Year: 2019

Wear and tear is a major issue in the realm of electric scooters, resulting in a short lifespan of individual scooters and poor unit economics. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Segway -Ninebot unveiled the Model Max scooter that is designed to help services like Bird and Lime, for example, reduce their respective operating and maintenance costs.

“Model Max was designed taking into consideration complex shared usage scenarios, consumer overuse of vehicles, operation models and maintenance costs,” Segway wrote in a press release. “At the same time, Segway-Ninebot is also more open to accept the customized needs of various operators to meet the different needs of users and customers in each market.”

Segway won’t share any details on the specifications but says it will share more on January 8.

It’s worth noting that some of Segway’s Ninebot scooters created safety hazards for Lime. In August, Lime says it became aware of a potential issue with some of its Segway Ninebot scooters. Specifically, Lime identified a problem with one of the two batteries in some of its earlier scooter versions.

Bird, which also uses Ninebot scooters, said it conducted an investigation and found that none of the vehicles it purchased from Segway Ninebot were affected.

Segway also unveiled today Loomo Delivery, an autonomous vehicle for last-mile deliveries. The idea is to use the bot to make autonomous deliveries for food, packages and other items.

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make sure it has a foothold in the medium. Cision, which provides press release distribution, media monitoring, and other PR services to businesses and the media industry, has acquired Falcon.io, a startup founded in Denmark that lets companies post, manage and analyse their presence on social media platforms.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, the companies tell me, but the whole of the Falcon team, including CEO/founder Ulrik Bo Larsen, are joining the company, where they will continue to operate its existing product set as well as integrate it into Cision’s wider business. We’ve heard from sources that the deal may be around $200 million, although I’m still trying to get more confirmation on this.

Falcon had raised around $25 million according to PitchBook, and it has never disclosed its valuation. Cision — well known to many journalists — is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of just under $1.6 billion. For some context, two other prominent social media management firms that compete with Falcon, Sprout Social and Hootsuite, are respectively valued at $800 million and anywhere between $750 million and $1 billion (depending on who you ask).

These two are bigger firms — Falcon has around 1,500 businesses as customers who use it to manage their social profiles and read social sentiment across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, while Sprout says it has around 25,000 and Hootsuite counts millions of individual users — and both have raised significantly more capital, but their valuations underscore the demand that we’re seeing for platforms and user-friendly tools to target the world’s social media users — estimated to number at upwards of 2.5 billion people globally.

Kevin Akeroyd, who came on as Cision’s CEO after long stints at both Oracle and Salesforce among other places, describes Falcon as a “top five” social media marketing and analytics firm, and in an interview he said that the new acquisition will form a key part of the “communications cloud” that Cision has been building.

As with Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe (who also use similar cloud-themed terminology to describe their product suites), Cision’s strategy is to build a one-stop shop for customers to manage all of their communications needs from one platform. Falcon itself may be smaller than its competitors, but idea is that it will be cross-sold to Cision’s customers, which currently number 75,000 businesses.

“We’re seeing too many of our customers using one application for content, another for something else, and so on. There are too many apps,” he said. “We have always believed in earned media” — that is, media mentions that are not in the form of paid advertising — “and the role of influencers alongside paid and owned marketing. We believe we could provide the first solution for businesses across earned, communications services and public relations, helping to build a better data stack to measure and attribute what you are doing in comms.”

As social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter build more of their own tools in-house to serve the social media needs of organizations who want to better manage their profiles and interactions on these platforms, this has led to some consolidation and shifts among social media management companies. Some are merging or getting acquired, and some are shopping themselves around.

And in that wider trend, it’s not too surprising to see public relations firms get in on the action. Social media has completely changed the landscape for how information is disseminated today, sometimes complementing what traditional media organizations do — there are many examples of how newspapers and other news outlets leverage, for example, Facebook to grow and communicate with their audiences — and often replacing traditional media altogether. (Pew last month said that social media outpaced newspapers for the first time as a news source in the US, although TV and radio are still bigger than social… for now.)

Given that public relations management has long been the connecting link between organisations and media outlets, they have had to take a bigger step into social media in order to provide a more complete picture of the media landscape to their clients. Cision is not the first to have done this: Last year, Meltwater, another media monitoring firm, acquired DataSift to add social signals and traffic to its platform mix.

“This consolidation has to come because there is just too much value for the user,” Akeroyd said. “CMOs and CCOs do not want their own islands, they want something bigger.”

