Year: 2018

Social media stars have always been treated like nobodies instead of VIPs on Snapchat. Despite pioneering the Stories and creative tools they love, the lack of support saw many drift to YouTube’s ad dollars and Instagram’s bigger audience. Now Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is finally stepping up to win back their favor and their content.

Last night, Spiegel joined 13 top Snapchat stars, ranging from the U.S. to as far as Lebanon, for dinner at the company’s first Creators Summit in LA. Flanked by a dozen Snap execs and product managers, Spiegel tried to impress upon the assembled artists, comedians and storytellers that the company is turning over a new leaf in how it will treat them. Today the creators sat with Snap VP of Content Nick Bell to give the company an unfiltered understanding of the tools they need and give input on Snapchat’s product roadmap.

“The goal of our first creator summit was to listen and learn from them about how we can continue to strengthen opportunities for them on Snapchat — and continue to empower our community to express themselves and have fun together,” Bell told TechCrunch. “We are grateful to each of them for coming to the table with candid feedback and are excited about the possibilities ahead.” Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch it plans to hold more of these Creator Summits.

Mike Metzler, one of the popular Snappers in attendance, told us, “It’s been refreshing. Snap seems very genuinely interested in listening to what we have to say, and committed to making this an important initiative.” But another questioned whether Snapchat was actually going to make changes or was just playing nice.

Creators cast aside

A week after Snapchat launched Stories in 2013, I asked “Who will be the first Snapchat Stories celebrity?” Apparently the young company hadn’t thought that through. It had concentrated entirely on the average American teen, to the detriment of power users and the international market.

Snapchat’s jankily engineered app crashed constantly for stars with too many followers. There were no advanced analytics about who was watching them or easy ways to prove their audience to brand sponsors. There was no support from Snapchat if they got hacked or locked out of their account. There was no ad revenue share. There was no promotion to help people discover their accounts.

Without a direct alternative, creators gritted their teeth and dealt with it. But when Instagram Stories came along, with its massive audience, Explore page and experienced outreach team for dealing with high-profile accounts, some jumped ship. Others focused their attention on Instagram, or YouTube, where they could at least get a cut of the ad money they generated. Users drifted too, leading many stars to see their view counts drop.

The situation came to a head on Snap’s November 2017 Q3 earnings call. With user growth slumping to a new low, Spiegel announced a change of course. “We have historically neglected the creator community on Snapchat that creates and distributes public Stories for the broader Snapchat audience. In 2018, we are going to build more distribution and monetization opportunities for these creators,” Spiegel admitted.

Snap began rolling out its verification badge, an emoji next to the user name, to social media stars instead of just traditional celebrities. With its recent redesign, it began promoting creators for the first time if they made something engaging enough to become a”Popular Story.” And in February it finally launched analytics for creators, which would help them secure sponsorship deals.

Still, Snap hadn’t done much soft diplomacy. While top creators frequent the offices of YouTube and Instagram, few had been to Snapchat HQ. They needed a face to connect the efforts to.

Spiegel and the stars

“[Spiegel] stopped by last night and was so happy to meet us, get to know us, take a selfie,” says CyreneQ, a prolific Snapper and master of its illustration tools. While he didn’t make any grand remarks, apologies, or proclamations, his presence signaled that the push to help creators was more than just talk. When asked how the Summit went, musician/comedian Shonduras told me, “we collaborated on a lot of ideas and it feels solid.”

Snapchat’s redesign moved creators into the Discover section

The biggest concern amongst the creators was growing their view counts. The recent redesign moved stars, brands and other popular people who don’t follow you back out of the friends Stories list and into the Discover section alongside professionally produced editorial content. One creator said that helped them find more fans, but another who asked not to be named said “It hasn’t been kind to my views.”

Bell and Snapchat listened, and informed the group that it’s going to develop a range of “tools and programs to help the creator community,” CyreneQ told me. Pressed for more details, she demurred, “I wish I could tell you but they’ll send ninjas after me.”

