Year: 2018

A couple of years ago I was eagerly expectant of an app that would identify anything you pointed it at. Turns out the problem was much harder than anyone expected — but that didn’t stop high school senior Michael Royzen from trying. His app, SmartLens, attempts to solve the problem of seeing something and wanting to identify and learn more about it — with mixed success, to be sure, but it’s something I don’t mind having in my pocket.

Royzen reached out to me a while back and I was curious — as well as skeptical — about the idea that where the likes of Google and Apple have so far failed (or at least failed to release anything good), a high schooler working in his spare time would succeed. I met him at a coffee shop to see the app in action and was pleasantly surprised, but a little baffled.

The idea is simple, of course: You point your phone’s camera at something and the app attempts to identify it using an enormous but highly optimized classification agent trained on tens of millions of images. It connects to Wikipedia and Amazon to let you immediately learn more about what you’ve ID’ed, or buy it.

It recognizes more than 17,000 objects — things like different species of fruit and flower, landmarks, tools and so on. The app had little trouble telling an apple from a (weird-looking) mango, a banana from a plantain and even identified the pistachios I’d ordered as a snack. Later, in my own testing, I found it quite useful for identifying the plants springing up in my neighborhood: periwinkles, anemones, wood sorrel, it got them all, though not without the occasional hesitation.

The kicker is that this all happens offline — it’s not sending an image over the cell network or Wi-Fi to a server somewhere to be analyzed. It all happens on-device and within a second or two. Royzen scraped his own image database from various sources and trained up multiple convolutional neural networks using days of AWS EC2 compute time.

Then there are far more than that number in products that it recognizes by reading the text of the item and querying the Amazon database. It ID’ed books, a bottle of pills and other packaged goods almost instantly, providing links to buy them. Wikipedia links pop up if you’re online as well, though a considerable amount of basic descriptions are kept on the device.

On that note, it must be said that SmartLens is a more than 500-megabyte download. Royzen’s model is huge, since it must keep all the recognition data and offline content right there on the phone. This is a much different approach to the problem than Amazon’s own product recognition engine on the Fire Phone (RIP) or Google Goggles (RIP) or the scan feature in Google Photos (which was pretty useless for things SmartLens reliably did in half a second).

“With the several past generations of smartphones containing desktop-class processors and the advent of native machine learning APIs that can harness them (and GPUs), the hardware exists for a blazing-fast visual search engine,” Royzen wrote in an email. But none of the large companies you would expect to create one has done so. Why?

The app size and toll on the processor is one thing, for sure, but the edge and on-device processing is where all this stuff will go eventually — Royzen is just getting an early start. The likely truth is twofold: it’s hard to make money and the quality of the search isn’t high enough.

It must be said at this point that SmartLens, while smart, is far from infallible. Its suggestions for what an item might be are almost always hilariously wrong for a moment before arriving at, as it often does, the correct answer.

It identified one book I had as “White Whale,” and no, it wasn’t Moby Dick. An actual whale paperweight it decided was a trowel. Many items briefly flashed guesses of “Human being” or “Product design” before getting to a guess with higher confidence. One flowering bush it identified as four or five different plants — including, of course, Human Being. My monitor was a “computer display,” “liquid crystal display,” “computer monitor,” “computer,” “computer screen,” “display device” and more. Game controllers were all “control.” A spatula was a wooden spoon (close enough), with the inexplicable subheading “booby prize.” What?!

This level of performance (and weirdness in general, however entertaining) wouldn’t be tolerated in a standalone product released by Google or Apple. Google Lens was slow and bad, but it’s just an optional feature in a working, useful app. If it put out a visual search app that identified flowers as people, the company would never hear the end of it.

And the other side of it is the monetization aspect. Although it’s theoretically convenient to be able to snap a picture of a book your friend has and instantly order it, it isn’t so much more convenient than taking a picture and searching for it later, or just typing the first few words into Google or Amazon, which will do the rest for you.

