Year: 2018

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch earn affiliate commissions.

More than likely, there’s someone in your circle who takes great pride in knowing about and staying on top of the latest tech. While you or your gadget-obsessed acquaintance may have a broad selection of new gear, the celebrated laptop, camera, or phone might not be the one that comes with all of the bells and whistles.

We’ve compiled some of our favorite upgrade picks that come with extra or special features that add to functionality, quality and overall performance.

Photo: Kyle FItzgerald

Bluetooth wireless headphones: The Sennheiser HD1 Wireless

Listening to music is a routine activity for many and a good pair of headphones makes a world of difference. Our upgrade pick for Bluetooth wireless headphones, the Sennheiser HD1 Wireless, are far from bargain-priced, but the sound this set offers is the best our panel of testers has ever heard from a Bluetooth model.

This Sennheiser HD1 Wireless have a solid, vintage build and for better clarity over calls, the pair has two microphones. Its cups aren’t as big as its competitors, but that doesn’t take away from comfort.

Of all the Bluetooth wireless headphones we tested, this pick gets closest to being an all-around perfect set. For those who get lost in their favorite songs and often forget to recharge their headphones, the Sennheiser HD1 Wireless offer 22 hours of battery life for more continuous playtime.

Photo: Geoffrey Morrison

360-degree camera: The Garmin VIRB 360

Capturing amazing shots in rugged, water-filled, and sometimes unfavorable environments is made easier with a 360-degree camera. More so than high-quality recording capabilities, a solid 360-degree camera should be easy to use and have features that add to its functionality.

Doubling as an action camera, the Garmin VIRB 360 offers even more. Its picture quality and digital video stabilization are noticeably better than competitors and its footage — shot in 5.7K — is good enough for professional projects. The VIRB is compact and, without a casing, can record in 33 feet of water. We like its 360-degree image and video quality — and if needed, its ability to do more.

Photo: Mike Perlman

Drone: DJI Phantom 4 Pro

Flying a drone is an experience in itself, but flying one that’s smarter with extended range and battery life keeps the party going. The DJI Phantom 4 Pro (Amazon), our upgrade pick for drones, is for seasoned videographers and photographers who could use a bit more help with getting the best images and 4K videos.

The Phantom 4 Pro has a mechanical shutter and a 20-megapixel, 1-inch CMOS sensor that produces more refined footage. While its more expensive than other DJI models, it’s one of the safest and has advanced collision detection sensors that contribute to stability when it hovers.

Though we consider its four-mile range, comfortable controller (which includes a 5.5-inch, 1080p screen), and Obstacle Sensing System to be among its best features, its manual photography controls leave room for skill and customization.

Photo: Chris Heinonen

Bookshelf speakers: The KEF Q15

For clearer sound and more detail we recommend the KEF Q15 (Amazon), a favorite during testing and our upgrade pick for bookshelf speakers. Whether used for setting the mood or background entertainment, you’ll notice a difference in the way the Q15 set delivers sound.

Audiophiles, musicians and everyday listeners will be able to detect the superiority of its in-depth bass, and the sound of instruments that are easier to distinguish.

Largely, the Q15’s specially designed Uni-Q drivers contribute to its overall performance. Its black or white finish is straightforward and modest enough to pair with decor in most homes—the appeal heightens when the speakers are on.

Photo: Signe Brewster

Home 3D printer for beginners: Aleph Objects LulzBot Mini

Makers and creative tech enthusiasts who have a home 3D printer are automatically deemed cool. True impressiveness is rooted in how and what a 3D printer is capable of producing. The Aleph Objects LulzBot Mini takes print production up a few levels by offering higher quality and higher volume. Beginners who are just starting out will find the guidance of this printer’s simple software and preloaded print settings helpful.

We like that its heated bed makes picking up prints less difficult once they’re completed. Creatives who want to try a hand at something a bit more difficult can do so, as the LulzBot Mini handles complex designs well.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

Facebook is expanding its support for header bidding, a technology that allows publishers to auction off ad impressions through real-time bidding between ad networks.

The company announced its support for header bidding on the mobile web last year. Today, it’s adding something similar for in-app advertising.

That means app publishers who use header bidding can include ads from Facebook’s Audience Network in their auctions. To enable this, Facebook is partnering with Fyber, MAX and Twitter’s MoPub.

