Year: 2019

The up to $818 million deal between Locus Biosciences and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a division of Johnson & Johnson) that was announced yesterday points toward a new path for CRISPR gene editing technologies and (potentially) the whole field of microbiome-targeted therapies.

Based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., Locus is commercializing research initially developed by scientists at North Carolina State University that focused on Cas3 proteins, which devour DNA Pac-Man-style, rather than edit it like the more well-known Cas9-based CRISPR technologies being used by companies like Caribou Biosciences, Editas Medicine, Synthego, Intellia Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics and Beam Therapeutics.

While the Cas9 CRISPR technologies can edit targeted DNA — either deleting specific genetic material or replacing it with different genetic code — Cas3 simply removes DNA strains. “Its purpose is the destruction of invading DNA,” says Locus chief executive, Paul Garofolo.

The exclusive deal between Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Locus gives Janssen the exclusive license to develop, manufacture and commercialize CRISPR-Cas3-enhanced products targeting bacterial pathogens for the potential treatment of respiratory and other organ infections.

Under the terms of the deal, Locus is getting $20 million in upfront payments and could receive up to $798 million in potential future development and commercial milestone payments and any royalties on potential product sales.

A former executive at Valiant Pharmaceuticals and Paytheon, Garofolo was first introduced to the technology that would form the core of Locus as an executive in residence at North Carolina State University. It was there that he met Dr. Chase Beisel and Rodolphe Barrangou, whose research into Cas3 proteins would eventually be productized by Locus.

The company spun out of NC State in 2015 and raised its first cash from the North Carolina Biotech Center a year later.

Locus is already commercializing a version of its technology with bacteriophages designed to target e coli bacteria to treat urinary tract infections. The company is on target to begin its first clinical trials in the third quarter of the year.

The focus on bacterial infection and removing harmful bacteria while ensuring that the rest of a patient’s microbiome is intact is a huge step forward for treating diseases that scientists believe could be linked to bacterial health in a body, according to Garofolo.

“Most microbiome companies are about adding probiotics to your body,” says Garofolo, representing a thesis that introducing “good” bacteria to the body can offset any harmful pathogens that have infected it.

“Things you’re exposed to are creating the groundwork for an infection or disease, or exacerbating an existing disease,” says Garofolo. And while he believes that the microbiome is the next big field for scientific discovery, the approach of adding probiotics to a system seems less targeted and effective to him.

Already, Garofolo has managed to convince investors of his approach. In addition to the initial outside investment from the North Carolina Biotech Center, Locus has attracted $25 million in financing from investors, including Artis Ventures and the venture capital arm of the Chinese internet giant, Tencent.

Meanwhile, investors have spent millions backing alternative approaches to improving human health through the manipulation of the microbiome.

Companies like Second Genome, Viome and Ubiome are all using approaches that identify bacteria in the human body and try to regulate the production of that bacteria through diet and probiotic pills. It’s an approach that allows these companies to skirt the more stringent requirements the Food and Drug Administration has put in place for drugs.

That doesn’t mean that extensive amounts of research haven’t gone into the development of these probiotics. Seed, a Los Angeles-based startup that launched last year, has recruited as its chief scientist George Reid, the leading scientist on microbial health and the microbiome.

Founded by Raja Dhir, a graduate from the University of Southern California and a leading researcher on microbiotics in his own right, and Ara Katz, the former chief marketing officer of BeachMint and an MIT Media Lab fellow, Seed focuses on developing probiotic treatments using well-established research.

“Foundational to our approach is that it’s not which microbes are present in your gut… It’s based on looking at what specific microbes can do to a healthy individual to improve that status of health independent of what is already present,” Dhir said in an interview around the company’s launch last June. “It’s a little bit less exciting from a tech perspective, but it’s hardcore grounded in basic science… The question is, does this have changes and effects in validated bio-makers in a controlled and placebo setting?”

Dhir said that a basic understanding of how different bacteria can influence health is necessary before getting into the benefits of personalization.

