Year: 2019

2What’s in a name?

More than two years ago, Fast Company published a story with the headline “Two Ex-Googlers Want To Make Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Corner Stores Obsolete.” The focus of the story was a nascent startup by the name of Bodega .

The company had raised $2.5 million in funding from First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green and Homebrew’s Hunter Walk. To announce their funding and vision to create the unmanned store of the future, Bodega briefed a number of journalists on its big idea. Given the simplicity of its product — a tech-enabled vending machine, in essence — the team was blindsided by the uproarious response that followed. September 13, 2017 was supposed to be the most exciting day in the startup’s history, at least until that point; instead, it was a nightmarish lesson in poor branding and messaging.

The press storm and public lambasting catapulted Bodega into the limelight — for all the wrong reasons. Overnight, the company went from just another early-stage commerce business to the symbol of everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley. Many wondered if it would fall victim to criticism and crumble like Juicero, a well-financed startup that sold a $400 juicer — that is, until a Bloomberg story proved its juice packets could be squeezed by hand, no machine necessary. Or would it take the public condemnation in stride, hearing out the critics and amending its brand as necessary?

Two years after its ill-fated launch, the latter seems to be true. Today, the three-year-old Oakland-based company — now known as Stockwell — is said to be growing quickly thanks to more than $45 million in venture capital funding from a number of deep-pocketed investors, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch.

Bodega’s original branding included a cat logo. Cats are often features of small neighborhood stores, known as bodegas.

Public outcry

“Bodega is either the worst named startup of the year, or the most devious,” wrote The Verge in the fall of 2017. “Tech firm markets glorified vending machines where users can buy groceries,” said The Guardian. The Washington Post dubbed the company “America’s most hated start-up.” CityLab, which writes about issues impacting cities, bluntly reported “Bodega, a Startup for Disrupting Bodegas, Is Terrible,” followed by 30 reasons why the startup sucks: “Maybe a Bodega can stock Soylent to appeal to people who also think that eating delicious food is a grim burden,” CityLab wrote. “Why do tech wizards keep thinking of new and more horrible ways to avoid dealing with people? How come they hate being human?”

It’s safe to say Bodega endured one of the most catastrophic company launches in the history of tech startups. But the press cycle surrounding Bodega was more than an attack on the startup alone. It represented a greater frustration with Silicon Valley culture and its reputation for funding “disruptive” products devoid of impact. Time and time again, VCs had proven their willingness to inject millions into standard concepts lacking originality. A juicer had raised more than $100 million, after all, scooters were beginning to attract private capital and Soylent, which sells a meal replacement drink fit for techies, was hot off the heels of a $50 million round.

A mini-fridge equipped with computer vision technology boasting a culturally insensitive name wasn’t going to change the world. Questioning why it had the support of VCs was only fair.

An innocent misunderstanding?

Behind the upsetting name was a business developing hundreds of five-foot-wide pantry boxes to be housed in luxury apartment lobbies, offices, college campuses, gyms and more. Similar to Amazon Go, the “smart stores” recognize what customers remove from the cases using computer vision and automatically charge the credit card associated with the account.

Bodega was founded by a pair of Google veterans, Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan. It had all the ingredients for a successful startup stew. Founders with years of experience in big tech: McDonald spent more than a decade at Google; Rajan had just finished up the search engine’s competitive associate product manager program. Both attended top universities: University of California -Berkeley and Columbia University, respectively. Still, neither of the two men nor their investors seemed to have predicted the controversy afoot.

“Bodega doesn’t want to disrupt the bodega,” Hunter Walk, a Bodega investor and co-founder of the seed fund Homebrew, wrote in a 2017 blog post. “Some instances of today’s press coverage suggested that element, a sound bite which, exacerbated by Bodega’s naming, pissed people off as another example of tech startups being at best tone-deaf, and at worst, predatory … It didn’t occur to me that some people would see the word and associate its use in this context with whitewashing or cultural appropriation.”

The company, too, quickly authored a blog post outlining their thought process behind the name: “Rather than disrespect to traditional corner stores — or worse yet, a threat — we intended only admiration,” McDonald wrote.