Here’s how Facebook’s Vijay Balan laid out the benefits of the new approach:

Currently, ad networks are called one-by-one until an app ad is filled, determined by historical average CPMs rather than which buyer is willing to pay the most. This method often overlooks a network willing to pay more for an impression because it is lower in the chain.

App bidding enables app publishers and developers to establish an impartial and open auction over their ad inventory. All advertising networks are called simultaneously and the highest bidder for the placement wins, thereby providing publishers with opportunities to earn more. Publishers can maximize their access to high value advertisers, fueling the creation of sustainable ad businesses that help ensure people continue to enjoy access to high quality free content.

Balan said Facebook has already been testing this with publishers who have their own ad-serving technology, including Rovio, Talefun and GameInsight. Those early tests have seen revenue gains of up to 20 percent.

Switchee, an IoT startup based in London, has raised £1.3 million in “pre-Series A” funding for its smart thermostat and accompanying cloud-based service. However, unlike consumer offerings, such as Nest, Hive or Tado, the company’s product is targeting large landlords, initially within the social housing sector.

The idea is to help social landlords both tackle fuel poverty amongst their residents and as part of their social remit, and to provide a scalable technology solution for managing their properties. This includes something akin to an early warning system for common housing stock maintenance issues, such as mould, poor insulation, or a failing boiler.

Leading the round is Fair by Design Fund, a new £15 million fund managed by Ascension Ventures and backed by Big Society Capital and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It specifically targets companies tackling the U.K.’s poverty premium.

Other backers of Switchee’s latest round include Contrarian Ventures, an early stage energy fund backed by Lietuvos Energija (the largest energy provider in the Baltics), and AU Capital Partners, a VC fund focused on the U.K.-India corridor and investing in technology companies in IOT, Smart Cities and fintech. Previously Mustard Seed, and ClearlySo invested.

“We solve two problems, one on the resident side the other on the landlord side,” Switchee co-founder Ian Napier tells TechCrunch. “For residents, fuel poverty and high energy costs, with 1 in 10 households in the U.K. having to make a choice between ‘heating’ or ‘eating’. For landlords, the poor or non-existent data about their housing stock and resultant maintenance and repair inefficiencies. To give an idea on cost, the average annual maintenance spend per property is £4,000. We have even seen examples of Housing Associations not knowing which houses they own”.

Interestingly, Switchee has decided to build its own hardware rather than, say, piecing together existing consumer smart home solutions or simply white labelling a competitor’s offering. This is something Napier says the startup has routinely debated internally but decided that to deliver a smart thermostat that truly fits the needs of social landlords, it was necessary to be fully vertically integrated, with bespoke hardware working in tandem with the Switchee cloud service and landlord analytics.

And that seems to be working out quite well so far. Following two years of commercial pilots, including successfully deploying Switchee on a national scale last winter, the company says it is now working with over 40 of the U.K.’s leading social landlords, including Flagship Group, The Guinness Partnership, and Peabody, in addition to a number of Local Authorities and Councils.

“We sell the hardware, which landlords give to their residents for free. We also sell access to our landlord SaaS dashboard which aggregates sensory data from Switchee thermostats and presents housing management and welfare alerts. These data insights allow landlords to better understand and manage their large housing portfolios, and the communities they house, more efficiently”.

The Switchee device itself has temperature, light, motion, humidity and air pressure sensors, which it uses to learn occupancy and a property’s “thermal profile” i.e. how quickly it heats and cools. Based on this data, it then optimizes heating settings remotely — meaning that the Switchee device can be used passively, which Napier says is crucial for a non-direct to consumer offering — and as a result claims to reduce resident energy bills by up to 15 percent. It connects via 2G phone networks (in addition to WiFi) so as not to have to rely on a resident’s own internet connection.

“We can be passive ‘fit and forget’,” says Napier. “Switchee will automatically calculate optimum heating settings and regulate heating to reduce wastage and cut bills. Residents who receive a free thermostat can be less engaged than a consumer who chooses to buy a Nest or Hive… so we can’t rely on engagement. But we hope residents will love our technology and use it. We just don’t need them to if they have other things going on”.