“These things can dance between drugs and nutrition,” Dhir said. “Probacteria are an additional lever that people should pull… like diet and exercise and cessation of smoking… In every correspondence we always have been and need to be clear that this should never be seen as a replacement of therapies.”

By contrast, the tools that Locus is developing are very much therapies with potentially far-reaching implications for illnesses, from irritable bowel syndrome to gastrointestinal cancers and even neurological disorders.

“The science [around the microbiome] is early, but it is very well-known that a potentially deadly pathogen should be removed from your body,” Garofolo said.

Over 100 million devices with Amazon’s Alexa assistant pre-installed have been sold, the company said Friday.

The new metric, revealed by Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp in an interview with The Verge, showcases just how quickly the company has crammed the voice assistant into disparate hardware devices and shoved them out the door. The company did not distinguish further how many of these items were Amazon-built Echo devices and how many were designed by third-party OEMs.

The company’s vision of encapsulating Alexa in anything with a circuit board was evident at its September hardware event where it announced more than a dozen new devices, including a clock, a microwave and some redesigns of existing products like the Echo. In the interview, Limp shares that there are more than 150 Alexa-integrated hardware devices on the market, most of which shipped in 2018.

When it comes to the 100 million number, that metric seems impressive for a platform that still seems to have so much room left to mature, but it also shows how aggressive the company has had to be to keep up with Google Assistant and Siri which obviously have significant reach on Android and iOS respectively. Alexa seems to occupy a more exclusive smart home presence than Google, which has managed to ship quite a few of its Google Home devices, especially the Google Home Mini.

Amazon’s low-cost Echo Dot similarly seems to be capturing the bulk of attention. The device was updated in September with a new design and a louder speaker. The company is also seeing success with hardware it hasn’t released yet, the company revealed that they’ve had more than 1 million people sign-up for an invite to buy an Alexa Auto device ahead of its launch.

A new voice phishing scam is going after iPhone users in a clever new way: by making calls seem like they are coming directly from Apple Support.

Brian Krebs reported today that a user, Jody Westby, got a call from Apple Support asking for her to call back. The contact information that came along with the number appeared to be Apple Inc.’s in the identity screen for the call. When she called the 866 number, however, something was clearly amiss.

KrebsOnSecurity called the number that the scam message asked Westby to contact (866-277-7794).

An automated system answered and said I’d reached Apple Support, and that my expected wait time was about one minute and 30 seconds. About a minute later, a man with an Indian accent answered and inquired as to the reason for my call.

Playing the part of someone who had received the scam call, I told him I’d been alerted about a breach at Apple and that I needed to call this number. After asking me to hold for a brief moment, our call was disconnected.

No doubt this is just another scheme to separate the unwary from their personal and financial details, and to extract some kind of payment (for supposed tech support services or some such). But it is remarkable that Apple’s own devices (or AT&T, which sold her the phone) can’t tell the difference between a call from Apple and someone trying to spoof Apple.

The exploit is unique because it allows callers to masquerade as other callers essentially by polluting search results with junk information that makes one number look like the contact number for a real company. The number Westby was told to call is a known phishing source. Remember: If anyone calls you claiming that your computer is broken they are most probably lying. After all, support people will never be proactive when it comes to problems with your computers, only reactive (if that).

Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” era, one characterized by military jackets, black sequins and snarls, is coming to a close and, apparently, that means her one-year-old mobile app is too.

The Swift Life, a gamified app developed in partnership with freemium mobile games maker Glu Mobile, announced this week that it would shut down effective February 1. Users of the app have until that date to spend any of their virtual currency, which they had to accumulate in order to purchase Taymojis and access exclusive content.

Glu is a formerly venture-backed business behind a number of celebrity-branded apps that help the A-listers find additional profit off their fan base. It’s responsible for “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” which recently announced it would shut down alongside all the Kardashian sisters’ mobile apps; “Britney Spears: American Dream,” “Katy Perry Pop” and “Nicki Minaj: The Empire.” Kim Kardashian’s app was reportedly the biggest success for Glu and at one point was expected to rake in more than $200 million in lifetime revenue. Other attempts by Glu to mimic Kim’s success failed, however.