After penning blog posts, the founders continued working on the company under the provocative and upsetting name. Meanwhile, investors seemed unfazed by the negative press, evidenced by the company’s ability to continue raising venture capital funding. After all, many of the best businesses endure the wrath of bloggers, competing founders and the general public. As for VCs, high-risk bets are just part of the ball game.

DCM Ventures, a Chinese venture capital fund with offices in Beijing, Tokyo and Silicon Valley, was the first to agree to invest in Bodega following the PR disaster. The firm, an investor in Lime, Hims and SoFi, led a $7.5 million Series A financing in the business in early 2018, sources tell TechCrunch. DCM vice president David Cheng, named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital, is actively involved with the company, according to his bio.

Finally, after pocketing nearly $10 million in total funding, Bodega announced a name change: “Did you buy something today from a Bodega?” Bodega’s McDonald wrote. “You may have noticed that we’ve changed our name to Stockwell . Our new name is one of the changes we’re making as we expand our offerings and open more stores around the country.”

Stockwell, fka Bodega, founders Paul McDonald (left) and Ashwath Rajan (Courtesy of Stockwell).

A new era

With a new logo and a toned-down, somewhat bland identity, Stockwell had a fresh start and, soon, more attention from top VCs. In late 2018, the company raised a $35 million round of funding co-led by Uber and Slack-backer GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, and NEA, an investor known for bets in Coursera, MasterClass and OpenDoor, Stockwell has confirmed. NEA’s Amit Mukherjee and GV’s John Lyman joined Stockwell’s board as part of the deal, which is said to have valued the business at north of $100 million. Stockwell, however, declined to confirm the figure.

Instead of announcing the news via TechCrunch, Venture Beat, Forbes or another tech publication, as is the norm for fast-growing consumer-facing startups, Stockwell remained mum on financing events and scaling plans, assumedly burned by the press and the public’s scorn a year prior.

Rather than subject itself to continued scrutiny as it attempted to rewrite its narrative, Stockwell was heads down, iterating, expanding and quietly raising millions. Bad press can break a startup, and given the sheer number of negative reports on Stockwell so early on, the company had already defied the odds. Keeping a low profile was undoubtedly the best strategy moving forward, and it seems to have paid off.

Today the company counts 1,000 “stores” in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. Stockwell has used its latest infusion of funding to explore shared ownership models, i.e. the opportunity for anyone to run their own Stockwell store. The company tells TechCrunch they are also working on building out their “unique curation model,” which allows customers to help determine what items are stocked in their local “store,” as well as their support for emerging brands, whose products they can stock in their next-generation vending machines.

Stockwell’s five-foot wide next-generation vending machine.

So what’s in a name?

Human beings make snap judgments, evaluate products quickly and can develop distaste for brands in a matter of seconds. A company’s moniker is their first opportunity to impress customers.

“When you’re not in the room, the name of your company is what gets passed between people,” writes NFX co-founder James Currier. “It speaks for you when you’re not there … It sets expectations of your company in the blink of an eye. And first impressions are hard to change. Both positive and negative.”

Most cases of poor startup naming are easily fixed. Most founders aren’t forced to bear the brunt of the internet’s fury. The case of Bodega is much more extreme and, as such, serves as the ultimate lesson for founders searching for the best way to tell their story. At the end of the day, avoiding a complete and total train-wreck is easy if you include a diverse group of people in the naming process and remember there’s a lot in a name — if that weren’t the case, Bodega would still be Bodega.

Electric scooter providers JUMP, Lime, Scoot and Spin have just been granted permits to operate their respective services in San Francisco beginning Oct. 15, 2020. This is part of the city’s longer-term permitting program for electric scooters.

Each scooter provider will initially be able to deploy 1,000 scooters, with the potential to deploy up to 2,500. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency says this should double the number of service areas covered.

As part of the program, the SFMTA is requiring all scooters to be lock-to and each company said they will use W-2 workers, both full-time and part-time, for operations.

“We look forward to honoring the commitments we feel are imperative to creating a strong partnership, including hiring locally, investing in the community, and ensuring our transportation services are equitably spread throughout the city,” Spin wrote in a blog post.