Monetization options should be high on Snapchat’s list. As long as creators are essentially producing content for free, they’ll be susceptible to the pull of other products. And if Snap can’t speed up its total user growth, it must find ways to get teens addicted to stars that boost the time they spend in its app.

The 2017 hack of Equifax, already among the largest ever recorded, just got bigger. Well, they’re admitting that it was bigger than they had previously, which amounts to the same thing. Documents filed with the SEC reveal that more people, more IDs, and more info in general was stolen when the company utterly failed to protect its “users,” many of which didn’t even know they were in the database.

The company revealed various numbers around the time it disclosed the hack, though one it neglected to include was how many millions of dollars in stock were sold by executives before publicly disclosing it. But let’s not linger on their past crimes. I’m sure they’re very sorry!

Amanda Werner, dressed as Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags, sits behind Richard Smith, CEO of Equifax, during a Senate hearing.

Today’s information was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of the company’s disclosures regarding the hack. It provided first a handy table listing what was stolen as raw strings of data from Equifax’s inadequately protected databases:

• Full name: 146.6M
• Date of Birth: 146.6M
• Social Security number: 145.5M
• Full address: 99M
• Gender: 27.3M
• Phone number: 20.3M
• Driver’s license number (incl. 2.4M partials): 17.6M
• Email address: 1.8M
• Credit card numbers (with expiration dates): 209,000
• Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN/Tax ID): 97,500
• Driver’s license state: 27,000

Previous estimates of driver’s license numbers leaked were around 10.9 million, and total affected put at 143 million. Sure, the difference between 143 million and 146.6 million is relatively small, but it’s still 3.6 million people.

Secondly the filing includes a table listing images stolen by the attackers. These were “uploaded to Equifax’s online dispute portal by approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers,” the document says.

• Driver’s license: 38,000
• Social Security of Taxpayer ID Card: 12,000
• Passport or Passport Card: 3,200
• Other: 3,000

It’s unclear why these don’t add up to 182,000, but the images could also have been non-valuable things like forms or pictures of assets.

Imagine the kind of havoc you could wreak with even a few isolated data points from this set. Phishing teams and other scammers must be having the time of their lives: with so much official data to use, it’s that much easier to convince someone that a service or email is legitimate. Images of licenses and passports could lead to more sophisticated fraud at borders or in other government situations as well.

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Google today announced a new version of Google Maps that will launch later this summer. All of the core Google Maps features for getting directions aren’t going away, of course, but on top of that, the team has now built a new set of features that are all about exploration.

“About a year ago, when we started to talk to users, one of the things we asked them was: how can we really help you? What else do you want Google Maps to do? And one of the overwhelming answers that we got back was just really a lot of requests around helping users explore an area, help me decide where to go,” Sophia Lin, Google’s senior product manager on the Google Maps team, told me. “So we really started digging in to thinking about what we can really do here from Google that would really help people.”

Right now, Google Maps is obviously best known for helping people get where they want to go, but for a while now, Google has featured all kinds of additional content in the service. Many users never touch those features, though, it seems. While I couldn’t get Lin to tell me about the percentage of users who currently use the existing Google Maps exploration tools, this new initiative is also part of an attempt to get users to move beyond directions when they think about Maps.

And because this is Google, that new experience is all about personalization with the help of AI.

So in the new Maps, you’ll find the new “For you” tab that’s basically a newsfeed-like experience with recommendations for you. You’ll be able to “follow” certain neighborhoods and cities (or maybe a place you plan to visit soon), similar to a social networking experience. When Google Maps finds interesting updates in that area — maybe a restaurant that’s trending or a new coffee shop that opens — it’ll tell you about that in your feed.

“People had problems finding out what’s new,” Lin told me. “Sometimes you are really lucky and you’re walking down the street and stumble across something, but oftentimes that’s not the case and you find out about something six months after it opened, so what we started looking into was can we understand, from anonymized population dynamics, what places are trending, what are the places that people are going.”