A one-year-old Chinese startup called Luckin is busy waging war against Starbucks as the new year unfolds. At an event on Thursday, Luckin announced that it aims to be the largest coffee chain in China by number of cups sold and outlets by 2019.

Caffeinated drinks are taking off in the tea-drinking nation. Average coffee consumption per Chinese consumer is expected to grow 18 percent between 2014 and 2019, well above 0.9 percent in the US. Starbucks is currently the largest player in China’s coffee market with 3,300 stores as of last May and a goal of topping 6,000 outlets by 2022.

Loss-making Luckin vows to more than double its number of locations from just over 2,000 to over 4,500 by the end of this year. It sounds like some kind of mission impossible given it took Starbucks 20 years to reach its current scale, but not all of Luckin’s facilities are the size of Starbucks’ sit-down shops.

Rather, Luckin operates a combination of cafes, tiny booths for customer pickup and take-out kitchens that dispatch deliverymen who bring drinks to people within 30 minutes, a big selling point of the company.

It also helps that Luckin has nailed powerful partners like food delivery giant Meituan Dianping after Starbucks teamed up with Ele.me. These moves in a way represent a proxy war between China’s two largest internet companies — Tencent and Alibaba, which backs Meituan and owns Ele.me, respectively.

Luckin has also scooped up loads of investments to power its lightspeed expansion. The company secured a $200 million series B funding round in December that valued it at $2.2 billion, only five months after it raised $200 million. It ventured into the market by shelling out large subsidies for consumers, with deep discounts like “buy five get five free.” It’s thus not surprising to see the company operating in the red. Luckin’s net loss amounted to at least 850 million yuan, or $124 million, within nine months in 2018, the company recently told local media.

“Our chief strategy is to quickly grab market share through subsidies, so losses are expected,” said Luckin, adding that it will press on with its subsidy-powered expansion.

CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round from a clutch of existing investors to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Sequoia India, Hillhouse and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the round which also saw participation from Axis Bank, one of CarDekho’s financing partners.

[Update] The company confirmed that the deals gives it a valuation of $400-$500 million, that’s in line with a report from Economic Times one month ago. The figure is up slightly on a reported $360 million valuation from CarDekho’s previous fundraising in 2016.

The deal takes the company to $185 million to date from investors, which also include Times Internet, Ratan Tata — Tata Group’s Chairman Emeritus — HDFC Bank and Dentsu.

Founded in 2005 as GirnarSoft, CarDekho operates a range of online portals that sell new and second-hand cars and motorbikes in India. The company has also branched out into Southeast Asia where it operates portals in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia and, on the content side, it operates a YouTube channel and an auto blog and reviews site.

CarDekho claims 39 million monthly unique visitors to its websites, and six million downloads of its apps. On the finance side, it said revenue went from 114 crores ($16.3 million) in the 2016-2017 financial year to 160 crore ($22.8 million) in 2017-18. (The Indian financial calendar runs from April 1 to March 31.)

CarDekho claims to work “actively” with 5,000 dealerships in India while it has direct retail partnerships with eight car and motorbike makers. It claims to influence 42 percent of sales for those dealerships and 15-30 percent of annual sales for those auto- and bike makers, although the company didn’t provide specific details on how it calculates those figures.

Beyond helping facilitate sales, it also offers car financing in partnership with over 10 financial entities who offer terms to its customers. It has provided insurance options too since 2017 and, with this new funding in the bag, it said that it intends to double down and build out more “transaction services” that go hand-in-hand with auto sales.

“Our contribution to a person buying a new car has grown manifold and this will continue to be a bulwark for us. Our used cars engine has scaled up tremendously and has also enabled us to incubate allied businesses like insurance and finance business as they are one of the largest opportunities ahead of us. The opportunity lies in extending formal credit and insurance coverage to the new-to-formal economy population and will continue to be a focus area for us” said CEO and co-founder Amit Jain in a statement.

CarDheko is rivaled by the likes of CarTrade, which is backed Temasek and Warburg Pincus and previous gobbled up rival CarWale, Truebil and Cars24, a service that buys cars from consumers and resells them to dealers. Notably, Sequoia India is also an investor in Cars24.

Chinese internet giant Tencent just lost a leading artificial intelligence figure. Zhang Tong, who previously worked at Yahoo, IBM and Baidu, has stepped down after directing Tencent’s AI Lab for nearly two years.