In total, eleven operators applied for permits. The SFMTA scored them across device standards and safety, pricing, operations, plan for safe riding and parking, experience and qualifications and more.

Skip, which was previously granted the rights to operate shared scooters in San Francisco, did not receive a permit this time around.

“As set forth in the permit application, Evaluation Scoresheet and Policy Directive, applicants were required to receive an average score of 2 or greater for each of the eight sections in the application, or would be disqualified from further evaluation,” the SFMTA wrote in its rejection letter to Skip. “Staff thoroughly reviewed all 11 applications received, including Skip Transport, Inc.’s. Skip Transport, Inc.’s permit application
is denied because it received an average score below the required threshold of 2 on Section A of the application, and therefore was disqualified from further evaluation.”

Notably, Lyft was also denied a permit to operate shared electric scooters. While Lyft scored quite well overall, the SFMTA said it determined four was the right number of operators.

Amazon’s device event today played host to a dizzying number of product announcements, of all stripes – but notably, there are three brand new ways to wear Alexa on your body. Amazon clearly wants to give you plenty of options to take Alexa with you when you leave the house, the only place it’s really held sway so far – but can Amazon actually convince people that it’s the voice interface for everywhere, and not just for home?

Among the products Amazon announced at its Seattle event, Echo Frames, Echo Loop and Echo Buds all provide ways to take Alexa with you wherever you go. What’s super interesting – and telling – about this is that Amazon went with three different vectors to try to convince people to wear Alexa, instead of focusing its efforts on just one. That indicates a stronger than ever desire to break Alexa out of its home environment.

The company has tried to get this done in different ways before. Alexa has appeared in Bluetooth speakers and headphones, in some cars (including now GM, as of today) and via Amazon’s own car accessory – and though the timing didn’t line up, it would’ve been a lock for Amazon’s failed Fire Phone.

Notice that none of these existing examples have helped Amazon gain any apparent significant market share when it comes to Alexa use on the go. While we don’t have great stats on how well-adopted Alexa is in car, for instance, it stands to reason that we’d be hearing a lot more about its success if it was indeed massively successful – in the same way we hear often about Alexa’s prevalence in the home.

Amazon lacks a key vector that other voice assistants got for free: Being the default option on a smartphone. Google Assistant manages this through both Google’s own, and third-party Android phones. Apple’s Siri isn’t often celebrated for its skill and performance, but there’s no question that it benefits from just being the only really viable option on iOS when it comes to voice assistant software.

Amazon had to effectively invent a product category to get Alexa any traction at all – the Echo basically created the smart speaker category, at least in terms of significant mass market uptake. Its success with its existing Echo devices proves that this category served a market need, and Amazon has reaped significant reward as a result.

But for Amazon, a virtual assistant that only operates in the confines of the home covers only a tiny part of the picture when it comes to building more intelligent and nuanced customer profiles, which is the whole point of the endeavour to begin with.  While Americans seem to be spending more time at home than ever before, a big percentage of peoples’ days is still spent outside, and this is largely invisible to Alexa.

The thing is, the only reliable and proven way to ensure you’re with someone throughout their entire day is to be on their smartphone. Alexa is, via Amazon’s own app, but that’s a far cry from being a native feature of the device, and just a single tap or voice command away. Amazon’s own smartphone ambitions deflated pretty quickly, so now it’s casting around for alternatives – and Loop, Frames and Buds all represent its most aggressive attempts yet.

A smart spread of bets, each with their own smaller pool of penetration among users vs. a general staple like a smartphone, might be Amazon’s best way to actually drive adoption – especially if they’re not concerned with the overall economics of the individual hardware businesses attached to each.

The big question will be whether A) these products can either offer enough value on their own to justify their continued use while Alexa catches up to out-of-home use cases from a software perspective, or B) Amazon’s Alexa team can interate the assistant’s feature set quick enough to make it as useful on the go as it is at home, which hasn’t seemed like something it’s been able to do to date (not having direct access to smartphone functions like texting and calling is probably a big part of that).