Meanwhile for the user there is still confusion. What can it identify? What can’t it identify? What do I need it to identify? It’s meant to ID many things, from dog breeds and storefronts, but it likely won’t identify, for example, a cool Bluetooth speaker or mechanical watch your friend has, or the creator of a painting at a local gallery (some paintings are recognized, though). As I used it I felt like I was only ever going to use it for a handful of tasks in which it had proven itself, like identifying flowers, but would be hesitant to try it on many other things when I might just be frustrated by some unknown incapability or unreliability.

And yet the idea that in the very near future there will not be something just like SmartLens is ridiculous to me. It seems so clearly something we will all take for granted in a few years. And it’ll be on-device, no need to upload your image to a server somewhere to be analyzed on your behalf.

Royzen’s app has its issues, but it works very well in many circumstances and has obvious utility. The idea that you could point your phone at the restaurant you’re across the street from and see Yelp reviews two seconds later — no need to open up a map or type in an address or name — is an extremely natural expansion of existing search paradigms.

“Visual search is still a niche, but my goal is to give people the taste of a future where one app can deliver useful information about anything around them — today,” wrote Royzen. “Still, it’s inevitable that big companies will launch their competing offerings eventually. My strategy is to beat them to market as the first universal visual search app and amass as many users as possible so I can stay ahead (or be acquired).”

My biggest gripe of all, however, is not the functionality of the app, but in how Royzen has decided to monetize it. Users can download it for free but upon opening it are immediately prompted to sign up for a $2/month subscription — before they can even see whether the app works or not. If I didn’t already know what the app did and didn’t do, I would delete it without a second thought upon seeing that dialog, and even knowing what I do, I’m not likely to pay in perpetuity for it.

A one-time fee to activate the app would be more than reasonable, and there’s always the option of referral codes for those Amazon purchases. But demanding rent from users who haven’t even tested the product is a non-starter. I’ve told Royzen my concerns and I hope he reconsiders.

It would also be nice to scan images you’ve already taken, or save images associated with searches. UI improvements like a confidence indicator or some kind of feedback to let you know it’s still working on identification would be nice as well — features that are at least theoretically on the way.

In the end I’m impressed with Royzen’s efforts — when I take a step back it’s amazing to me that it’s possible for a single person, let alone one in high school, to put together an app capable of completing such sophisticated computer vision tasks. It’s the kind of (over-) ambitious app-building one expects to come out of a big, playful company like the Google of a decade ago. This may be more of a curiosity than a tool right now, but so were the first text-based search engines.

SmartLens is in the App Store now — give it a shot.

Have you ever turned off Facebook’s notifications or even deleted the app entirely on your birthday, simply to avoid the non-stop barrage of alerts that someone had posted “Happy Birthday!” to your timeline? A fix may be in the works, as it turns out. An update to how Facebook will handle birthday notifications was given a brief mention during today’s keynote address at the company’s F8 developer conference, hinting at a new birthday feature yet to come.

The feature wasn’t one of Facebook’s demos, and the company is declining to share more details about its launch at this time.

However, the general idea is that Facebook could leverage the Stories format to create “birthday packages” that are sent once to users at the end of the day, instead of having users post messages to the friends’ timelines.

This was mentioned briefly alongside other ideas for how Stories will be expanded — like the upcoming launch of collaborative Stories, and a Stories option that allows video clipping, for example.

“And then birthdays,” added Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox in his keynote address. “Instead of all of us writing on your wall to wish you a ‘happy birthday,’ how about we pull together, over the course of the day, a photo and video reel, which you then receive as a package at the end, saying, ‘happy birthday.'”

It’s unclear when this feature will actually arrive, but we understand Facebook isn’t commenting publicly because the product team is still working on what this new “happy birthday” feature will look like.

It’s not likely to prevent anyone from writing on a friend’s timeline, we’d imagine — but it could be a change to how Facebook prompts you to remember your friend’s or family member’s birthday. (Today, Facebook prompts you to post to their timeline, but that could be tweaked to encourage users to leave messages via Stories instead.)