Glu has already fallen on hard times, with reports indicating that a company restructure in 2017 led to the loss of at least 100 employees. Now it’s mourning the loss of two of its largest celebrity app plays, signaling what could be a dire future for the company. We reached out to Glu for comment.

There are no available Swift Life revenue figures, but its short lifespan coupled with fan complaints suggest it wasn’t the moneymaker Glu and Swift’s camp hoped for. The app was designed to provide Swift yet another avenue to intimately converse with fans, something she’s become known for in her more than 10-year career. Swift often chats directly with fans on Tumblr, views some of her 114 million Instagram followers stories and, offline, she invites select groups of fans into her home for album listening parties. An app where she could interact with and provide her biggest of fans unique material made sense.

Until all hell broke loose.

After reportedly soaring in its App Store debut, The Swift Life swiftly turned into a battleground for her politically opposing fans: “Less than 48 hours after launching, Taylor Swift’s new app has become plagued with Trump-loving trolls and homophobic comments,” Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Daily Beast in December 2017, just days after the app’s release.

What followed was an eruption of tweets and Reddit posts denouncing the app and its inability to prevent hate from spreading like wildfire across what was meant to be a wholesome, affectionate space for Swifites — on brand with Swift’s mostly squeaky clean image. It’s a wonder the app wasn’t shut down immediately.

Instead, the singer continued to earn money off the app, while some users complained an unannounced moderator was coming in and deleting certain posts. Simple fixes could have improved the user experience, and more access to Swift, something users were promised, would have bandaged the wound.

This week’s announcement cited the end of the Reputation era as the reason for the app’s shut down, but the reality is it failed to meet user expectations and prevent combative behavior.

The demise of Swift’s app, as well as Kim, Kourtney, Khloe and Kylie’s (Kendall got rid of hers long before), can only mean one thing: “We are mourning the end of the golden age of the celebrity app,” writes Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany.

In the age of Instagram, consumers, even Swift’s biggest fans — and she does have some very big fans — don’t need yet another app to suck up their time and money. When it comes to the Kardashian family, who have made themselves more accessible to their fans via social media and their reality television show than has ever been possible in the past, an app touting “exclusive content” seems especially lacking in credibility.

Sure, several other celebrity-promoted apps remain, but if Swift and Kim Kardashian, who have more than 230 million Instagram followers between them, can’t generate sticky users then who can?

Sorry Tom Hanks, Demi Lovato, Shakira, Chelsea Handler and other celebs looking to capitalize on their tech-enabled fans. The future of your apps isn’t bright.

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things.

The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik.

“At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if you want to customize an object, it would be best to have access to the original shapes — what their dimensions are and how they’re combined. But once you combine everything into a triangle mesh, you have nothing but a list of triangles to work with, and that information is lost,” said Tao Du to 3DPrintingIndustry. “Once we recover the metadata, it’s easier for other people to modify designs.”

The process cuts objects into simple solids that can then be added together to create complex objects. Because 3D scanning is imperfect, the creation of mesh models of various objects rarely leads to a perfect copy of the original. Using this technique, individual parts are cut away, analyzed and reassembled, allowing for a more precise scan.

“Further, we demonstrated the robustness of our algorithm by solving examples not describable by our grammar. Finally, since our method returns parameterized CSG programs, it provides a powerful means for end-users to edit and understand the structure of 3D meshes,” said Du.

The system detects primitive shapes and then modifies them. This allows it to recreate almost any object with far better accuracy than in previous versions of the software. It’s a surprisingly cool way to begin hacking hardware in order to understand it’s shape, volume and stability.

Short-form video app TikTok has been growing in popularity across international markets, including in the U.S. where a merger with Musical.ly has seen the app topping the App Store charts. Facebook and Snapchat have been hastily trying to copy TikTok’s features as a result. A part of TikTok’s ambitious global expansion plan has been its more recent targeting of emerging markets — like India and Indonesia — where the company’s quietly launched “TikTok Lite” app has been gaining ground in the latter half of 2018.

TikTok hasn’t yet made much fuss over its Lite version, which actually consists of two separate apps.