Specifically for these new products, I’d put the Buds at the top of the list as the most likely to make Alexa a boon companion for a much greater number of people. The buds themselves offer a very compelling price point for their feature set, and Alexa coming along for the ride is likely just bonus for a large percent of their addressable market. Both the Frames and the Loop seem a lot more experimental, but Amazon’s limited release go-to-market strategy suggest its planned for that as well.

In the end, these products are interesting and highly indicative of Amazon’s direction and ambition with Alexa overall, but I don’t think this is the watershed moment for the digital assistant beyond the home. Still, it’s probably among the most interesting spaces in tech to watch, because of how much is at stake for both winners and losers.

The meal replacement company Soylent Nutrition, Inc., has added mint chocolate flavor to its line of drinks and snacks.

“Our new Mint Chocolate Drink requested by our fans was engineered by Soylent’s hard-working team, with the complex tastes of humanity in mind,” said Andrew Thomas, Soylent’s VP of Brand Marketing, in a statement.

In concert with its new flavor launch, the company is also releasing an assessment of the environmental footprint of its products.

Without releasing the full life cycle analysis report, Soylent revealed that its packaging and logistics operations were the biggest contributor to its carbon emissions. The company also said that its decision to use soy protein rather than rice or another vegetable or grain for its main ingredient actually resulted in a lower environmental footprint for the company.

“It’s a crucial time in our existence, with an ever-increasing population and a need for more bioavailable, sustainable sources of nutrition,” said Julie Daoust, PhD, VP Product Development & Innovation, in a self-congratulatory statement. “Many companies talk about their sustainability impact, but very few actually make the investment to get the independent data to prove or disprove their assumptions.”

The company’s new mint chocolate favor is available through the company’s website now and will be sold through Amazon beginning in October.

Workplace collaboration software business Slack (NYSE: WORK) has added Sheila Jordan, a senior vice president and chief information officer of Symantec, as an independent member of its board of directors. The hiring comes three months after the business completed a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Jordan, responsible for driving information technology strategy and operations for Symantec, brings significant cybersecurity expertise to Slack’s board. Prior to joining Symantec in 2014, Jordan was a senior vice president of IT at Cisco and an executive at Disney Destination for nearly 15 years.

With the new appointment, Slack appears to be doubling down on security. In addition to the board announcement, Slack recently published a blog post outlining the company’s latest security strategy in what was likely part of a greater attempt to sway potential customers — particularly those in highly regulated industries — wary of the company’s security processes. The post introduced new features, including the ability to allow teams to work remotely while maintaining compliance to industry and company-specific requirements.

Jordan joins Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield, former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper, Accel general partner Andrew Braccia, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya and former Salesforce chief financial officer Graham Smith on Slack’s board of directors.

“I believe there is nothing more critical than driving organizational alignment and agility within enterprises today,” Jordan said in a statement. “Slack has developed a new category of enterprise software to help unlock this potential and I’m thrilled to now be a part of their story.”

Slack closed up nearly 50% on its first day of trading in June but has since stumbled amid reports of increased competition from Microsoft, which operates a Slack-like product called Teams.

Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week to discuss the company’s founding, road to the public markets and path forward. Buy tickets here.

Project A, the Berlin-based VC that backs startups in Europe at seed and Series A stage, has raised a new $200 million fund (€180 million). This brings total assets under management to $486 million (€440 million) and is the third fund Project A has raised.

The venture capital firm, whose investments include the likes of WorldRemit, Catawiki, Voi and Uberall, is also announcing that it will now have a presence in London and Stockholm in order to put people on the ground in what it says are “two of its favourite ecosystems”.

Meanwhile, it is just over two years since Project A raised its last fund. Fund two sat at €140 million, so this new fund is a slight increase in size. As is the initial cheque size the VC plans to write out of fund three: “up to $7 million,” the firm says.

“We are pleased that our approach as an operational venture capital investor convinces both startups and co-investors. Over the next few years, the new fund will enable us to continue backing passionate European founders and their teams at Seed and A stages – working both on B2B as well as B2C innovations,” says Thies Sander, General Partner at Project A, in a statement.