This isn’t the first time Facebook has attempted to fix the age-old Happy Birthday spam problem. It has also done things like group birthday posts together, and it has consistently tried to get people to use video with things like Birthday Cam in 2016,  and later personalized but automated video messages. 

It has also attempted to bundle birthday greetings into recap videos, which is the experience that sounds most similar to what Facebook is now teasing with this Happy Birthday Stories feature. Perhaps the recap video will make a comeback, but be presented not within your News Feed or Timeline, but as a personalized Story built for you.

Of course, if you really don’t like the birthday spam, you could just remove your birthday information from your Facebook profile ahead of the actual day.

The security community is still reeling from the discoveries of the Meltdown and Spectre computer vulnerabilities, and now it seems that a rash of new hardware vulnerabilities called MasterKey, RyzenFall, Fallout and Chimera have been found in the past few months, too.

Unlike most previous threats, all these vulnerabilities attack a computer’s hardware, rather than its software. This second release of attacks may be early indications that Meltdown and Spectre have opened a new front in the war between hackers and defenders in the realm of computer chips.

While experts are working to make and distribute patches for these bugs, the question remains: What does this mean for cybersecurity as a whole? The answer to that question starts with understanding a bit about how hackers work.

Hackers are a social and trendy bunch. A couple of years ago, hacking onboard computers on cars was common, so a bunch of vulnerabilities were found and patched and now cars have become somewhat harder to commandeer. Then drone hacking was all the rage, and drone manufacturers too have implemented patches and become somewhat more secure.

That is how cyber defenses work. Some smart researcher finds a new hole. If they’re nice (most are nice), they tell the manufacturers about it so they can fix the bugs. With Meltdown and Spectre, the researchers were nice and informed the manufacturers months beforehand. The MasterKey, RyzenFall, Fallout and Chimera researchers were not so nice, and only gave them a day. If the researchers are really not nice and decide instead to use their exploit, then some unlucky person or organization is probably going to have a very bad day.

That moment of discovery is the starting gun for an intense race between the defense community and the hacker community. Some hacker genius somewhere already knows how to use the bug and other hacker geniuses start working overtime to write their own code that exploits it.

Once a few of them figure it out, one of them will write a simpler version for people who don’t understand the details so that hackers who aren’t geniuses can use it too. Soon after that, it gets included in the common hacking databases. From that point on, anyone can literally point and click their way into your computer.

Although not much can be done for the folks who already had their bad day, the defense community, as a whole, almost always wins that race. As soon as their fastest programmer finds a fix, it can be quickly distributed throughout the world, making the new hacking toys only useful against the stragglers who fell behind the herd. And these days, it’s gotten pretty hard to fall behind. The patching process has become invisibly smooth, and most regular computer users never even know that there was a race on.

With hardware vulnerabilities, things could be different. You can’t change hardware by sending an invisible string of 1s and 0s through the air. For Meltdown and Spectre, workarounds where changing the software can help block the hardware problem are still being figured out and distributed. These workarounds showed up quickly at first, but the process has been anything but smooth, and proof-of-concept code for exploiting these vulnerabilities has been seen online for more than a month. As for the more recent vulnerabilities, it’s not clear yet what workarounds exist, and there might not always be a workaround that creates software solutions to hardware problems.

Though stark, this situation is not entirely unprecedented. Some operating systems are no longer supported by their vendors, which means that any new hole will go un-patched. The most famous example is Windows XP. Most people know by now that using Windows XP is not safe, but don’t fully understand how unsafe it is.

Today, any computer-savvy high schooler can watch a YouTube video and learn in just a couple hours how to point and click their way to control of someone else’s computer on the internet, so long as it is running Windows XP. Even with Windows XP though, when a truly nasty bug comes out, Microsoft can choose to go back and patch it like they did last year for the WannaCry ransomware. With a nasty hardware vulnerability, that may not even be an option.