The first was launched on August 6, 2018 in Thailand, but is now available across other primarily Asian markets, including Indonesia, where it’s most popular, as well as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

This version of TikTok Lite has grown to 5 million installs since its August debut. (It’s actually written with a lowercase “l” in “Lite” in the Play store, which is how you can tell the difference between this and the other app.)

This version was also briefly live in India, Brazil and Russia, but now these countries are served by a separate Lite app (written as “Lite” with an uppercase “L”), which launched on November 1, 2018.

This second version of TikTok Lite has now become the larger of the two, thanks to India. It has around 7.1 million total downloads, according to Sensor Tower data.

It has also now been installed across 15 additional non-Asian countries, including Egypt, Brazil, Algeria, Tunisia, Russia, Ecuador, South Africa, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Kenya, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nigeria, Angola and Ghana.

Combined, the two TikTok Lite apps have gained more than 12 million downloads in around six months’ time, TechCrunch confirmed with Sensor Tower.

However, TikTok Lite is not being heavily promoted at this time — especially when compared with the outsize marketing that TikTok’s flagship app has been seeing as of late.

This advertising is courtesy of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which has had an infusion of billions in outside capital recently. The company is valued at $78 billion, as of October.

And it’s spending, apparently:

E.g.:

Sensor Tower found that more than half of TikTok Lite’s downloads came over the past month, following TikTok Lite’s return to India. Combined, the two Lite apps’ downloads reached around 6.7 million in December, which was a 158 percent increase over November’s 2.6 million installs, it said.

Despite TikTok Lite’s growth, 12 million+ downloads is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to TikTok’s larger user base. This represents only 4.5 percent of TikTok’s downloads on Google Play since August 2018, and only about 3.6 percent of all TikTok downloads since then across both the iOS and Google Play app stores combined.

To date, TikTok’s main app has been downloaded more than 887 million times on Google Play. That doesn’t count the downloads from the Chinese version called Douyin, which is found on third-party Android app stores. That means TikTok’s true install base is even bigger.

ByteDance itself had publicly said last July the TikTok user base had grown to 500 million+ monthly active users — a way of counting who’s regularly using the app instead of just installing it on their phone.

Given that Facebook Lite grew to 200 million users in less than two years‘ time, it seems like a “Lite” version of TikTok, now one of the world’s biggest apps, could be doing a bit better than 12 million installs over a six-month period.

The problem seems to stem from a variety of factors, including how TikTok Lite is marketed in the Play Store. The app uses screenshots and a description that make it seem like it’s just another version of TikTok. But according to user reviews, people were disappointed to find it’s a consumption-only app. Many have left reviews complaining about how they can’t make videos. They call it “fake” and “bad” as a result.

TikTok would do better to clarify how its Lite version is different, to eliminate this confusion.

It’s common for major tech companies to offer a “lighter” version of their app for emerging markets where low bandwidth is a concern. These apps tend to be smaller in size, more performant and sometimes either have reduced capabilities or special features aimed at low-bandwidth users.

Google, for example, has a suite of light apps — the “Go” edition apps — like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Files Go, Google Go, Google Maps Go and Google Assistant Go. Uber now offers Uber Lite. Facebook operates apps like Facebook Lite, Messenger Lite and Instagram Lite — the latter which launched just ahead of TikTok Lite, in fact.

Like most “Lite” apps, TikTok Lite clocks in at a smaller size — it’s only 10MB to 11MB (depending on the version) versus the much larger 71MB of TikTok’s main app.

A rep for TikTok confirmed the company is now offering a Lite version in some markets so users can choose a smaller app if they have concerns around data or the storage space on their phone. No other information about the Lite versions or strategy was provided.

So far, ByteDance’s efforts around TikTok Lite seem more experimental, given it hasn’t put up a proper description on Google Play, runs two separate Lite versions and had offered the app in some markets briefly, pulled out, then returned with another version. It will be interesting to see what TikTok Lite becomes when it gets the sort of attention that the main TikTok app is receiving today.

One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash.