The scientist will return to academia and continue research in the AI field, Tencent confirmed with TechCrunch on Thursday, adding that it hasn’t appointed a successor.

”We are grateful for [Zhang]’s contributions to Tencent AI Lab and continue to explore fundamental and applied research that can make the benefits of AI accessible to everyone, everywhere,” Tencent said in a statement.

Zhang’s departure is the latest in a handful of top AI scientists quitting large Chinese tech firms. In 2017, search giant Baidu lost its chief scientist Andrew Ng who started Google’s deep learning initiative. Last year, the firm suffered another blow as renown AI expert Lu Qi resigned as chief operating officer and moved onto spearheading Y Combinator’s newly minted China program.

Talent is key to a tech firm’s AI endeavor, for a revered leader not only inspires employees but also boosts investor confidence. Baidu stocks plunged following Lu’s exit as markets weighed on the talent gap inside the company, which had poured resources into autonomous driving, smart speakers among other AI efforts. Tencent itself had poached Zhang from Baidu’s Big Data Lab to ramp up its own AI division.

Tencent is best known for its billion-user WeChat messenger and being the world’s largest video game publisher, but it’s also been doubling down on machine learning R&D to serve users and enterprise clients. It launched the AI Lab in April 2016 and opened its first U.S. research center in Seattle a year later to work on speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP).

The AI Lab dives into machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition and NLP. Meanwhile, the social and entertainment giant also works to put fundamental research to practical use, applying AI to its key businesses — content, social, online games and cloud computing.

One beneficiary has been WeChat, which applies NLP to enable seamless dialogues between users speaking different languages. Another case in point is Tencent’s news aggregator Tiantian Kuaibao, which deploys deep learning to recommend content based on readers’ past preference. Kuaibao is a direct competitor to Jinri Toutiao, the popular AI-powered news app run by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.

To date, Tencent’s AI Lab has a team of 70 research scientists and 300 engineers, according to information on its website. Tencent operates another AI initiative called the Youtu Lab, which focuses on image understanding, face recognition, audio recognition and optical character recognition. While its sister AI Lab falls under Tencent’s research-focus Technology Engineering Group, Youtu is the brainchild of the Cloud & Smart Industries Group, a new unit that Tencent set up during its major organizational reshuffle in October to place more emphasis on enterprise businesses.

It’s not Lunar New Year yet, but there is something new on the moon. In a major milestone for space exploration, China announced that its lunar program has successfully soft-landed a probe on the far side of the moon, making it the first one to do so. The historic landing was reported by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, earlier today.

According to the China National Space Administration, the probe, consisting of a lander and rover, touched down at about 10:26AM Beijing time. This is the first ever soft-landing (meaning a landing without damage or destruction to the space vehicle) on the far side of the moon, which is never visible from Earth. Named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e-4 launched on Dec. 8 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province.

China’s Chang’e-4 probe softlands on Moon’s far side pic.twitter.com/Z1R6tbpBMI

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) January 3, 2019

The South China Morning Post reported earlier this week that the Chang’e-4 will be used for “astronomical observation using low-frequency radio, surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition and shallow lunar surface structure, and measuring neutron radiation and neutral atoms.” The successful soft-landing is important for space exploration because there is relatively little information about the far side of the moon compared to the side visible from Earth, which has been explored and surveyed by previous missions.

Photographs taken by earlier spacecraft, including the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 and Zond 3 (launched in 1959 and 1965, respectively) and NASA’s Lunar Orbiter program (launched in 1966), found significant differences between the far side’s terrain and the surface of the moon visible from Earth. In 1962, NASA’s Ranger 4 probe became the first spacecraft to impact on the moon, but was unable to send back data after landing.

Since direct communication between Chang’e-4 and Earth is blocked because of the probe’s position, China also launched a relay satellite called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, that is currently 400,000 km above Earth, positioned between it and the moon.

Chang’e-4’s successful landing concludes the second phase of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP). The first phase was the launch of Yutu, the lunar rover of Chang’e-3, which landed on the moon in December 2013, but stopped moving after 40 days due to a mechanical problem (it is still able to transmit data and photos, including true color high-definition photos). The successful landing of Chang’e-3 was another a significant milestone for China’s space program, making it only the third country after the U.S. and Soviet Union to soft-land on the moon. After Chang’e-4, the third and final phase of CLEP will be a returnable spacecraft called Chang’e-5. Set to launch by 2020, Chang’e-5 will be used to collect samples.