So what can be done? Hopefully, the hacking community will not become enthralled with searching for hardware vulnerabilities. They might not. It is hard and requires rare expertise that is not as easy to come by as software hacking. If we are not so lucky, then defending the herd by responding quickly to the first attack may no longer be a viable approach — but herd immunity comes in many forms.

Perhaps it will be from increased diversity of chip designs or perhaps approaches to slow the spread of information from hacker genius to amateur. Perhaps it will be from improved perimeter defenses, although hardware at the perimeter may be just as vulnerable as the rest.

Time and again, the adaptability of the world’s smartest engineers have overcome the most dire threats to computing and the internet. The safe money is on them to win the day again, but with hardware vulnerabilities it may require a whole new approach for defending the herd.

Facebook is adding support for in-app purchases to its Instant Games platform, the company announced during a session on gaming at its F8 developer conference this afternoon. The feature will allow game developers to add another form of monetization beyond advertising to their games on select platforms, but not on iOS.

Instead, support for in-app purchases will be available to Instant Games on Android and on Facebook.com on the web.

First launched in 2016, Facebook opened up Instant Games to all developers last month. The platform allows developers to build mobile-friendly games using HTML5 that work across both Facebook and Messenger. The idea is to give game developers access to another sizable platform for their work, in addition to the existing app stores run by Apple and Google.

Facebook has had in-app purchases on its roadmap for Instant Games for some time, and began testing the feature with select developers around six months ago.

Similar to the app stores, the revenue share model for Instant Games is 70/30 on Facebook.com. However, on mobile, the games will follow the in-app billing terms from each platform, the company notes. That means purchases made in games running on Android devices, the 30 percent revenue share will apply after the standard mobile platform revenue share – aka Google’s own 70/30 cut.

That’s not ideal, of course. And all the hands in the pie may lead to game developers pricing their in-app purchases higher, as a result.

Facebook seems to acknowledge this concern in its blog post announcement, saying: “Our primary goal is to build [in-app purchases] in a way so that our developer partners can sustain and grow, and we’ll continue to evaluate rev/share with that goal in mind.”

Facebook wouldn’t confirm if or when support for in-app purchases is coming to iOS.

In addition to helping developers generate revenue outside of using ads in their games, in-app purchases in games could prove beneficial to Facebook as well. The company’s payment revenue has dwindled over the years, with things like Messenger payments never really seeing significant attention. Plus, Facebook made it possible for third-parties like PayPal to operate over Messenger, which signaled its disinterest in the payments space in general.

In-app purchases in games turns things around, a bit.

The submission process for in-app purchases will open up to developers on May 7, allowing them to implement the monetization features on Android and the web. In the meantime, Facebook is offering documentation about the feature here.

Cisco just announced an agreement to acquire Accompany, which uses artificial intelligence to build databases of people and relationships at companies.

Founder and CEO Amy Chang has compared the product to a digital chief of staff or personal assistant, giving executives the context they need before conversations and meetings. Cisco plans to incorporate Accompany technology into its collaboration products, for example by introducing company and individual profiles into Webex meetings.

Cisco says it will pay $270 million in cash and stock in the deal.

The company probably didn’t have to search too hard to find Accompany, since Chang (who previously served as the head of product for Google’s ad measurement and reporting) has been on Cisco’s board of directors since October 2016. As part of the transaction, she’s resigning from the board, effective immediately.

In addition, Chang will be taking over the company’s Collaboration Technology Group. Rowan Trollope, who currently leads the collaboration group, is departing to become CEO at cloud software company Five9.

“Amy has proven to be an effective and innovative leader through her years as an entrepreneur, an engineer, and CEO, and I couldn’t be more pleased to have her and the Accompany team join Cisco,” said Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins in the announcement. “Together, we have a tremendous opportunity to further enhance AI and machine learning capabilities in our collaboration portfolio and continue to create amazing collaboration experiences for customers.”

