Author: azeeadmin

As it promised last month, Amazon has launched its serialized fiction Kindle Vella store that lets you unlock episodic, self-published stories via in-app purchases. The new platform is a way for readers to discover new fiction and a new way for authors to generate revenue from the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

While the name might suggest otherwise, Kindle Vella isn’t available on Amazon’s Kindle e-readers. Rather, you’ll only find it on Amazon.com or the Kindle iOS app (no Android for now). To start with, the service will be limited to US-based authors who publish stories in English.

The serialized stories will run from 600 to 5,000 words per episode, with the first three offered for free. To see subsequent episodes, you’ll need to pay for “tokens,” with prices ranging from $2 for 200 tokens up to $15 for 1,700 tokens. The latter will give you about 34 episodes, though prices per episode depend on the word count — the more words, the more you’ll have to spend.

Authors, meanwhile, will receive 50 percent of the revenue along with bonuses based on engagement with the app’s social media-style features. To that end, readers can follow stories to be notified of new episodes, leave a thumbs up for episodes they like, apply a “Fave” for their favorite story of the week (provided they purchase tokens), and share on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. To boost engagement, authors can speak directly to readers at the end of episodes to “share story insights and behind-the-scenes content,” Amazon wrote.

Since Amazon opened Vella to authors three months ago, “thousands of authors” have published “tens of thousands of Kindle Vella episodes across dozens of genres and microgenre,” Amazon said. Authors appear to be interested as well. “I’ve published close to 30 novels, and I’m enjoying the adventure of writing The Marriage Auction in this new format,” said bestselling author Audrey Carlan in a statement. Whether or not the format takes off now depends on readers — to try it out, you can access Vella here.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. 

While retail investors grew more comfortable buying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2021, the decentralized application world still has a lot of work to do when it comes to onboarding a mainstream user base.

Phantom is part of a new class of crypto startups looking to build infrastructure that streamlines blockchain-based applications and provides a more user-friendly UX for navigating the crypto world, something that can make the entire space more approachable to a non-developer audience. Users can download the Phantom wallet to their browsers to interact with applications, swap tokens and collect NFTs.

The crypto wallet startup has banked a $9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Solana Foundation and Garry Tan also participating. The round, which closed earlier this summer, comes as some venture capital firms embrace a crypto future even as volatility continues to envelop the broader market. Last month, a16z announced a whopping 2.2 billion crypto fund, the firm’s largest vertical-specific investment vehicle ever.

via Phantom

The co-founding team of CEO Brandon Millman, CPO Chris Kalani and CEO Francesco Agosti all come aboard from crypto infrastructure startup 0x.

At the moment, Phantom is best-known among the Solana community where it has become the go-to wallet for applications on that blockchain. The startup’s ambition is to interface with more and more networks, currently building out compatibility with Ethereum and looking to embrace other blockchains, aiming to be a product built for a “multi-chain world,” Millman tells TechCrunch.

Alongside building out support for other networks, Phantom wants to build more sophisticated DeFi mechanisms right into their wallet, allowing users to stake cryptocurrencies and swap more tokens inside the wallet.

The startup says they have some 40,000 users of their existing wallet product.

Building out a presence on the popular Ethereum blockchain, which already has a handful of popular wallet providers, will be a challenge, but Phantom’s broadest challenge is helping a new breed of crypto-curious users interface with a network of apps that still have a long way to go when it comes to being mainstream-friendly.

“The entire space is kind of stuck in this ‘built by developers for other developers mode,'” Millman says. “This bar has been kind of stuck there, and no one is really stepping up to push the bar up higher.”

WhatsApp is finally pushing an improvement to a key feature that even the Facebook-owned instant messaging service acknowledges has been a top request from users for years.

On Wednesday, WhatsApp said it is rolling out a limited public beta test for its improved multi-device capability.

The update enables WhatsApp users for the first time to use the service on up to four non-phone devices without having the registered phone switched on or otherwise connected to the internet. A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that this chain of multiple devices can’t have another phone in it.

“Each companion device will connect to your WhatsApp independently,” said the messaging app in a post.

To be clear, WhatsApp, which is used by over 2 billion users globally, already provides support for multiple-device use. A user can simultaneously access the service, for instance, from a web browser or a desktop app on their computer. But the multi-device support flow currently requires the phone to be connected to the internet.

In WhatsApp’s own words:

“By requiring the phone to perform all operations, companion devices are slower and frequently get disconnected — especially when the phone has a poor connection, its battery is running low, or the application process gets killed by the phone’s OS. It also allows for only a single companion device to be operative at a time, meaning people can’t be on a call in Portal while checking their messages on their PC, for example.