Vengo, a six-year-old, Bethpage, New York-based startup that makes touchscreen vending machines for a wide variety of uses and clients, has raised $7 million in new equity funding, shows a new SEC filing.

That roughly doubles the amount of money the company has raised over the years, including from such notable investors as Brad Feld, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh, David Tisch, rap mogul Nas, and Joanna Wilson, among others.

Vengo makes wall-mounted mini-vending machines the size of large picture frames that it then sells to vending machine distributors, asking for a small fee per month in exchange for access to its software. Its customers then either advertise on the video screen that appears, or sell their products in Vengos. (It charges them an additional fee per month per product per machine.)

Each time a sale is made, both the customer and Vengo is notified via cloud-based inventory monitoring. Payments are cashless. And sensors allow automatic refunds if a product isn’t received.

The company first gained attention three years ago, when it competed on the ABC show “Shark Tank,” with cofounder and CEO founding Brian Shimmerlik walking away a deal for $2 million in venture debt, to be paid over three years at 7 percent interest, in return for 3 percent of the company.

Vengo’s machines sell six items at a time, generally electronics (think battery packs and cables at hotel kiosks), personal care products (Kiehl’s was among its earlier customers), and snacks, which it sells at colleges like New York University and at health clubs, among other places.

According to the outlet Inc., which runs an annual list of the 5,000 (!) fastest-growing private companies, Vengo ranked 620th this year, based on 2017 revenue of $3 million and three-year growth of 807 percent. Much of that growth has come from customers in its home state of New York, though the company has been steadily expanding its geographic footprint.

It’s bucking a broader trend, apparently. Overall, the vending machine market has been slowing owing to competition from convenience stores, supermarkets and micro markets. According to the market research firm IBISWorld, annual growth for vending machine operators between 2013 and 2018 was negative 2.9 percent.

Global investor Lightspeed is starting 2019 with its largest-ever fund for China, where it has backed a number of new internet challengers. The firm announced this week that its fourth China fund has closed with a total capital commitment of $560 million.

The firm had a massive 2018, with no fewer than five of its portfolio holding IPOs including two of China’s up-and-coming startups that are challenging the country’s internet establishment — they are Meituan, the super app firm that specializes in deliveries, and Pinduoduo, a group e-commerce company that is threatening Alibaba’s dominance.

Based on those successes, it is perhaps not a surprise that Lightspeed has pulled in a record new fund. TechCrunch previously reported that the new fund was aimed at $360 million based on filings, but it added more capital to give more options.

Lightspeed said it has $360 million for early-stage deals aimed at Series A and Series B stages, with an additional $200 million set aside for “growth investments.” The new fund dwarfs Lightspeed’s previous vehicles in China — the firm’s previous two China funds each closed at $260 million while it raised $168 million for its debut fund in the country in 2013.

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a well-known investor that is anchored in Silicon Valley with global funds in India, Israeli and — of course — China. Together, those funds manage around $6 billion in capital, according to the firm.

Led by partners Chris Schaepe, Herry Han and James Mi, the China operation has backed a range of unicorns, including the aforementioned Meituan, which raised over $4 billion via a Hong Kong IPO last year, and Pinduoduo, which raised $1.6 billion via a U.S. listing in 2018. Other Lightspeed China IPOs from last year were PPDai, Rong360 and InnoLight while the firm also counts $9 billion-valued Full Truck Alliance, real estate platform Fangdd and Airbnb-like Tujia, both of which are valued in the billions, among the more mature bets in its portfolio.

“We believe there are plenty of new opportunities in China consumer Internet given the depth of China’s mobile payment and social networks. Innovation and entrepreneurship in the next decade will bring more China-based startups to the world stage. This will be China’s first decade of truly global innovation. Chinese entrepreneurs are now developing business plans with global expansion in mind from day one,” said Han, one of the firm’s founding partners, in a statement.

Last year, Lightspeed Venture Partners — the U.S. entity — filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. In December, it added five new partners to its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

The Senate has officially confirmed the incoming FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr and Geoffrey Starks have been officially confirmed by the Senate for their five-year terms. This completes the five-seat commission, which is required to be balanced between the two parties — today’s additions bring it to three Republicans and two Democrats.