According to Crunchbase, Accompany has raised around $40 million in funding from investors including CRV, Cowboy Ventures, Iconiq Capital and Ignition Partners.

Cisco also announced today that it’s selling off some of its NDS video assets.

The feed is the greatest psychological and mental manipulation tool that has ever been invented. Every day, billions of people open apps and scroll through algorithmically-selected content designed to emotively engage us. Through the feed, we enter an intellectual stupor, downloading information to our brains without critical thought, without filters. Who ultimately controls those feeds, and can they use that control to change not just the emotions of their audience, but our very understanding of reality?

The feed and its discontents is the theme undergirding Bandwidth, the latest science fiction novel by Eliot Peper, which was released today by Amazon Publishing imprint 47North. The novel, the author’s sixth, is the story of Dag Calhoun, a lobbyist who gets caught up in a war over climate change and the world’s response to it. In this telling, activists fight not through picket signs and petitions, but instead with the modern weaponry of algorithms — controlling the feeds of global leaders to change their very understanding of the world.

The book is straight out of the Peper oeuvre, combining a thriller plot with a deeper introspection of technology and its effect on our actions and our futures. It’s an engaging, electric read, but also one that forces us to confront the state of the world today and our impact as an industry on politics.

The book is also the latest milestone in the entrepreneurial writing career of Peper, who migrated from the startup and VC worlds to pursue his creative passions full-time. He describes his background as “a bit of a pinball career path,” studying international environmental policy, working at a plasma arc startup in the clean energy space, and then working at a venture firm.

Yet through all of those experiences, something was gnawing on him about the content that he was reading, particularly about business. “Folks don’t want to publicize some of their less overtly positive experiences,” Peper said. “They don’t want to throw shade on other people, so business books sometimes miss some of the human experiences.”

Peper, who has been a voracious reader his entire life, thought he could offer that missing link by writing speculative fiction. “Writing fiction, you have to synthesize your ideas about the world,” he explained, and “put that all in a story that is compelling and illuminates something about the world for readers.” That led to his first trilogy of novels called the Uncommon Stock series, which are thrillers set against the backdrop of a fast-growing startup and show the sorts of highs and lows (and danger!) you don’t get in the business shelves.

Over time though, Peper has grown more philosophical about technology and its role in society, using his plots to explore ever more complicated connections of accelerating technological change. “We live in this world where our institutions and the tools we use every day are changing fast,” he explains, arguing that “my grandparents wouldn’t understand many, many things about my life today.” Peper often gets ideas for novels from the news and general events happening, and uses the medium of the novel to explore their nuances in-depth.

That sort of thinking shows up in Cumulus, his fourth novel about an eponymous company which utilizes its vast user data to provide better transportation services called Fleet, but also uses that data to attempt to block criticism of the company. Peper, who is a native of Oakland, California, integrates the vast inequality that technology has created in Silicon Valley into the core of the plot.

For Bandwidth, Peper wanted to respond to the challenges of the 2016 election, and the challenges of managing one’s own media diet. “In 2016 with the presidential campaign running in full swing, it felt that there was so much news that it was almost hard to escape from,” he said. “I really wanted to take more agency in the ideas and the stories I was inviting into my own heart.”

That thinking led Peper to start speculating on what would happen if you controlled that intake. “If you could personally curate the media diet of someone else, could you control their thinking … could you change their world view? That was the seed of Bandwidth,” he said.

Bandwidth is the first work in a trilogy, although each novel will be independent, set in the same universe but with different characters and themes. The next book is called Borderless, and will focus on the decline of the nation state, and comes out October 30th.

Snapchat’s redesign was a disaster. It cratered ad views and revenue and led Snapchat’s user count to actually shrink in March. That’s why CEO Evan Spiegel just announced a big reversal of the redesign’s worst part.

“We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors. We are currently rolling out an update to address this by sorting communication by recency and moving Stories from friends to the right side of the application, while maintaining the structural changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends’ Stories by relationships.”