There are also algorithmically designed “Foodie List” and “Trending this week” lists that show you what’s new and interesting and where the trendmakers in an area are hanging out. As Lin told me, the Foodie List is based on an anonymized cohort analysis that looks at where people who go out a lot gather. Because those are often the first to try new places, too, their movements often tend to presage trends. Similarly, the “Trending” list looks at the overall population, so that list can change based on season, with an ice cream parlor trending in the summer, for example.

For other items in the “For you” feed, Google Maps will actually analyze articles about local news to see what’s new, too.

Lin stressed that the feed isn’t so much about the volume of information but about presenting the right information at the right time and for the right person.

In addition to the “For you” feed, there are also a number of new basic exploration features, which are all powered by AI, too. Maps will generate lists of Michelin-starred restaurants, for example, or popular brunch spots depending on your context and the time of day.

Another major new feature that’s coming to Maps soon is “your match.” If you regularly peruse the star ratings of various restaurants before you decide where to go, then you know that those ratings can only tell you so much. Now, with “your match,” Maps will present you with a personalized score that tells you how closely a restaurant matches your own preferences.

Google Maps learns about those preferences based on how you have rated this and other places and your own preferences, which you can actually set manually in the Google Maps settings once this update goes live. Interestingly, Google does not try to base these scores on how other people like you have rated a place.

The third major new feature of the new app is group planning. Based on the demo I saw, the team actually did a really nice job with this. The general idea here is to allow you to easily create a list of suggestions for a group outing (or just a dinner with your significant other) by long-pressing on a place listing. Google Maps will then pop up a chat head-like bubble that follows you around as you browse for other places. Once you have compiled your list, you can share it with your friends, who can then vote for their favorites.

Google will launch this new Google Maps experience later this summer. It will come to both iOS and Android, though the team hasn’t decided which one will come first yet. For now, all of these new features will only come to the app, not the web.

A new report published by security researched Troy Mursch details how the cryptocurrency mining code known as Coinhive is creeping onto unsuspecting sites around the web. Mursch recently detected the Coinhive code running on nearly 400 websites, including ones belonging to the San Diego Zoo, Lenovo and another for the National Labor Relations Board. The full list is available here.

Notably, the list names a number of official government and education websites, including the Office of the Inspector General Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and sites for the University of Aleppo and the UCLA Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences program.

Most of the affected sites are hosted by Amazon and are located in the United States and Mursch believes that they were compromised through an outdated version of Drupal:

“Digging a little deeper into the cryptojacking campaign, I found in both cases that Coinhive was injected via the same method. The malicious code was contained in the “/misc/jquery.once.js?v=1.2” JavaScript library. Soon thereafter, I was notified of additional compromised sites using a different payload. However, all the infected sites pointed to the same domain using the same Coinhive site key.

Once the code was deobfuscated, the reference to “http://vuuwd.com/t.js” was clearly seen. Upon visiting the URL, the ugly truth was revealed. A slightly throttled implementation of Coinhive was found.”

Coinhive, a JavaScript program, mines the cryptocurrency known as Monero in the background through a web browser. While Coinhive isn’t intrinsically malicious, it can be injected into unsuspecting code in a “cryptojacking” attack, forcing it to mine Monero without the victim’s knowledge.

With so much focus on consumer-facing updates, it can be easy to forget that the rest of I/O is all about developers. So, when the company announces a rare piece of first-party hardware at the event, it should come as no surprise that it’s just not for the rest of us.

A month after passing mysteriously through the FCC, Google’s new Android TV dongle made its debut at an I/O session this afternoon. The ADT-2 is the follow up to, get this, the ADT-1, which was introduced at I/O back in 2014, designed to give devs an easy in to Google’s set-top offering.

The older version hasn’t really gotten much love in recent years, but Google’s letting the developer world know that it’s still committed with the sequel, which brings along a number of new features announced at the show today.