Carr, nominated and previously confirmed in August of 2017 (though only just now for his full term), was an advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai during his time as a Commissioner, and before that worked at a law firm that works with telecoms. He’s the Republican of the two.

Starks was nominated this last June and has worked in the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau (think fines and legal threats) and the Justice Department.

A tweet from the Senate Cloakroom account, operated by Republican staff on the floor there, shows a note that seems to have erroneously confused the two: according to the note, Carr’s term starts in 2018 and Starks’s in 2017, despite the fact that the latter wasn’t even nominated at that time, and 2017 is certainly when Carr actually began his duties. I’ve asked the FCC about this discrepancy and will update the post if I hear back.

Chairman Pai issued a statement welcoming both Commissioners to their positions:

I congratulate Geoffrey on his Senate confirmation.  He brings a wealth of experience and expertise, including having served most recently as Assistant Chief in the Enforcement Bureau.  During his confirmation hearing, I was excited to hear him highlight the need to expand rural broadband and the power of telemedicine.  I look forward to working with him and having a fellow Kansan on the Commission.

I also congratulate Brendan on his confirmation to a full term.  Brendan has done tremendous work on a number of issues, including his leadership on wireless infrastructure modernization.  He has also been a staunch advocate for rural broadband deployment, particularly for precision agriculture and advancements in telemedicine.

Commissioners Carr, O’Rielly, and Rosenworcel all tweeted out welcomes as well:

A full Commission means more work gets done, since these people and their staffs have to come up with and enforce all the rules on the books. It maybe politically expedient to have a 2:1 Republican majority on the Commission when taking controversial measures like rolling back net neutrality rules, but ultimately the job to be done needs five.

Very rarely does an early technology garner such an air of inevitability like AR has in the past few years.

2018 was supposed to be a year where the foundational tech for augmented reality was built out a bit and the industry took a couple big leaps. Things started off well-enough, but momentum really doesn’t seem be on the side of some of the industry’s heaviest hitters heading into 2019, suggesting that life for earlier-stage startups may not be much easier.

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.

The ghost with the most

For all of the AR advances made this year, the company most emblematic of AR’s numerous challenges was clearly Magic Leap .

The company spent the past few years trashing industry standards and lauding their own approaches with braggadocio, but ended up releasing a product that largely iterated on its competitors. With the release of their “developer kit” this year, a product that clearly seems to have stopped being a first-gen product only when the reality of the climate availed itself, the startup seems to be finding that optics and infra progress is going to come more slowly than foretold.

I’ve talked to more than a few people who think Magic Leap hindered progress in the AR industry by siphoning investor attention and discouraging other hardware startups from joining the fray in the face of a billions-backed unknown. But in 2019, there are fewer available plays for the funding juggernaut. They spent years trying to distinguish themselves from the corporate mission of Microsoft and their HoloLens headset; now it seems they’ve begun to see that the only hope of justifying their sitting valuation in the next few years is enlisting support from the big customers that MSFT is chasing, as opposed to single-handedly birthing a consumer market. Magic Leap recently lost a bid to Microsoft for a $480 million military contract to outfit troops with AR headsets, and as Microsoft prepares to release a second-generation HoloLens with the enterprise in full concentration, it seems like Magic Leap is going to reshuffle its deck.

Dead-on-arrival content plays

Magic Leap’s struggles are well-documented, but what plagues the overall AR industry seems less discussed.

The consumer appetite for phone-based AR content is obviously lacking. Even Apple’s reality distortion field isn’t enough to convince people that its ARKit releases have led to anything other than some weird experimentation for iOS users. Few Android OEMs are boasting about compatibility with Google’s ARCore platform anymore, suggesting that approachable hardware standards for device makers wasn’t all that was missing from the failed Tango brand.

The most apparent mobile AR opportunities are probably in user-generated content, but there seems to be a disconnect between platforms and users in terms of how complex these AR experiences can and should become. At this point, selfie masks still seem to be at the edge of users’ comfort levels, leaving a lot of solved tech problems stuck in limbo waiting for a problem that makes them worthwhile.

Niantic is probably one of the most revenue-heavy startups dabbling in phone AR, even if it is a bit of a false idol for the industry. Nobody seems to think of Niantic as a capital-A augmented reality startup, but it’s clear that the team behind Pokémon GO sees the technology as a not-fully-tapped reservoir of potential for future gaming experiences that feel more social and more immersive than any mobile RPG that’s sucking up the majority of your playtime today. The company’s new Harry Potter title still doesn’t have a release date, we haven’t seen any gameplay, but we do know that AR plays a part in the title in some capacity. We’ll see if they figure out things the rest of the industry hasn’t.