The new WhatsApp multi-device architecture removes these hurdles, no longer requiring a smartphone to be the source of truth while still keeping user data seamlessly and securely synchronized and private.”

In a whitepaper published today (PDF), WhatsApp has outlined how this feature works, which gives an insight into why it took so long to ship.

The firm says it has developed new technologies that ensure that even on multiple-devices, messages sync while maintaining end-to-end encryption, a feat that is currently rare in the market.

Image: WhatsApp

“To achieve this, we had to rethink WhatsApp’s architecture and design new systems to enable a standalone multi-device experience while preserving privacy and end-to-end encryption,” the company wrote. “Each message is individually encrypted using the established pairwise encryption session with each device. Messages are not stored on the server after they are delivered.”

The feature also doesn’t change how WhatsApp uses cloud backups for users, a spokesperson said. “The mechanism we use to synchronize messages and other app data across a user’s devices is independent from our cloud backups,” the spokesperson added, pointing to the whitepaper that describes the protocol in more detail.

WhatsApp doesn’t have a specific date for when it plans to roll out this feature to all users. Instead, the firm told us that it is initially rolling out this feature to its existing beta users. Over the coming months, it plans to start adding it as an opt-in beta feature for a small number of users on stable versions of the app, as well.

The aforementioned feature is one of many that WhatsApp is currently developing. WhatsApp is working on a dedicated app for the iPad as well as expand on the last year’s disappearing mode feature. The app, which currently allows users to set a seven-day timer on messages, plans to expand this feature to let users share pictures and videos that can only be viewed once.

Off the Grid is a mainstay of the San Francisco culinary scene. The event company, founded by Matt Cohen in 2010, created neighborhood pop-up festivals centered around entrepreneurial food trucks. It was part of the vanguard in the food truck movement, designed to open a path to restaurants for a new generation of ambitious and diverse chefs with inventive ideas around food and the people who enjoy it.

Off the Grid’s food festival in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Over the years, the festivals grew to extreme popularity (I remember more than once trying to go and realizing that others have way more patience to wait in line than I do), and Off the Grid itself increasingly expanded into catering for events. “[I] built my career on the idea that food is a source of comfort at all different times,” Cohen said.

Well, we do live in different times, don’t we?

The first inklings of a change for the company started back in 2017, when wildfires like those in Sonoma and Napa swept across California. Frontline firefighters, operating at times in remote areas of the state, were often forced to eat what the military dubs MREs or Meals Ready-to-Eat.

Cohen and his team saw an opportunity. “For a long time in emergency response, people thought about food as calories, not necessarily about allowing local food businesses to sustain themselves,” he said. He noted that MREs are almost universally bland, and that the meals are typically ordered in bulk from outside the state. Could Off the Grid connect the dots by having local restauranteurs cook meals while Off the Grid supplied the logistics to get them to the frontlines?

Those 2017 fires were the first time the company forayed into helping first responders and victims, and Off the Grid along with its restauranteurs supplied an estimated 20,000 people with meals that year. “[We] got an understanding of the market landscape in emergency response,” he said.

Those first trials were accelerated dramatically in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across California and the rest of the world. Suddenly, delivered meals were the only means for restaurants to connect to their communities, and the frontlines were no longer in the foothills where the fires were, but everywhere all the time.

Off the Grid worked with its restaurant partners to scale up food delivery to frontline workers and victims during the pandemic and wildfire season last year. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Off the Grid doubled down on its pivot, seeing an opportunity to provide solace to people at a time of terrible tragedy. “People don’t think of food being delivered during emergencies as delicious, [since] the reality is that people are happy to just have anything to eat,” Cohen said. “But then, delicious food can be a real comfort when the rest of their lives are disrupted.” Over the course of the pandemic, Off the Grid facilitated the delivery of 1.3 million meals with a “rotating list of options, so people can constantly be delighted,” targeting customers ranging from temporary shelters to immunocompromised consumers residing at home.

In addition to giving customers delectable options, the model also helped sustain the local food scene that Off the Grid had spent years growing through its programs. Cohen said the company sees these links as a key tool for building resilient communities, particularly as climate change continues to ravage California and much of the rest of the world.

Last year’s punctuated growth forced the startup to scale up quickly. Food safety and health regulations vary from county to county, which meant that as it delivered meals throughout the greater Bay Area and the rest of California, Off the Grid had to develop scalable processes to handle the paperwork and logistics. That technology is now forming the basis for the next phase of its business as Off the Grid enters its second decade in operation.