Describing itself as the only European “Operational VC” — which is highly debatable, given that tons of European VCs offer operational support and have Partners that are ex-founders with exits behind them — Project A says its portfolio companies receive support from 100 “functional experts” in engineering, marketing, product, design, communications, business intelligence, sales & customer success, organizational building and hiring.

“Project A can provide support in all critical functions across the entire startup building stack, at all stages of a founding teams’ startup journey,” says the Berlin-based firm.

Sectors that Project A plans to invest span fintech, digital health, proptech, Industry 4.0, enterprise software, mobility and logistics — all areas the VC says it has “deep expertise,” and where European startups are uniquely positioned to build “transformational” global businesses.

And it is certainly true that these are sectors where European startups are punching above their weight, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by venture firms and LPs in the U.S. In fact, with fund three, it is the first time that Project A has attracted LPs from the U.S., with Top Tier Capital Partners now a backer.

Cue a statement from Florian Heinemann, General Partner at Project A: “The European digital ecosystem matured enormously within a few years. We see more and more ambitious serial entrepreneurs working on groundbreaking product innovations based on their experience in the established economy combined with their prior expertise. We also see more and more competence-driven acquisitions and strongly believe that they will increase significantly over the next few years”.

Congratulations to all the motivated hackers, coders, devs and designers who took action and secured their spot in the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. We limited participation to 800 people, and we’re thrilled that the event is completely full.

We can’t wait to see what 800 of the world’s best code warriors create over the course of roughly 24 high-pressure hours. And we’re pretty sure you can’t wait to hear more about our hackathon sponsors and the real-world challenges they’ve created to test your mettle. This is the post you’ve been waiting for.

Each sponsor offers prizes for the team that creates the best solution for the specific challenge — prizes can include cash, and they vary depending on the sponsor. Oh, but wait there is more. On top of the sponsor prizes, TechCrunch will select one team’s project as the best overall hack and award them $10,000 prize. Want more details? Check out the Hackathon website.

Alright, the time has come. Here are the sponsors, contests and prizes for the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2019. Let the games begin!

Humana

Create a prototype for Humana and win one of three cash prizes. First place: $10,000; second place: $5,000 and third place: $2,500. Examples of a prototype include a mobile app, a website, animations, video, etc. Here are the prototype guidelines.

• The prototype should either demonstrate what a customer would experience visually/in audio or be a technical prototype with basic UX to understand the concept
• Teams are encouraged to showcase a demo with a use case that brings the solution to life, simulating movement/animation of the user experience.

Kinship

We want to see Kinship data used in ways that has never been thought of or explored and applied in a manner that translates into real and positive change for pets. Create a solution that improves the lives of pets or pet parents using at least one Kinship data source and win one of three prizes.

• First prize: $10,000 between the team and a Whistle GO Explore pet tracker for up to five team members
• Second prize: $5,000 between the team and a Wisdom Panel Health canine test for up to five team members
• Third prize: $2,000 between the team

Intersystems

Mapping all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy? InterSystems is there. Providing interoperability for over a billion medical records around the globe? InterSystems has that covered. Processing over a billion transactions a day for a global investment bank? InterSystems is quietly at work in the background. Whether it’s healthcare, business, or government, digital transformation has changed consumers’ expectations about how their data is accessed and managed. Speed, scale, transactional processing, cloud deployment, and high availability, are all cornerstones of what users expect out of their applications. InterSystems challenges you to explore and build your own business solutions using our IRIS Data Platform tools to solve for healthcare, business, or consumer-facing problems. InterSystems will offer a $4,000 prize for the best use of our IRIS for Health platform to solve for healthcare challenges and $4,000 for best use of IRIS Data Platform to solve for business or consumer application challenges. Use of our extensive libraries that enable connectivity both within and between hospital systems is not required for healthcare solution proposals.

But wait…in the coming days we’ll have even more juicy details about contests and prizes sponsored by Plaid and United Airlines!

Disrupt SF 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we just can’t wait to see what the brilliant minds at the TechCrunch Hackathon will produce under pressure.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

At its developer conference Wednesday, Oculus showed off a pair of prototype designs for its next high-end headsets.