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced today that they’ve closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

The startup has raised around $140 million to date.

“Today, the time and cost of long-distance travel prevent us from connecting with far-off people and places,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl in a statement. “Overture fares will be similar to today’s business class—widening horizons for tens of millions of travelers. Ultimately, our goal is to make high-speed flight affordable to all.”

Alongside the fund raise, Boom is further detailing its plans to begin testing its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner this year. The company is aiming to launch a 1:3 scale prototype of its planned Overture airliner this year called the XB-1. The two-seater plane will serve to validate the technologies being built for the full-sized jet.

The startup’s supersonic Overture jet will hold 55 passengers, and the team hopes that the costs of flying more than double the speed of sound will be comparable to today’s business class ticket prices. $100 million may seem like a lot of money, but the development costs for lengthy projects like these can quickly race past estimates.

The company already has pre-orders from Virgin Group and Japan Airlines for 30 airliners .

Starwood’s data breach just got both better and worse at the same time.

Marriott, the parent company of hotel chain giant Starwood, said it has revised the number of customers affected by its recently disclosed data breach from 500 million to “fewer than 383 million unique guests.” That doesn’t mean all those 383 million guests are affected, Marriott said, but the hotel giant still can’t yet give a more precise number of customers whose data was stolen.

The bad news is that the company confirmed that more than five million unencrypted passport numbers were stolen, on top of the more than 20 million encrypted passport numbers.

That might be a problem, given passport numbers can be used for identity theft and to commit fraud, but is the sort of data that remains highly valuable for spy agencies that can use the information to track down where government officials, diplomats and adversaries have stayed — giving insight into what would ordinarily be clandestine activities.

Marriott also said that 8.6 million unique payment card numbers were taken, but only 354,000 cards were active and unexpired at the time of the breach in September.

The hotel giant said it had “no evidence” to show that the hackers stole the keys needed to decrypt the data, but did not say how it came to that conclusion.

Starwood’s security lapse became the largest data breach last year, and remains one of the most damaging hacking incidents in recent memory. The company said the contents of the stolen data were from the Starwood guest reservation database, which it acquired when it bought Starwood and its 1,200 properties in 2016 for $13 billion.

Marriott said in its Friday update that it has “completed the phase out” of Starwood’s reservation database and now runs guest bookings through its Marriott database, which was not affected by the breach.

If you think times are bad at Apple, spare a thought for HTC, the once king-of-hill phone maker that continues to struggle very badly.

The Taiwanese smartphone company, which offloaded a portion of its business to Google for $1.1 billion and is pivoting to VR, laid off yet more staff in 2018 and had its worst year of sales ever.

According to its own figures — and as noted by Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan — the company brought in just 23.74 billion TWD ($770 million) in revenue over the entire year. That’s the first time it has grossed less than $1 billion during a year as a public company.

That figure represents a massive 62 percent drop on HTC’s paltry revenue for 2017 — 62.12 billion TWD, around $2 billion — which was its poorest year since 2005. We don’t yet know the total loss for 2018, but its three previous quarterly reports combined amount to a total operating loss of 11.13 billion TWD, $361 million, with one more quarter to add.

HTC’s 2018 total was so bad that it actually made more money during just one single month a few years ago. Its total revenue during May 2013, back when phones like the One M7, One Mini and One Max made it one of the best smartphone companies on the planet, came in at 29 billion TWD.

Those days of booming sales are, of course, long gone as these charts painfully illustrate.

The decision to sell a large chunk of the smartphone business to Google one year ago was the icing on the cake served at HTC’s smartphone wake. Yes, the company did announce the U12+ — with a squeezable side — in May and it is working on a blockchain phone that we kind of got a look at during our Shenzhen event last year, but these are peripheral plays that are tucked well away from where the mainstream players are dueling, a place where HTC used to be.

Even VR, trumpeted as HTC’s great area of hope, is a long-term play.

The company doesn’t break down revenue — that’ll come later when it releases its next earnings report in February — so we don’t know how its Vive and other virtual reality plays are working out in terms of numbers. But the immediate future isn’t great.