“[There are a lot of] unique aspects of food service in particular, licensing, and permitting, and insurance, and the less sexy things that allows us to operate,” Cohen said. With those logistics increasingly systematized, 2021 is going to be an even more ambitious year for the company.

Off the Grid CEO and founder Matt Cohen. Image Credits: Off the Grid

“We actually have been working with the state and the Red Cross to identify 39 counties in the state of California that are at relatively high risk for fire danger, and on-board 200 restaurants … so that in the event there is a fire, we can access them and activate them,” he said. Today, roughly half the company is focused on its emergency response programs.

That doesn’t mean its food festivals will go away. It has reopened its smaller venues in places like Levi’s Plaza near SF’s Coit Tower in North Beach, and it intends to restart its larger festivals as safety guidelines allow. But emergency response is a new, enduring mission for this mission-oriented company. “We’re definitely going to continue to do this as long as there is a need,” Cohen said.

Facebook just announced plans to pay content creators more than $1 billion by the end of next year through new bonus programs designed to keep creatives plugged into its app ecosystem. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the new funding to “reward creators for great content” on his Facebook page.

The company will pay creators through a series of new bonus initiatives across Facebook and Instagram which are “seasonal, evolving and expanding over time.” The bonus programs will have a dedicated hub within the Instagram app later this summer and in the Facebook app later this year.

The company will offer the first new bonuses to creators making videos on Facebook with in-stream ads enabled. Facebook is also expanding bonuses through its Stars system, which invites viewers to send streamers tips in exchange for fan perks. Creators making videos or livestreaming games will be eligible for monthly bonuses based on how many viewers send them payments via Stars through October.

Instagram will introduce its own bonuses, which will be invite-only to begin with. Within the next few weeks, U.S. creators can collect a one-time bonus for enabling IGTV ads. Other bonuses will reward creators for making Reels, Instagram’s answer to TikTok’s short-form video success, and for hitting certain milestones in Instagram Live.

Facebook’s foray into creator payments is just the latest effort to jump-start TikTok competitor products with cold hard cash. Snapchat hands out $1 million each day to the most popular videos in its short-form video product Spotlight. YouTube has its own $100 million fund for YouTube Shorts, the company’s own TikTok clone.

TikTok itself launched a $200 million creator fund last year, though the app doesn’t seem to have much to worry about (yet, anyway). According to data from SensorTower, TikTok just surpassed 3 billion global downloads. The only other apps to have crossed that milestone are WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram — all owned by Facebook.

Facebook has joined Amazon in a show of alarm at the sudden rise of antitrust hawk Lina Khan to the position of FTC Chair by asking that she be recused from all decisions relating to the company. The argument, more or less identical to Amazon’s, is that before her appointment, Khan was too outspoken about her professional opinion that companies like these are in violation of antitrust rules.

In a letter filed with the FTC and obtained by the WSJ, which the agency could not provide and declined to comment on, Facebook explained that Khan’s last few years of academic publications and articles in other media amount to cause for recusal from decisions about the company. (I have asked Facebook for a copy of the petition and will update this post if I receive it.)

“Chair Khan has consistently made public statements not only accusing Facebook of conduct that merits disapproval but specifically expressing her belief that the conduct meets the elements of an antitrust offense. When a new commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker, due process requires that individual to recuse herself,” reads the petition.

Neither the FTC nor Khan in any other capacity have responded to the recusal requests from Facebook and Amazon. She did note in her nomination proceeding that recusal requests like these do happen, and are resolved on a case-by-case basis (unlike automatic recusals for things like financial or personal interest). Perhaps even now she is meeting with the ethics experts at the agency.

Khan has, however, certainly made her policy positions known in numerous articles and papers, many of which have argued that antitrust regulators have been highly conservative in their interpretation and deployment of their legal powers, and equally permissive in their oversight of the current crop of enormous tech companies. Things like acquiring competitors, artificially lowering prices to pressure a market, or misrepresenting the collection and use of customer data have gone either unchallenged or minimally punished.

In particular she acted as counsel for the House’s Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets, an antitrust report issued last fall. Amazon and Facebook lean on cases from 1966 and 1970 where an FTC Commissioner was recused for “prejudgment” of a case during a Congressional investigation in which he participated. It’s a promising hook to hang a case on to be sure, but the circumstances are by no means equivalent. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that no case or even specific allegations have been prejudged, only the general idea that Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon all either have monopolies or otherwise possess market power. (They didn’t care much when the report was issued.)

The main finding of the House report, in fact, was arguably that there could be no legal case because existing laws and regulations are insufficient. Certainly Khan has shouted this from the rooftops for some years now — but the conclusion is a legislative matter, not an FTC one. It would be mighty difficult for Khan to have prejudged an antitrust case predicated on laws that haven’t yet been written.