The data the device collects is also used to produce a landlord dashboard displaying a range of welfare and maintenance KPIs and alerts such as mould risk, poor insulation, fuel poverty risk and boiler performance. “This facilitates a shift from reactive to pre-emptive maintenance, saving money and delivering better outcomes,” he says.

On the topic of data privacy, Napier says the Switchee team believe in using “data for good”. In this instance, to combat fuel poverty and to help social landlords care for properties and communities more effectively. “The real key to data privacy, we believe, is transparency and communication: we explain to residents what information we are collecting and why. And we always obtain consent before installing,” he says.

Asked specifically about the occupancy data the device collects and how it can be used, Napier says the company is not interested in the occupancy profiles that drive residents’ energy bill savings, only the outcome, i.e. lower energy bills. “Similarly, we don’t share raw occupancy with landlords, but we do have a couple of features derived from that occupancy. We can suggest convenient times for engineer, repair or other house visits. And we can alert landlords if we think a property has been abandoned,” he adds.

At an event in Brazil this morning, Lenovo announced the latest addition to its line of modular handsets. The Moto Z3 doesn’t represent a big leap for the line, but it does introduce a slight change in approach for a company hoping to make a bigger splash on the modular side of the question.

Like its predecessor, the Z3 Play will be priced at an extremely reasonable $499. That includes some upgrades, such as a slight redesign with a glass back (Gorilla Glass 3 on both sides) and a screen that’s been extended to six inches (a 2160 x 1080 resolution at 18:9), courtesy of thinner bezels and fingerprint reader that’s been moved around to the side of the devices.

That’s a 79 percent screen-to-body ratio, by Motorola’s count, but no embrace yet of the nearly ubiquitous top notch. The company, it seems, is saving that for the upcoming Motorola Power One, its upcoming iPhone X-like flagship. The Z3 Play, for all of the flashiness of modularity, is still a mid-tier handset, as evidenced by (among other things), the octa-core Snapdragon 636 inside.

One of the key differentiators here, however, is how the company is selling the device. Bundles make a lot of sense with a device for which accessories are a key selling point. A number of third parties have offered some version of this, discounting mods with the purchase of the phone. Now, however, the bundles are being offered from the get-go, included as part of that $499 price point.

The Z3 will ship with either Motorola’s first-party speaker or battery pack. Availability will depend on the country. Here in the States, for example, it seems we’ll only be getting access to the battery version, which augments the handset’s solid 3000 mAh “all day” battery. It is, understandably, the best-selling Moto Mod — the speaker, meanwhile, is in second place. The availability of said bundles will be dependent on the popularity of those devices in a given location.

Motorola’s given out these numbers before, but they bear repeating: one-third of those who purchase a Moto Z device end up picking up a Mod. Roughly 60 percent of that number, meanwhile, buy two or more. Those numbers are surprisingly low, given that Mods seems like such a central selling point for the product.

After all, the company has made some sacrifices for such modularity. Chief among these are the fact that there’s really not a lot of wiggle room with regard to device footprint. As long as the company wants to continue making the devices backward-compatible with Mods, the phones are going to have remain roughly the same size.

Motorola squeezes a little more screen out of the device through the above-mentioned methods, and while it tells me that it’s confident there’s still space to work with on future devices, it does seem to have painted itself in a corner here. For all of Essential’s seeming struggles, the device’s connector allowed for a broader range of sizes and shapes.

The company’s no doubt hoping these bundles will kickstart interest in Mods. Until one comes along that really excites the fan base, however, it’s easy to see how making the two most popular Mods available essentially for free could ultimately eat into potential sales.

Meantime, the device will be arriving at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Fry’s and B&H Photo this summer. It will also be available through Amazon’s Prime Exclusive program.

LinkedIn, the social media site that’s aimed at people looking to network or otherwise change up their career prospects, is taking a plunge into location-based services. From today, the company is turning on a new feature that will let job-seekers check out the location and commute time to specific businesses, to help them evaluate whether they would want to work there.

‘Your Commute’ as the feature is called, is now available globally on mobile, providing location data for all businesses where LinkedIn already has location information, and it will be coming soon to desktop, senior product manager Dan Li told TechCrunch.