The biggest new bit for the limited-edition device is a preview of Android P. The upcoming version of the company’s mobile operating system brings some nice additions to the big screen, including autofill for passwords and auto installs of apps you put on handsets or past versions of Android TV. The dongle supports 4K streaming and has 8GB of storage built in. It also supports Google Assistant via a Bluetooth remote with built-in mics.

The ADT-2 comes as Google makes a renewed push around Android TV. Yesterday, the company announced a JBL soundbar that brings both Android TV and Assistant to sets via HDMI. The company has made it clear that the set-top version of Android will be a key part of the company’s play for the living room, as it looks to beat the likes of Apple and Fire TV.

Developers can apply for the device here.

Facebook was a mess. The independence it dangled to close acquisition deals with Instagram and WhatsApp turned the company into a tangle of overlapping products. Every app had its own messaging and Stories options. Economies of scale were squandered. Top innovators led mature products already bursting at the seams with features while new opportunities went unseized.

Facebook was effectively drowning in its own success because the different arms couldn’t coordinate to paddle in the same direction.

But today Facebook announced its biggest reorganization ever, which could cut the redundancy, apply talent to fresh problems and unite the company under a common banner.

Putting the family first

Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, will fly that flag. He now oversees the “Facebook Family of Apps,” including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Messenger’s VP of Product Stan Chudnovsky will take over as head of Messenger, replacing David Marcus, who’s moving to lead a new blockchain group at Facebook (more on that later).

Facebook’s head of News Feed Adam Mosseri is taking the Instagram VP of Product role, taking over for Kevin Weil, who’s going to Marcus’ project. Mosseri is replaced by Facebook VP of Product Management John Hegeman. Meanwhile, Facebook’s head of Internet.org Chris Daniels will take the lead role at WhatsApp, recently vacated by Jan Koum as he departed the corporation altogether.

Image via Recode

These changes could reduce the autonomy of Instagram and WhatsApp, at least in philosophy if not in formal hierarchy. That might make them less appealing places to work, after WhatsApp veterans like Nikesh Arora were passed over in favor of an installed Facebook exec. It could spook future acquisition candidates, who might see the reorganization as Facebook reneging on its promise of independence. And it could hinder the apps’ role as hedges against harm to Facebook’s core brand. Many users don’t realize they’re owned by Facebook, and therefore didn’t extend to them the backlash about recent privacy scandals.

But Facebook will gain the ability to execute a more coherent strategy. Mosseri, a long-time member of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle, will bring to Instagram his experience turning News Feed into one of the world’s most popular inventions as Instagram is hoping to ramp up monetization now that it’s achieved utter dominance over Snapchat in photo sharing. Few know the Facebook playbook better than Mosseri, who could help Instagram get out ahead of problems he’d been in the thick of, like fake news and declines in original sharing.

Daniels’ days connecting the developing world fits well at WhatsApp, whose users across the globe often deal with slow mobile networks. This also leaves room for new blood at Internet.org. It’s now connected 200 million people to some form of the internet, but its Free Basics app has been banned in several countries over net neutrality concerns and partners have pulled out over sustainability concerns. WhatsApp, too, is ready to monetize, having recently launched its WhatsApp for Business product, and Daniels’ background in biz dev and partnerships at Facebook around the IPO could serve him well.

Mark Zuckerberg discusses the Facebook family of apps at F8 2015

But more important than their siloed efforts is what a more unified family under Cox could accomplish. Over 2016 and 2017, all four apps launched isolated Stories products. While Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s took off, Facebook’s and Messenger’s felt absurdly redundant and underpopulated. It took until late 2017 for Facebook to realize it should synchronize Stories across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger so users could post once to their audiences everywhere.

The reorg could prevent Facebook from haphazardly tripping over itself in an attempt to seize on emerging trends. As visual communication becomes the new Facebook mandate, the company could similarly align its efforts in augmented reality, ephemeral and encrypted messaging and e-commence tools. Mosseri and Daniels can implement the Facebook strategy and shield their apps from the same old pitfalls. Instagram and WhatsApp have instituted themselves in their respective markets, and now have the leaders to make them well-oiled cogs in the Facebook machine.