Lucas Matney — TechCrunch’s resident virtual reality cyberpunk — noted just this week that 2019 is shaping up to be a very testing year for the entire VR and AR industry, HTC/Vive very much included.

“There are plenty of reasons to be long-term bullish on AR, but the time horizons some have espoused seems to be bogus and pitch decks organized around a near-term spike in phone-based or glasses-based users are going to have a tougher time being taken seriously in 2019,” Matney wrote.

If that proves true, HTC’s sickly sales may well contract further still.

In many ways, it’s hard to not feel sorry for the company. Pivots this brutal are usually carried out by private startups who can keep the contents of their books to themselves, rather than 22-year-old public companies who must file financial statements. Unfortunately for HTC, information like monthly sales, losses and other revealing data will continue to be public information, ensuring that this painful transition continues to play out with full public scrutiny.

Despite an incredible downturn in success, co-founder, president and CEO Cher Wang continues to run the business with no calls for a change in leadership. Wang keeps a low profile and has said little of her plans to turn things around. Maybe 2019 is a good year for being more forthcoming, especially if the losses continue to mount as seems inevitable.

Amazon just over a year ago launched its first in-home furniture brands, with private labels Rivet and Stone & Beam. This past fall, it began experimenting with a new, more visual way to shop for furniture and other merchandise with its Pinterest-like recommendation service Scout. Now, Amazon is venturing further into home furnishings with the debut of Amazon Showroom, a visual design tool that allows you to place furniture into a virtual living room, customize the décor, then shop the look.

The retailer didn’t formally announce the launch of Amazon Showroom, but a spokesperson confirmed it’s a recent test available that’s now available on Amazon.com and in the Amazon mobile app.

You can access it from the “Accounts & Lists” drop-down on the web; the Home, Garden & Pets department on the web; or the Home & Kitchen department on the mobile app.

Currently, the new feature is focused on helping Amazon shoppers put together a living room. In a virtual setting, you can make adjustments to the wall color and the flooring, then swap out each item in the space with one of your own choosing – including the sofa, coffee table, chair, end table, lamp, rug, and even the art on the wall.

To do so, you just click on the piece in question, then pick another from the right-side panel where a scrollable list of other options are available, along with their prices. This selection can be filtered by a number of factors, as well, like price, style, color, material, brand, and star rating.

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s own home furnishing brands are heavily featured here.

As you work on your project, you can save your room design to pull up later. And you can save more than one room design, if you’re trying to decide between different styles. When satisfied, an “Add to cart” button lets you place all at into your cart for checkout with just one click.

Amazon Showroom – a name that’s almost a cruel reference to Amazon’s ability to turn brick-and-mortar stores into showrooms for online shoppers – isn’t the retailer’s first attempt at helping shoppers visualize items in their home ahead of purchase. The company also launched an AR shopping feature in its app in 2017, which allows you to place a virtual item in your camera view to see how it goes in your own room. That can be useful if shopping for a single item, but less so when designing a complete room.

Home furnishings is still an emerging category for online retail, not only because they’re hard to visualize, but also because heavy items are expensive to ship. However, major retailers see the potential in this growing market.

Walmart, for example, launched a new home shopping site for furniture and décor last year, which features its own in-house brands and more visual, editorial-style imagery. It has also snapped up other home furnishing and décor retailers, including Hayneedle and recently, Art.com, and is building its own visual search.

Amazon confirmed the launch of Showroom in a statement.

The retailer wouldn’t say when the feature debuted, exactly, but a Twitter account was tweeting links to a pre-production site earlier in December. It’s also unclear at this time if Amazon Showroom was built entirely in-house.

“Amazon Showroom is a new way for customers to visualize their home furnishing purchases when shopping online,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Amazon Showroom presents customers with a virtual living room, where they can customize the décor and furniture selection providing the ability to visually compare to scale representations of furniture items together in a room to determine how an item will fit with the style of a room and work with other complimentary pieces. The result is a photorealistic rendering of a room that answers the question: ‘How will this all look together?’,” they said.

The feature is live for all customers on the web and in the Amazon app.