The feature will appear within job postings on LinkedIn and will become a part of how LinkedIn surfaces job opportunities in its search feature for its 500 million-plus users. “When members save their location preferences in Career Interests, we’re able to provide more relevant job recommendations that fit exactly what they’re looking for in their next role,” he said. “We’re thinking through additional ways members can use location information to improve their job searches in the near future.”

For now, the distance feature isn’t being used in other parts of the LinkedIn platform, but you can imagine where it might pop up next. For example, when two contacts are arranging an in-person meeting, LinkedIn’s AI ‘bot’ — which is already being used to suggest conversation openers in messages — could suggest locations to meet that are mutually convenient for the two parties.

LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion in 2016, has been slowly cross-pollenating features and services with its new owner, and this is the case here. The location and navigation data is being supplied by Bing Maps, Microsoft’s mapping service that is akin to Google and Apple Maps, by way of its API.

Using it in LinkedIn will give Bing one more extension into more traffic and data collection to help expand the maps’ datasets. And for a mapping service that lags by some way behind use of Google Maps, that extra boost is a help. For LinkedIn, it gives it one more hook to keep people engaged in and using their service, both to expand the usefulness of LinkedIn itself, as well as to give its job listings one more edge over other competing job boards.

You can get an initial list of details about a company’s location through LinkedIn itself — helping with the app’s own engagement — but LinkedIn, hoping to make this as useful as possible, will also allow users to dive in deeper and open the navigation up in other maps.

While LinkedIn has sometimes been taken to task for how it suggests connections to users — particularly in cases where it isn’t even clear how LinkedIn has gleaning is social graph information in the first place — Li said that the addition of this feature came straight from user feedback.

“Our members have indicated that the location of a job — and the commute time associated with it — is a big factor in their decision making process when considering new roles, and we know commute times are getting longer across the board according to recent research from Gallup,” he said.

The company’s own LinkedIn survey data indicated that 85 percent of professionals would take a pay cut for a shorter commute. “The Your Commute feature is a quick and easy way for members to access insight into their potential commute directly within the job posting on LinkedIn and empower them to make more informed career decisions.”

More generally, location has become a huge factor in how people choose jobs, and for the less sexy companies out there based in far-flung suburbs that might mean cheaper overheads, it’s become a false economy of sorts, as these same companies have found their locations to be a challenge when recruiting talent. Some have even opted to lease spaces in WeWork offices or other slick co-working venues that are in more central areas, as a way of attracting top candidates.

The more complicated side of that has seen huge concentrations of people in specific industries like the tech world, where remunerations are generous, flocking and filling out cities across the Bay Area to be closer to their jobs, leading to huge housing crunches. In a way, LinkedIn’s tool could make that location drive even more acute in sectors where it’s already a problem.

Dockless bike sharing startups — such as Ofo, Mobike and LimeBike — have flooded European cities with rides that can be hired at the tap of an app in recent years.

But fierce competition in the urban mobility space is not deterring Uber from peddling into the region, and attempting to put some shine back on a brand that’s still divisive — charged with all sorts of problematic effects from rising congestion and air pollution to having a damaging impact on workers’ rights.

It’s certainly true that the hangover from Uber’s legacy operational style of brash expansionism and thumbing its nose at regulators continues to cause the company problems in Europe.

Many cities have banned its p2p service, and last year — in a major upset — London’s transport regulator withdrew its license to operate.

Though under new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Uber has also been expanding in some European markets — where regulatory requirements allow.

Uber’s new chief executive has taken a strikingly different tone vs founder Travis Kalanick, saying he wants to work with cities and local authorities, rather than fight them.

Today at the NOAH conference in Berlin that emollient tone was on show again, with Khosrowshahi announcing that Uber’s Jump electric bike sharing service will launch in the city this summer.

“Here in Germany, I am determined to have a better dialogue with cities and various German stakeholders to discuss how we can shape the future of urban mobility together. Uber stands ready to help address some of the biggest challenges facing German cities: tackling air pollution, reducing congestion and increasing access to cleaner transportation solutions,” he said.

Other unnamed European cities are also slated to launch in the coming months. And bikes can’t be accused of exacerbating air pollution or road-based congestion.

Khosrowshahi also said Uber will also launch its all electric vehicle Uber Green service in Berlin by the end of the year, following a recent launch in Munch — saying that was Uber “playing our part in tackling air pollution”.