Khan’s FTC has suffered an early setback on her watch though not of her making in the dismissal of some complaints in the agency’s current antitrust case against Facebook. It was for lack of evidence that the company exerts monopoly control over social media that the judge told the FTC to come back and try again. Perhaps Khan intends to remedy that with a supplemented filing, or perhaps she will take the loss and muster her forces for another go in a year or two — but either way it is probably best to resolve the question of her alleged “prejudgment” before that decision is announced. (The FTC declined to speculate as to whether the recusal request would affect the current proceedings.)

But the agency also has explicit backing from the White House in the form of President Biden’s request that it prioritize “dominant internet platforms, with particular attention to the acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by ‘free’ products, and the effect on user privacy.” So Khan probably isn’t feeling the sting of the aforementioned legal challenge.

The petitions filed by Amazon and Facebook have near-zero risk for the companies and an outside chance at provoking a recusal, so it makes sense strategically to file them. They also provide breadcrumbs later for their inevitable objections to the FTC’s (under Khan, equally inevitable) allegations of monopolistic practices. The legal repercussions are hard to predict but it is usually better to have a complaint on the table already rather than bring it out late in the process.

Given Chair Khan’s position that the FTC itself needs to be overhauled and empowered in order to bring actions like this against companies like Facebook, it seems clear that all these are merely the opening gambits in a long, long game.

It’s been fascinating to watch the development of Eventtus, a startup I came across many years ago on my travels in the Middle East, finding them at the Rise-Up Summit in Cairo in 2012. Then, it was two young women who’d taken the Silicon Valley startup culture to heart and created their own take on event ticketing. But today it’s my genuine pleasure to write that Eventtus has reached a well-deserved exit.

Bevy, an enterprise event platform for virtual, hybrid, and in-person events has acquired Eventtus for an undisclosed sum. Bevy has raised $61.4M in VC.

The acquisition means Eventtus’ 20 engineers will now join the Bevy team, alongside Egyptian founders Mai Medhat and Nihal Fares.

The purchase will add to Bevy’s event technology stack with the addition of a mobile in-person conference app, and several other engagement tools for attendees, enabling Bevy to offer a more comprehensive, end-to-end event management solution, especially as events now stretch from virtual to hybrid to, – as the world opens up again – in-person event programs.

Derek Andersen, CEO, and co-founder of Bevy said: “Enterprises have invested in creating connected communities for their customers, employees, and partners. Events are not only an extension of these communities but also provide an important channel for driving ongoing engagement. With this acquisition, we can now further advance our leadership role in enterprise events.”

Medhat and Fares did an incredible job of navigating the crazy startup world, but they did it from Egypt, and during interesting political times in that country, to put it extremely mildly. And a global pandemic to boot.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Medhat said: “We competed against companies such as Hopin, Attendify, Bizzabo, and Swapcard within the mobile event application space, but we won when it came to delivering a white-labeled experience built for organizers.”

She told me Eventtus was acquired due to its tech stack and its expertise within event technology: “Derek Andersen and I met a few years back and we were the event application of record for Startup Grind and CMX Summit. Bevy is focused on enabling businesses to build community, and the acquisition allows for us to meet attendees where they are at and how they prefer to experience events.”

Medhat now becomes VP of Innovation while Fares will be Director of Product Management.

I asked Medhat if the exit was prompted by the pandemic in some way?: “It wasn’t. Across the world, we’re seeing so much exciting innovation and demand within the event tech space, with Bevy recently fundraising $40M during its Series C round. This acquisition is the union of our shared vision of being the community event engine powering community globally and we are excited to grow together.”

As for its ramifications for the Egyptian ecosystem, the news is nothing but good. Eventtus was one of the rising stars of the MENA region’s tech scene, and no doubt its founders will continue to champion that, going forward.

Many watchers expected an uptick in merger and acquisition activity when the world began to emerge from the pandemic in 2021, but the current spike is record-breaking, topping $2.4 trillion in the first half of the year. That’s more than a 150% increase over last year’s M&A activity level.

Coming out of the pandemic, there’s a worker shortage that has complex causes, which has increased the competition for talent. On top of that, we’re experiencing what has been coined the “Great Resignation,” with 4 million people quitting their jobs in April alone.

Business leaders everywhere have a greater appreciation of the value of their people as a competitive asset. So, if you’re contemplating a merger or acquisition at this critical juncture, you know it’s important to retain talent and keep employees happy during the M&A process. It’s simple — you need them.