Spiegel relayed that user behavior on iOS is starting to stabilize, but “performance regressions” on Android related to the redesign have contributed to the app’s overall growth troubles.

Snap had previously tested this change, and also tried creating separate tabs for Chat and chronologically-sorted Stories inside the Friends section on the left side of the app. Below you can see the new version of Discover, which shows preview tiles of friends’ Stories up top, sorted by who you interact with most. It’s reminiscent of Instagram Stories, which also users a horizontal scrolling row of Stories.

I think this design is still a mess. It takes Snapchat’s pioneering Stories product and buries it amongst all the professional content inside Discover. Essentially, Snapchat has taken its redesign philosophy too far. Originally it pulled brands and social media stars out of the Stories list and put them in Discover because it didn’t want your friends’ Stories to have to compete with the pros. But now those Stories and the pro content are all crammed into one screen.

What Snap needs to do is create tabs for relevancy-sorted Stories and chronologically-sorted messages in the friends side of the app, and keep all professional content in the Discover section, but with the option to subscribe to your favorite creators to move them over to the Friends’ story lists.

Spiegel says he expects users metrics to stabilize as people get used to the redesign. But Snapchat doesn’t have time to be patient. Its losses are mounting and the growth of WhatsApp Status is explosive. That Facebook-owned Stories clone now has 450 million daily users. Snapchat needs to stuff its pride and philosophy and drill down into what users actually want. Spiegel has always gone by his gut, but this awful earnings report should give him indigestion.

Apple ended up with a pretty decent report for its second quarter, beating analyst expectations on most of its metrics — but it is making a huge move in terms of returning capital to investors.

The company said it is announcing a new $100 billion buyback program and increasing its dividend by 16%. That means that Apple investors are going to get more of an opportunity to snap up the value the company has created over time as it’s continued to grow significantly. While Apple in the past several months a lot of the momentum that carried it to a market cap nearing $1 trillion, the company’s stock has still risen around 80% in the past two years. Not surprisingly, the stock today is soaring (by Apple standards) in extended trading, with shares rising nearly 5% after the report.

Last quarter Apple CFO Luca Maestri said the company expected to be “net cash neutral” over time, signaling that it might start returning more capital to shareholders through its dividend and share buyback programs. That’ll be important for the company, which thanks to the tax bill last year will be able to repatriate a significant amount of the cash it holds outside of the U.S.

The rest of the line was a pretty solid beat on expectations Apple’s services revenue continues to grow as it looks to create a steady additional revenue stream. All that’s important too, of course, but the big news here is the set of buybacks. Here’s the bottom line:

• Q2 Revenue: $61.1 billion, compared to analyst estimates of $60.86 billion. Apple projected between $60 billion and $62 billion. It’s an increase of 14% year-over-year.
• Q2 Earnings: $2.73 per share, compared to analyst estimates of $2.60 per share.
• Q2 iPhone shipments: 52.2 million units sold, compared to Wall Street estimates of 51.9 million iPhones sold.
• Q3 Gross Margin estimate: Between 38% and 38.5%
• Q3 Revenue estimate: Between $51.5 billion and $53.5 billion
• Q2 iPad shipments: 9.1 million units
• Q2 Mac shipments: 4.1 million units
• Q2 Services revenue: $9.2 billion, up 31% year-over-year

That big capital return program is likely to keep investors happy for some time while it continues to sort out its new iPhone lineup. Last year, the company released the iPhone X — which was widely praised, but also carried a substantial $999 price tag for the cheapest model. Apple has worked to create programs to pay for those phones over time, but it’s still an extremely high ticket price. That’s especially true internationally, where consumers might not tolerate high prices for those phones. As a result, the reception on Wall Street was pretty muted, and Apple seems to have to figure out some other way to restart that iPhone growth engine.