“I’m thrilled to announce two new products for Berlin that are an important first step in developing our long term partnership with Germany — our Jump pedal-assist electric bikes and the introduction of a fully electric Uber Green service,” he added. “The team is working hard to bring Jump to Berlin by the end of this summer and we also plan to launch in additional cities across Europe in the coming months.

“We’re particularly excited about bikes because they can provide a convenient, environmentally friendly ride even in dense cities where space is limited and roads can be congested.”

Uber acquired the Jump bike sharing startup back in April, paying around $200M according to a source close to the situation.

The Jump bikes use electrical assistance so renters do still need to peddle. On a full charge the bikes have a range of 30 to 40 miles.

Uber deploys teams to service bikes but its Help Center warns users “the bike you rent might not be at full charge” — so the rider can end up having to do work without assistance from the motor if the battery goes flat.

SAP announced today at its Sapphire customer conference it was making the SAP Leonardo Blockchain service generally available. The latter is a cloud service to help companies build applications based on digital ledger-style technology.

Gil Perez, senior vice president for product and innovation and head of digital customer initiatives at SAP, says most of the customers he talks to are still very early in the proof of concept stage, but not so early that SAP doesn’t want to provide a service to help move them along the maturity curve.

“We are announcing the general availability of the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Services.” This is a generalized service on top of which customers can begin building their blockchain projects. He says SAP is taking an agnostic approach to the underlying ledger technology whether it’s the open source Hyperledger project, where SAP is a platinum sponsor, MultiChain or any additional blockchain or decentralized distributed ledger technologies.

Perez said part of the reason for this flexibility is that blockchain technology is really still being defined and SAP doesn’t want to commit to any underlying ledger approach until the market decides which way to go. He says this should allow them them to minimize the impact on customers as the technology evolves.

They join other enterprise companies like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon who have previously released blockchains services for their customers. For SAP, which many companies use for the back-office management of everything from finance to logistics, the blockchain could present some interesting use cases for its customers such as supply chain management.

In this case, the blockchain could help reduce paperwork, bring products to market more quickly and provide an easy audit trail. Instead of requesting a scanned copy of a signed document, you could simply click on a node on the blockchain and see the approval (or denial) and follow the products through the shipping process to the marketplace.

But Perez stresses that just because it’s early doesn’t mean they aren’t working on some pretty substantial projects. He cited one with a pharmaceutical company to ensure the provenance of drugs that involved over a billion transactions already.

SAP is simply trying to keep up with what customers want. Prior to the GA announced today, the company conducted a survey of 250 customers and found, that although it was early days, there is enterprise interest in exploring blockchain technology. Whether this initiative can expand into a broader business is hard to say, but SAP sees blockchain as logical adjacent technology to their core offerings.

Is it time to swipe left on the swipe? Badoo, a UK-based dating app with some 388 million users globally — whose majority-owned app Bumble is currently being sued by Tinder in part for its use of swiping — says that it will be removing the gesture from its own app as a way to let users browse profiles. In its place, the company says it is rolling out a new feature called Badoo Live — live video broadcasts to help people show off their personalities on the platform in a more authentic way, after its users said they were losing interest in swiping.

“Badoo is all about real dates, not just matches or swiping; we want to get our users offline and face-to-face,” Badoo’s CEO and founder Andrey Andreev said to TechCrunch in a statement.

Users will be able to send messages during a live session, which appears to work on a principle similar to Facebook Live, where people can catch widely broadcast streams as they happen, or watch them in playback mode. Once a match is made, users can start a live video chat with each other (a feature launched last month).

The swiping gesture is a common one in the mobile world, where people rely on quick and imprecise movements to send commands to apps and interact with their small screens with a minimum of fuss.

But after it was made popular in the world of dating apps specifically by Tinder, the swipe has more recently become a point of contention.

Match Group, which controls Tinder, earlier this year filed a patent and intellectual property infringement lawsuit against rival app Bumble, which is majority owned by Badoo (and founded by a co-founder of Tinder), in part related to the latter app’s use of the swipe.

Bumble, it alleges, “copied Tinder’s world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise,” among other accusations related to similarities between the two apps’ designs. Bumble has responded with its own suit. (To complicate things, it seems that Badoo is exploring a sale, and Tinder’s owner has tried to buy Bumble, but so far these two have yet to make a match.)