Move fast and shake things up

Few hires have had the impact at Facebook of Marcus and Weil. The former president of PayPal, Marcus has brought Messenger from 200 million monthly users in 2014 to more than 1.3 billion now. He successfully managed the forced migration of users off Facebook’s chat feature to Messenger, laid the foundation for advertising and business tools and turned the app into a platform for games and useful utilities (beyond the initially half-baked bots).

Weil, formerly SVP of Product at Twitter, where changes came at molasses pace, turned Instagram into a rapid-fire launcher of new features. Most significantly, he implemented Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom’s plan to copy Snapchat’s Stories. Instagram was growing stale, showing just the occasional highlights of users’ lives. Instagram Stories solved that, and Weil grew it to more than 300 million daily users — much bigger than Snapchat’s whole 191 million user audience. Meanwhile, using Stories to spark conversation, Instagram Direct grew into one of the most popular messaging apps.

But today, Messenger and Instagram have begun to feel bloated. Marcus had to announce a plan to simplify the chat app at the start of 2018 after its version of Stories, called Messenger Day, steamrolled the rest of the product’s design. The camera, games and bots got as much space in the navigation bar as the core chat product. Last week Messenger revealed a redesign that refocuses on… messaging, giving the app a sensible roadmap. Instagram, now having effectively won the Stories war with Snapchat and having acclimated users to an algorithmic feed, left Weil without as many urgent changes to make.

If Facebook wasn’t careful, it could have lost these leaders to the CEO or COO role of a growing startup, or seen them leave to launch something of their own. Marcus had already taken a board seat at crypto giant Coinbase, while Weil took one at exercise community Strava.

Kevin Weil (Instagram) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017

That’s why it was so wise to give Marcus the latitude to build a new team of fewer than a dozen, including Weil, focused on finding how Facebook could take advantage of the blockchain. It’s a massive, open new problem space in which to operate. One that needs visionaries in both product and business.

It’s unclear what they’ll build together, but there are plenty of opportunities.

They could explore payments facilitated by the blockchain’s lack of transaction fees. Messenger and Instagram both added native payment systems recently. Cutting out the credit card companies could be a lucrative shot for Facebook. And micropayments could open new ways to tip creators or compensate news outlets. Cloud storage based on blockchains could help Facebook cut its massive server bills. And the decentralized nature of the blockchain might unlock new paradigms for social networking with increased autonomy that might threaten Facebook if invented elsewhere.

Perhaps they’ll conclude Facebook doesn’t need the blockchain. That’s fine. The risk would be leaving the space unmined and ripe for someone else’s taking.

Facebook has lasted this long by identifying new threats of disruption, and thwarting them with its build, buy or copy strategy. Streams like FriendFeed and Twitter? Facebook built News Feed. Photos and chat? Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp. Ephemeral content? Facebook copied Snapchat.

The reorganization recognizes how Facebook had become a danger to itself — disruption through internal redundancy and wasted chances. It saw the discombobulated wings of Google lead it to massive failure in messaging, with a half-dozen chat apps all competing while confusing users. And it saw how internet giants like Microsoft and Apple ignored social because it was outside their wheelhouse, only to end up sharing the titan’s table with Facebook.

Zuckerberg loves to say the journey is 1 percent finished. Today Facebook proved it’s always looking for a new finish line.

If you build it, they will come. And if you 3D print it, they will come faster, cheaper and more sustainably.

We live in an era of overpopulation and mass housing shortages. Yet  we also live in a time of phenomenal digital innovation. On the one hand we have major crises affecting the health, liberty and happiness of billions of people. But look at the other hand, where we have potential for life-changing technological breakthroughs at a rate never before seen on this planet.