Platform tech opportunities

Part of this broader content pain is the fact that some known platform fundamentals are still getting tackled. In 2018, the startups in AR that were raising the most buzz were so-called “AR cloud” startups, teams that were largely focused on solving more fundamental back-end problems around localization and mapping. It turns out “simple” problems like getting a bunch of users in a single session or keeping track of objects you’ve moved around between sessions are actually incredibly complex.

A big issue is that AR fundamentally relies on a level of spatial understanding that goes far beyond grasping geometry. For all the ground that has been traversed by computer vision researchers this year, issues like segmenting environments by objects and accurately identifying them are still in the earliest stages. When you think of AR tech as a subset of vision problems, you realize that products today are being approached in a kind of bizarre manner.

Google has been making worthwhile movements in proliferating their Lens computer vision engine across new apps and devices. In a very roundabout way, the company seems to have come to the worthwhile perspective that mapping an environment spatially doesn’t really help that much if you can’t parse the contextual nuances of what the camera is actually looking at, as well.

A lot of the AR startups in this space have raised some cash on the backs of the smartphone AR trend and the hundreds of millions of potential users, but it still seems pretty dubious whether this market has legs. Fortunately, most of these solutions have wide applicability across future industries like robotics and autonomous vehicles, helping computers interface with the real world through visual and geographic cues, but their utility might not be as ripe as they’d hope.

This is an area where Magic Leap could be poised to find some relatively near-term success. The startup’s top brass spent a hefty amount of time at their developer conference talking about the “Magicverse,” basically their vision for bringing localized AR layers onto geographic spaces where users with Magic Leap glasses could observe the content. Without having taken a peek at the tech they’re working with, their biggest advantage seems to rely on their partnership with AT&T, which is poised to start working more seriously with 5G in 2019.

The back end still remains a much more exciting market than hardware in 2019, but there may still be some interesting movement with devices this year. I don’t trust most of the predictive data that exists surrounding headset sales, so I’m not even going to reference it; suffice to say that AR headset sales aren’t going to explode anytime soon.

North Focals

More conservative AR hardware

One trend that I am curious to see shake out is the more simplistic version of AR where the glasses basically just offer users a heads-up display for notifications and lightweight apps.

Companies like North and Vuzix have been talking a lot about their work here. Apple’s rumored AR glasses have been talked about for ages at this point, with 2020/2021 seeming to be the rumor mill sweet spot for a release time frame. If that’s the case, I’d bet it falls more into this design ethos than a HoloLens type device. The hardware just isn’t small enough yet, but it is getting close, and there could be some interesting early ground that the industry could gain by moving in more heavily on traditional wearable use cases — though high component costs will be an early limiter as well.

This is probably a hardware space Snap has their eyes on; Spectacles jogged a lot of the current thinking on glasses-type wearables, but at this point, the company needs something that has wide appeal and can feed users back into its own app. The company isn’t in a position to hock something with razor-thin or non-existent margins, and it doesn’t gain that much from a product that sells a few thousand units in terms of building its platform.

Bottom line

For the Facebooks and Apples of the world, immediate market conditions and user interest obviously hold a different weight. U.S. investment firms with good track records spent a lot of time this year rejiggering their expectations for their first waves of investments. For the more ambitious privately held AR startups of the world, there’s probably going to be an issue with raising capital this year, as a lot of the top hardware companies have been seeking more free-flowing late-stage cash from Chinese firms, which have been growing harder to pin down as the trade climate worsens. This is going to be a problem for hardware companies especially.

For the most part, the BS is going to continue to get easier to parse this year.

Platform plays are going to have to dial in their target audience a bit more than “everyone with an AR-enabled phone”; more realistic expectations are something the industry should benefit from. ARKit and ARCore are going to level-up and game engine-makers are going to get better solutions for AR content creators. Back-end vision challenges are going to get solved and enable things like more seamless multi-player, but there are plenty of reasons why these tech problem solutions won’t lead to big changes in user behavior. Users failing to take off in the second year of some of these big platforms probably won’t dissuade Apple, but it definitely will dissuade some investors from continuing to bet big on the near-term future of mobile AR.