To be very clear, Badoo denies that today’s announcement is connected in any way with the lawsuits’ focus on swiping. Rather, it says it’s the result of a survey it ran with millennials (18-30 year-old) British consumers, who appear to have grown tired of the swipe and are looking for more something closer to real life before taking the plunge and agreeing to an actual in-person meeting.

“We are testing the removal of our ‘encounters’ feature, as our research shows that people now value real life interactions and want to see more of the person behind the profile picture,” Andreev said to TechCrunch. “Badoo Live, launching soon, will give our users the chance to let their true personalities shine through; interact in real time and ultimately, form more genuine connections.”

Badoo’s research covered 5,000 respondents, among whom 74 percent said they were looking for more “real-life dating experiences” and 68 percent said they “dislike swiping,” which they perceive as a shallow way of interacting. Broadcasts, Badoo found, were deemed by 83 percent of respondents as a more comfortable indicator of whether they would want to meet someone.

At a time when we’ve seen both ups and downs for user-generated live video streaming services — Facebook and YouTube continue to ramp their live plays up; and Vimeo is now also entering the fray; but there is some evidence that Periscope is on the wane — Badoo Live is an interesting turn and will be worth watching how it catches on.

One of the attractions (sorry for the pun) of apps based on swiping has been the fact that a user can take a gradual and rapid approach to figuring out if another person is someone he or she would like to meet. Live video may be more “authentic”, but it also throws some of that efficiency out the window: one tester of the service, Badoo said, has already used Badoo Live to stream a friend’s wedding… for 13 hours.

Starting in 2020, Cadillac will start to offer autonomous driving on every Cadillac model. The Super Cruise system is already available today but limited to just the full-size CT6 sedan. General Motors is also announcing today that the SuperCruise system will start hitting other GM brands — such as Chevrolet, GMC, and Buick —  after 2020. And then by 2023, an unnamed, high-volume Cadillac crossover will have vehicle-to-everything communication to let it speak to similarly equipped vehicles, infrastructure and other connected devices.

Super Cruise launched earlier this year and only works on expressway in the United States.

When active, Super Cruise controls the steering and speed, but again, only on an expressway. This is done through on board sensors and using GPS and mapping data. GM employed GeoDigital, a startup in GM Venture’s portfolio, to map 160,000 miles of expressways in the U.S. and Canada . The car company then used Super Cruise-equipped vehicles to test each mile.

I tried out the Super Cruise system and found it easy and enjoyable to use. It feels like just another feature and not anything tacked onto an already-finished vehicle.

Cadillac and General Motors are clearly take its time to roll out the system. The CT6 is a low-volume vehicle and Super Cruise is optional. There has been very little advertising around the autonomous feature.

Super Cruise is Cadillac’s answer to Tesla’s  Autopilot. The system shares a lot of the same marketable points, but there are key differences. For one, Super Cruise only works on expressways. Cadillac’s system also lacks several autonomous features found on Autopilot including the ability to pull the car out of a garage and change lanes by using the turn signals.

The system will likely evolve and mature and the SuperCruise that hits future vehicles will likely be more sophisticated that the one that’s available today.

While DoorDash, Postmates and other apps are looking to reimagine what the food delivery experience looks like, Ray Reddy says he wants to figure out what the next generation of a food court looks like. Sort of.

Reddy’s startup, Ritual, aims to remake the whole process of leaving your office and walking around five minutes to a nearby deli or cafe to pick up food for lunch. But Reddy and his founders Larry Stinson and Robert Kim wanted to focus first on getting that experience right for a single building that leaves to go pick up coffee or food — and has that daily ritual of getting lunch with the team, or something along those lines. The whole process boils down to an app for consumers to order food or drinks as well as have coworkers piggyback onto that order to create a more socialized experience around getting up and going around the corner for a snack. Ritual said it has raised a new $70 million round led by Georgian Partners, with existing investors Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, and Mistral Venture Partners all participating.

“If we [couldn’t] build something that is compelling for the 300 people who work at this single building, it’s not gonna work period,” Redddy said. “That helped us define the problem narrowly. We thought, here are the 12 or 14 spots within a five minute walk of this building, let’s focus on simulating what would happen. Let’s not worry about financials or economics, let’s prove this works. Just like Uber’s a remote control for the real world, we viewed this in a similar way where ultimately the app is a remote control for a real world experience.”