Our challenges are vast, but our capabilities to produce solutions are even greater. In the future, we will remember this moment in time as a pivotal one. It is now — not tomorrow, and certainly not five years from now — when technology and innovation are disrupting multiple major industries, including those of housing and construction, at breathless and breakneck speed.

Innovators around the world are hard at work to change the way we design, build and produce our homes, and all of this will result in massive change to the housing status quo. Harnessing the revolutionary power of 3D printing, companies from Russia to China, the U.S. and the Netherlands have already proven that not only can a home be 3D printed, it can be done cheaply, efficiently and easily.

Here are just a few ways 3D printing is already transforming the way we live:

Speed

In March 2017, Apis Cor, 3D printing specialists with offices in Russia and San Francisco, announced they had produced a 3D printed home in just 24 hours. That means that from the time you drank your coffee yesterday to the time you sat down for cereal this morning, they produced the self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelopes of an entire home, installed it on-site, and added the roof and interior finishings. It happened in the dead of winter in a tiny Russian town named Stupino, and it was done using Apis Cor’s on-site printer, which means that the massive cost and logistical hurdle of transporting parts and building materials from factories to a home site was almost entirely eliminated.

Think about the possibilities: You select the site where you want to build your home, Apis Cor brings in their 4.5-meter-long printer, the raw materials are set up, and within one single day, your home is printed and ready for you. Compare that to the traditional six- or seven-month construction time the industry is used to, and you’ll begin to understand the scope of potential disruption.

The speed of technological innovation here is also exponential and mind-blowing; just one year before Apis Cor’s breakthrough, we in the 3D printing industry were marveling over Chinese construction company HuaShang Tengda, who set their own record by 3D printing a two-story home in a month and a half. Consider that, for a moment: this industry is moving so quickly that construction time has been slashed from 45 days to 24 mere hours, in the span of a single year.

Image: shanelinkcom/iStock

Cost

Housing prices in America have skyrocketed over the past 50 years, with the average price for a home now surpassing $200,000. And remember, that’s just the average — if you live on the East or West Coast, chances are you’re going to be shelling out something closer to the half-million dollar mark (or more!).

According to a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, a full one-third of people who live in cities will find decent housing out of their reach due to cost by the year 2025. And construction costs are the primary barrier — the report also states that it will take between $9 trillion and $11 trillion just to build the necessary houses to flip that supply-demand ratio and make housing affordable in that time.

Of course, that’s taking only traditional methods of construction into account. But Apis Cor’s 24-hour home was made for around $10,000. HuaSheng Tenga’s homes were made with only 40 percent of the materials traditional construction usually requires, in 30 percent of the time. That represents massive savings in labor and material costs. And these companies aren’t alone — dozens of other firms are exploring cheaper and less complicated methods for building the roofs we all need over our heads, and slashing prices in the process. 

New Story, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that builds housing in the developing world, just unveiled a new 3D printer at SXSW that can print a house in less than a day for $4,000. DUS Architects — a dutch architecture studio that has been 3D printing houses since 2012 — has

unveiled the KamerMaker, a huge 3D printer that can build using local recycled materials. This slashes transport, material and manufacturing costs, all driving down costs. 

The bottom line

What’s so revolutionary about 3D printing is that its potential is limited only by our imaginations. If the past few years have taught us anything about this industry, it’s that barriers of size, scope and material do not apply to the potential that 3D printing brings to the manufacturing market. From cars  to food,  to the houses we live in, the industry isn’t just gearing up for a shakeup. It’s in the throws of it already, because change is happening now.

Google managed to elicit an audible gasp from the crowd at I/O today when it showed off a new augmented feature for Maps. It was a clear standout during a keynote that contained plenty of iterative updates to existing software, and proved a key glimpse into what it will take to move AR from interesting novelty to compelling use case.

Along with the standard array of ARCore-based gaming offerings, the new AR mode for Maps is arguably one of the first truly indispensable real-world applications. As someone who spent the better part of an hour yesterday attempting to navigate the long, unfamiliar blocks of Palo Alto, California by following an arrow on a small blue circle, I can personally vouch for the usefulness of such an application.