Two years ago, Oculus showed off its Half Dome prototype which utilized a technology called varifocal lenses to allow users to adjust where the points of focus were in an image, this is technology similar to what Magic Leap uses on its headset, but is designed to allow for a much greater range of focal planes.

The company showed off tow new prototypes including a “Half Dome 2” prototype and a “Half Dome 3” prototype.

“Half Dome 2” is optimized for weight and size significantly shrinking down the form factor of the previous prototype while reducing the weight by 200 grams. The device is also shrinking the 140 degree field-of-view of the first design, though the company says the headset will still boast a FoV that’s 20% wider than the Rift.

The headset still utilizes a system that mechanically moves the lenses inside the headset to adjust the focus, but Oculus is also looking further down the line.

“Half Dome 3” integrated the technology of its previous designs with an electronic varifocal module that has no moving parts and integrates a number of stacked lenses that can be turned on and off to let users move through various planes of focus (the company detailed the headset could switch between 64 planes of focus with this setup). This will enable users to view items in focus at closer distances and will let headsets function more like human eyes.

There weren’t any timelines thrown around for either prototype being productized, but Oculus is clearly investing in the high-end still inside Facebook Reality Labs.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate and Alex were back at TechCrunch’s San Francisco HQ to huddle over the weeks’ biggest news story: WeWork’s infamous CEO exiting his role. Adam Neumann is now merely the non-executive chairman of The We Company, a firm that he helped found and led the public story for over the last half-decade.

His exit comes after a number of revelations made his tenure at the highly-valued WeWork appear chaotic and self-dealing. After WeWork’s valuation tumbled as it raced towards a financially-critical IPO, something had to give. The firm tried to ameliorate investors with changes (read: improvements) to its corporate governance but that wasn’t enough. Snakes don’t rot from the tail, and WeWork needed new leadership, which it got the form of co-CEOs.

WeWork is now led by Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, seasoned executives with stints at Amazon and Time Warner Cable, respectively. They’ve been charged with leading the company into an era of maturity, cost-cutting and maybe even profitability! But probably not. Anyway, we think there are a whole lot of parallels to draw between Uber and WeWork, as we’ve made clear in the past.

Kate and Alex also touched on corporate governance, especially regarding super-voting stock. The TL;DR: private company boards look and operate much differently than public company boards. More often than not, startup boards are made up of venture capitalists focused on protecting their equity and future returns. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, folks.

Wapping, it seems likely that WeWork will look to secure new cash in the short-term as it buttons up its business, divests or kills off non-performing assets (remember this?), and looks to temper both its growth-rate and losses. If that will be enough to allow the company to float in 2020 (2019 seems unlikely) isn’t clear.

Icarus.

We’re back Friday morning with our regular episode and a guest. Stay tuned!

At the end of its hardware event today, Amazon announced a new program for testing and selling its own experimental, limited-volume hardware: Day 1 Editions.

The first of these new products is Echo Frames. These are Alexa-enabled glasses, though unlike Google Glass, there’s no camera and no display, just microphones and a speaker.

The second is the Echo Loop, a rather large Alexa-enabled ring with two built-in microphones and, of course, a tiny speaker. Both of these will be available on an invite-only basis and in limited volumes later this year.

The frames will retail for $179.99 and the Loop will be $99.99.

The glasses, which will sell without any prescription lenses (though you can add those if you want), weigh in at 31 grams. They aren’t especially stylish, though they look pretty acceptable.

The ring is maybe the oddest product Amazon demoed at its event today. It’s pretty large and I can’t quite see people talking into their rings and then listening to what Alexa has to say in response, but I could be wrong. Maybe it’s the next big thing.

“Paired with your phone, this ring lets you access information throughout the day,” Amazon writes. “It’s super easy to connect with Alexa without breaking stride or digging out your phone, for those simple things like turning on the lights or calculating the tip on your lunch bill. Simply press a button, talk softly to Alexa, and then the answer comes discretely through a small speaker built into the ring.”

To be fair, though, these are very much experimental products that are meant to allow Amazon to get feedback from real customers. But that’s what Amazon said about its Alexa-enabled microwave, too, and now it’s the best-selling fridge on the site.