting something like this on their nightstand as a way-too-smart alarm clock might want the smaller version, whereas if you have a bit more room in your kitchen or living room the 10-inch version might offer some needed screen real estate. For this review I tested the 10-inch $249 variant.

While I didn’t have too many qualms with the hardware, it was much easier to pick out things that bothered me about the way Google has approached the Smart Display software. While some tasks were refreshingly thought out, like searching for and progressing through recipe instructions, others, like finding a specific YouTube video, were frustratingly difficult.

The Smart Display is fundamentally a Google Home device that can also communicate to you through visuals. It may look like a tablet with a speaker, but you will not find anything resembling a full app on the device, you will not be entering text via an onscreen keyboard and you certainly will never see a “menu” button. This is a tablet with an identity crisis, a product that can use certain functionality to communicate with you but also wants you to speak with your words and let its AI prowess do the more stringent work of  telling you what you would like.

Asking the device to “open YouTube” will take you to a screen with a list of recommended videos and… nothing else. Fair enough, everything is sparsely simple, but it’s frankly a little annoying to wander through voice commands to navigate to something right in front of you that you know you could tap toward much more quickly. This is one of the key advantages that the Smart Display holds over the Amazon Echo Show, so I just feel like they should have been a little bit more heavy-handed in porting a fuller version of the app.

The onscreen content is more often than not just an added perk; for more informational queries it can be useful to see what a person looks like if you’re asking Google who they are, and it can be useful to see a five-day weather forecast rather than having Alexa list all of the days out. For the most part, it seems less than necessary, and I rarely found myself actually looking at the screen after I had asked a question.

Google has been doing some work in stringing commands together or adding support for follow-up questions in some contexts, but with a screen that can now show you the device is still listening I wish the company just kept the mic running during certain situations. When you’re progressing through the steps of a recipe, for instance, each time you have to keep repeating “Hey Google, next!” (you can also tap an onscreen button but that’s not always ideal when deep in cooking).

Some of these features could use updates, but there are other things that Google has nailed, right out of the box. Routines are great on the Smart Display. Saying,”Hey Google, good morning,” will turn on my lights, tell me about my meetings for the day, showcase the weather and my commute and give a nice little rundown of the news. This was all possible on my display-less Google Home already, but something about doing this on the Smart Display just feels much more Jarvis-like, à la Tony Stark, and I feel like I’m living in a fairly cool future, as long as I cut off the news headlines in time.

Let’s take a closer look at the hardware, though, because Lenovo has actually built a very thoughtful product, and I must say it’s been a little bit since I’ve been wowed by consumer hardware coming from them. More often than not, Lenovo gear seems to occupy that area where it’s mostly quite good but one or two things are off and the whole thing just feels second-tier as a result. Their Smart Display, on the other hand, is beautiful and, honestly, much better-looking than any Home product that Google has shipped.

Sound-wise, this speaker is also much better than I was expecting for its small footprint. It seems louder and crisper than the standard Google Home, falling short of those metrics when compared to the pricier Max, though you are also certainly getting less speaker for your money than a comparably priced (but screen-less) product like the Sonos One. Both JBL and LG also have smart display products in the pipeline that seem to place more of an emphasis on powerful sound, but the whole boombox look that they have going just doesn’t do it for me.

There were a couple of hardware quirks with Lenovo’s Smart Display, but really nothing major. I wasn’t generally getting the greatest viewing angle from the device on my kitchen counter, so some sort of hinge on the stand would have been nice to adjust the angle of the screen. The device’s ability to be viewable in both portrait and landscape was interesting, but you can really only use it in portrait for Duo calls as Google doesn’t really seem to want the Smart Display to be used in that orientation. The touchscreen was also at times a little less responsive than I would have liked, but fared well enough by and large.

Lenovo’s Smart Display is very pretty and offers some great value as well as some interesting ideas from Google. It strangely doesn’t feel like a huge upgrade over its screen-less Google Home variants, especially because navigating videos is still a bit harder than it should be, but with pretty decent sound and a few nice visual feedback features there are some very novel ideas present even if they don’t feel entirely fleshed out.

After months of waiting, the first Google smart display is finally available. The company announced a slew of the devices back in January at CES — no doubt as a way of sticking it to Amazon. After all, the Echo Show was a novel enough device in the smart speaker world, but the hardware was always a little lacking.

Google, on the other hand, let hardware partners do the heavy lifting here, and at CES, the company announced devices from Lenovo, JBL and LG. The former was far and away the nicest looking of the bunch — and it’s the first to hit the market, running $200 for the eight-inch version and $250 for the 10-inch (including three months of YouTube Premium). The others are simply listed as “coming soon.”

Google took things a step further at I/O, handing out hardware development kits, so interested manufacturers could build their own. Expect those to start flooding the market in the not-so-distant future, if the Assistant smart speaker market is any indicator.

If you’ve spent any time with the Echo Show or Spot, you pretty much know the deal here: news, music, podcasts, recipes and the like, all with a visual element. Of course, the smart displays have one very key thing Amazon doesn’t: YouTube. Access to the video service has been a major sticking point in the battle between the two companies. After all, it’s one of the best case uses for this sort of hardware.

Letgo, the secondhand goods marketplace valued at over a billion dollars, this week announced the launch of new features aimed at helping sellers: video listings and automatic pricing suggestions that leverage image recognition and A.I. technologies. Sellers will now be able to point their smartphone camera at something they want to sell using this new feature, which letgo is calling “Reveal,” in order to find out what their item is worth. This is based on insights from letgo’s database of hundreds of millions of listings. the company says.

At launch, potential sellers will be able to use Reveal to get a general idea about what something sells for, and how high current demand is for similar items. They can then decide to sell it with just a tap, and letgo will suggest further details like title, price, and category. The feature is similar in that respect to technology competitor eBay launched in its app earlier this year – however, it required a barcode scan to do so.

However, letgo Reveal isn’t capable of differentiating different models of devices – it’s meant to give a broader idea. In a demo, for example, Reveal offers a ballpark price for things like a “camera,” “record player,” and “bike’ and gives you an ideal of how long it will take to sell them. But obviously, some items will be worth more than others – like a newer iPhone will sell for more than an older one. Reveal won’t help sellers figure out the exact pricing, but could at least get the ball rolling.

Another new feature launching this week is video listings. Now, along with item photos, sellers can choose to add videos to their listings so buyers can view the item in question from all angles.

“We’ve created a new kind of marketplace – built on intuitive technology and radical simplicity – because it should be as painless to resell something as it was to buy it in the first place,” said letgo cofounder Alec Oxenford, in a statement. “Reveal takes the guesswork out of selling secondhand, while video listings are a new way to show off whatever you want to sell when photos won’t do it justice.”

Video listings could give letgo an advantage over rivals like eBay, which suggests that sellers link to videos, as well as OfferUp, which is today ranked #3 in the Shopping category on the App Store, while letgo is #6.

The changes could attract more sellers to letgo, as it battles against these and other rivals, including Facebook’s Marketplace and Craigslist.

The company is backed by $475 million in funding from a line of investors, including Naspers, Accel, Insight Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, 14W, Eight Roads Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and FJ Labs, according to Cruchbase. Investors are betting on these startups being able to finally topple Craigslist’s stranglehold on secondhand listings, but they all still have to contend with the threat of Facebook and eBay – the latter which just reported a slight miss on earnings, but a growing base of active buyers – now up to 175 million.

Today, letgo has over 75 million downloads, and has been pegged by comScore as the second-fastest growing app in the U.S.