Ritual’s main flow is probably something the typical user is accustomed to at this point when it comes to food. They pick a place they like, place an order for food (or coffee), and then go pick it up. But the whole background process involves not only getting restaurants on board with the specific things they want while still trying to calibrate a consistent experience that users at this point expect when it comes to ordering something online after being trained on that simplicity for years by Postmates, DoorDash, or even apps by companies like Starbucks.

But over the past year or so, the company has increasingly tuned itself to employees jumping aboard the same order when considering what to pick up for a snack or a meal. The whole process aims at emulating that experience of figuring out where you want to eat in a Slack channel or arguing over a Seamless order, and in the end whoever has time to run out and grab something will be able to bring things back for teammates (or, of course, everyone can leave at the same time). That whole process is called “piggybacking,” a feature the company introduced around 18 months ago. The company has around 44,500 teams using the app, Reddy said.

All this is aimed to help restaurants adapt to the same changes in user behavior that retail has seen in the past decade, Reddy said. Amazon trained users to buy things online, forcing retailers to shift their strategies, just as Postmates and DoorDash have trained users to order food delivery through apps and immediately have access to a ton of options. With all that comes more and more data, which has helped those industries slowly tune their models over time and try to keep up with the increase in demand that has come with reducing friction around the whole experience.

“What restaurants are seeing are right now the same challenges retailers saw 10 years ago,” Reddy said. “What does it mean to become omni-channel, how do you go from one customer segment to dealing with walk-ins plus digital orders. Retailers faced a lot of those challenges 10 years ago, they faced challenges around pricing, fulfillment, and how do they build new capabilities. They are dealing with a new source of demand, and fundamentally the problem was a lot of stores weren’t designed for accepting multi-channel origins.”

While an order-ahead app might be one way to connect online users to a physical location, there’s still plenty of work to do as most restaurants, coffee shops or typical stores aren’t tuned for a digital-first experience, Reddy said. That extends to even not having enough counter space to hold coffee cups that customers have ordered ahead of time, much less including things like NFC readers or QR codes — the latter of which has proved wildly popular and effective throughout Asia thanks to services like Alipay and WeChat. And that’s largely a result of iOS and Android, the main platforms in North America, not really doing a lot with QR codes for a very long time. Reddy said that North America was making some progress, especially when it came to NFC, but for now the company still has to figure out unique ways to connect users to those restaurants.

That can take a lot of different forms. While Ritual has to figure out how to create a seamless experience that covers a lot of different restaurants or shops, Reddy said the startup still has to offer those same stores some kind of control over the experience. That means giving those customers some value proposition beyond just telling them to sign up for another order-ahead app. Ritual, for example, lets restaurants who onboard Ritual customers themselves keep the full transaction for a purchase, while it takes a small slice off other transactions. That, in addition to other marketing options, helps restaurants control their own destiny, he said.

Of course, at its heart, it’s an order-ahead app — even with that social experience on top of it. And if you’ve ever looked at where to eat nearby with coworkers, you’ve probably checked Yelp or a few other places, and possibly even settled the argument with a giant order on an online ordering platform like DoorDash or Seamless. All these have already tapped that user experience, and it’s not clear if Ritual would be able to clear enough room should any one of them go after a similar experience while already having that customer and user relationship, in addition to being the spot customers go already. In the end, Reddy says that it’ll come down to users having a few apps, and hopes that by offering restaurants flexibility and focusing on the hyper-local idea of just a single office building will help build up that moat.

“The way that things have played out in Asia [with platforms like WeChat] is exactly striking the right balance between a platform and giving stores control,” Reddy said. “When you think of the consumer view, people — for the same reason you don’t have 10 retail apps — don’t have 10 food apps. You’re not gonna download an app for every neighborhood spot. It’s not that these apps are bad or don’t work well, people are just not gonna download 10 apps. There’s gonna be a handful of platforms people are going to use to access their neighborhoods. We have to have a unified platform, but give restaurant partners enough control, not only over being able to speak with their customers, but control for the look and feel of their storefront. That’s the middle ground we’re looking to find, which we think is a win for customers and our storefronts.”