It’s still early days — the company admitted that it’s playing around with a few ideas here. But it’s easy to see how offering visual overlays of a real-time image would make it a heck of a lot easier to navigate unfamiliar spaces.

In a sense, it’s a like a real-time version of Street View, combining real-world images with map overlays and location-based positioning. In the demo, a majority of the screen is devoted to the street image captured by the on-board camera. Turn by turn directions and large arrows are overlaid onto the video, while a small half-circle displays a sliver of the map to give you some context of where you are and how long it will take to get where you’re going.

Of course, such a system that’s heavily reliant on visuals wouldn’t make sense in the context of driving, unless, of course, it’s presented in a kind of heads up display. Here, however, it works seamlessly, assuming, of course, you’re willing to look a bit dorky by holding up your phone in front of your face.

There are a lot of moving parts here too, naturally. In order to sync up to a display like this, the map is going to have to get things just right — and anyone who’s ever walked through the city streets on Maps knows how often that can misfire. That’s likely a big part of the reason Google wasn’t really willing to share specifics with regards to timing. For now, we just have to assume this is a sort of proof of concept — along with the fun little fox walking guy the company trotted out that had shades of a certain Johnny Cash-voiced coyote.

But if this is what trying to find my way in a new city looks like, sign me up.

Routines are probably one of the best features the Google Assistant team has rolled out in recent months. Just say “Hey Google, good night” and the Assistant will shut down your lights and start playing some nature sounds to soothe you into deep sleep (or whatever else you want it to do). One limitation so far was that you could only use Google’s preset routines (think “good morning,” “I’m home,” etc.). As the company announced today, though, you’ll soon be able to create your own custom routines and also schedule routines for a specific day or time.

With Custom Routines, Google Home users will soon be able to set their own phrases to kick off a routine and selection of what Google promises are “one million Actions.” So if you want to set the mood for dinner, you can create a “Hey Google, dinner’s ready” routine that turns up the music, turns off the TV and sets the temperature in the kitchen. Easy.

Soon, you’ll also be able to schedule these routines to run at a set time so that your lights turn on or off at a given time, for example. Google says you’ll be able to schedule these actions in both the Google Clock app on Android and the Google Assistant app. And with that, even the Clock app now offers an AI-based tool.

These new features will roll out later this summer, though Google has lately had a propensity for being a bit late with these launches.

After four years at the helm of Messenger, David Marcus will be leaving the team to lead a small group of Facebook employees to explore what blockchain technologies can do for the social media giant.

In a post on Facebook, Marcus noted that he would be “starting from scratch” in these efforts surrounding blockchain tech. His departure from Messenger comes alongside a major organizational restructuring up top at Facebook that saw the roles of many key executives at Facebook shift.

Marcus is notably on the board of directors at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase so this won’t be his first foray into blockchain . Marcus will be joined by Instagram’s Kevin Weil in this new endeavor, Recode reports.

Below is Marcus’s full post:

After nearly four unbelievably rewarding years leading Messenger, I have decided it was time for me to take on a new challenge. I’m setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch.

When I joined Messenger, under 300 million people were using it every month, since then we’ve added well over 1 billion people. We’ve crafted many new experiences from video chat to P2P payments, a capable camera and new features like games. We opened the platform and now over 200,000 developers are creating experiences and over 8 billion messages are sent between people and businesses every month. Looking forward, I’m excited about Messenger’s upcoming redesign I’ve shared an early look at this year’s F8. I think you’re going to love it!

It’s been an honor to lead the amazing Messenger team, their commitment to making Messenger the best it can be is unsurpassed. I will miss them but I know Messenger is in great hands with Stan Chudnovsky and they will continue to create amazing experiences for all the people who depend on it around the world.

Messenger is now one of the most important apps in the world, and its future is unbelievably bright. The saying is that the journey is more important than the destination, and what a remarkable journey this was!