Toward the end of last year, it seemed like Apple was inching closer to being a company with a market cap over $1 trillion. That’s a completely symbolic number, but nonetheless would be a significant milestone for the iPhone maker that looks to figure out what a next-generation smartphone looks like. Apple’s stock has by no means been in a tailspin, but it hasn’t really done anything either as expectations start to drop a bit following the launch of the iPhone X.

Snapchat face-planted in its Q1 2018 earnings report amidst a rocky redesign and sustained competition from Facebook, unable to keep up its comeback from last quarter. Snapchat reached only 191 million daily active users, up from 187 million, with its growth rate sinking to 2.13 percent — its slowest ever, compared to 5.05 percent in Q4 and a disastrous 2.9 percent in Q3. It pulled in $230.7 million in revenue with an adjusted EPS loss of $0.17. That’s compared to Wall Street’s estimates of $244.5 million in revenue and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.16.

It seems that Snapchat’s sudden growth spurt last quarter was a fluke, with Snap adding just 1 million users in its core North American market this quarter. It’s actually worse than it looks. CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in his prepared remarks that compared to its 191 million users quarterly average, “our March average was lower, but still above our Q4 average.” The idea that Snapchat actually shrank last month should terrify investors.

Snapchat is going to have ongoing trouble significantly increasing its user count with over 300 million daily users on Instagram Stories, and 450 million on WhatsApp Status — both clones of Snapchat. Wall Street hates weak user growth, and Snap’s share price fell about 16 percent in after-hours trading to under $12.

Snap’s losses grew to $385.7 million, up from $350 million last quarter. That’s another spot Snap was hoping to improve with cost-cutting layoffs, but those were too little too late.

Snap also saw an unprecedented decline in its average revenue per user in North America. It’s standard for the holiday Q4 to rake it more cash than the following Q1. But Snap’s ARPU in the US and Canada slipped to $2.10, down from $2.75 in Q4, but also down from $2.17 in Q3. That indicates serious problems monetizing that could be due to fewer Stories or Discover ad views during Q1.

Snapchat spent the year’s first quarter trying to capitalize on Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal while overhauling the design of its own app. Initial app store reviews were predominantly negative, but first-time installs and its App Store rank increased. Celebrity backlash and anecdotal declines in usage for some people have pushed Snap to waffle on the changes, in some cases changing the app to work more like the old version.

Snap just launched version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but we’ll have to wait until next quarter to see any revenue from that. The question will be whether Snapchat’s layoffs of over 120 staffers will start to make a dent in its big losses, because it certainly didn’t show up this quarter.

Honestly, Snap os in serious trouble. Slowest ever growth rate, declining revenue per user, and growing losses point to a company in crisis.

On the heels of Facebook announcing its intent to add a dating element to its platform, dating company Match’s stock is suffering. Match is the brand behind dating services like Tinder, Match, OK Cupid and Plenty of Fish.

At the time of publication, Match’s stock was trading down about 22 percent.

Facebook’s entrance in this space brings it into direct competition with Match’s bread and butter. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the dating functionality will be a standalone feature that will focus on legitimate long-term relationships, rather than just hookups.

Though, Match Group CEO Mandy Gisnberg says she is flattered by Facebook’s entrance into its space.

“We’re flattered that Facebook is coming into our space – and sees the global opportunity that we do – as Tinder continues to skyrocket,” Ginsberg said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We’re surprised at the timing given the amount of personal and sensitive data that comes with this territory. Regardless, we’re going to continue to delight our users through product innovation and relentless focus on relationship success. We understand this category better than anyone. Facebook’s entry will only be invigorating to all of us.”

Meanwhile, the parent company of IAC threw some shade at Facebook. In statement provided to TechCrunch, IAC CEO Joey Levin said,

Come on in. The water’s warm. Their product could be great for US/Russia relationships.

Bumble is another competitor that may be affected by Facebook’s new service, but the company says it’s “thrilled” about today’s news.

“Our executive team has already reached out to Facebook to explore ways to collaborate,” a Bumble spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Perhaps Bumble and Facebook can join forces to make the connecting space even more safe and empowering.”