The war for talent is real

Companies — especially startups looking for highly skilled talent— were locked in a war for talent before the pandemic. COVID-19 intensified it, and if employers thought they had the upper hand when workers were getting hammered with layoffs and furloughs, they know better now. A report published earlier this year cited this startling statistic: More than half of workers in North America said they plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends.

Money alone won’t solve the problem for employees who are motivated by purpose. Employees who are invested in your company put their heart and soul into it, which is invaluable. But employers have to work harder to keep that loyalty, and M&A situations threaten the status quo.

Acquisitions add an element of uncertainty, and workers who feel uncertain about a company’s future and their role in it are more likely to look elsewhere. The good news is that with the right leadership approach and preparation, you can address that uncertainty and keep your valuable talent on board. Here’s some advice for keeping employees top of mind during M&A:

Communicate, communicate, communicate: If you’re steering a startup or established tech company through an acquisition, the most important thing you can do is share your vision of what the new company will look like and how employees will be a part of its success. Employees today have a more entrepreneurial mindset than previous generations. They are purpose-driven, and they need to feel like they have a stake in the business. In a situation where uncertainty is driving anxiety (and causing employees to eye an exit), it’s hard to overcommunicate, and undercommunicating can be disastrous.

Stories that disappear after a period of time are where the action is on social platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. But when it comes to Twitter, it looks the product itself is going to be going away in a matter of days. Twitter has confirmed that Fleets — its own take on ephemeral Stories that it launched into general availability just nine months ago — is shutting down on August 3.

The company said the reason for the move is a lack of activity — specifically, among the more hesitant Twitter users who it said it was trying to target with Fleets in the first place. Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of consumer product, said that the company would be building other products, but didn’t say whether they would be bringing in any more ephemeral aspects to any of them.

Spaces, the company’s answer to Clubhouse, currently sits in the same strip at the top of the app as Fleets and it will become the sole occupant of that horizontal carousel when Fleets disappears.

Meanwhile, the company noted in a blog post from Ilya Brown, VP of Product, that some of what it built for Fleets — such as the veritical, full-screen advertising test that it ran only as recently as June — would possibly reappear in other places on the app.

The announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that the most we’ve heard about Fleets has been when Twitter launched them, or made some kind of product iteration on them, or found itself facing a technical glitch. Yet in terms of viral traction, or high profile Fleets, there hasn’t been much.

Most of all, though shut-down also underscores how Twitter continues to struggle to make its product accessible in a more mainstream way to a wider pool of users; and how it struggles to boost engagement by tapping users who are there but just to sit back with their popcorn and watch the action.

Back when Twitter first started testing Fleets in limited markets in March 2020, its bet had been that some people weren’t tweeting as much as others because the permanent format of Twitter put them off. Make the tweets disappear, they thought, and more people would get talking… not least because the format was proving so popular on other social platforms. (Before it made its move last year, Twitter was, indeed, one of the few social media sites that had yet to launch a stories format.)

Initial rollout of the feature looked promising — at least, if you consider it a positive indicator that Fleets crashed from the surge of people using it when it first became a available worldwide.

But longer term, it turns out those quiet Twitter users weren’t much interested in Fleets, either, and that the only people really posting stories as Fleets were already pretty active on the platform.

To be clear, we don’t know how many of power users were using Fleets, either. Twitter declined to provide any usage numbers or other stats on Fleets when asked.

There were other issues that Twitter never quite resolve with the user experience of Fleets. For example, was it an issue or confusing at all that when Twitter launched Spaces they appeared in the same place as Fleets? Or was that lack of clarity the writing on the wall for Fleets?

And with Fleets, it was never completely clear how Twitter decided what to put in the space. Some people follow thousands of accounts, and there was never a way to specifically follow people for their Fleets, so what you saw became a question of Twitter’s algorithms.

It seems that Twitter is not closing the door on trying more experiments, even if it’s had a lacklustre track record in getting some of them into wider use. “Bg bets are risky and speculative, so by definition a number of them won’t work,” Beykpour noted. “If we’re not having to wind down features every once in a while, then it would be a sign that we’re not taking big enough swings.”

As concerts and live events return to the physical world stateside, many in the tech industry have wondered whether some of the pandemic-era opportunities around virtualizing these events are lost for the time being.

San Francisco-based FlyMachine is aiming to seek out the holy grail of the digital music industry, finding a way to capture some of the magic of live concerts and performances in a live-streamed setting. The startup hopes that pandemic era consumer habits around video chat socialization combined with an industry in need of digital diversification can push their flavor of virtual concerts into the lives of music fans.

The startup’s ambitions aren’t cheap, FlyMachine tells TechCrunch it has raised $21 million in investor funding to bankroll its plans. The funding has been led by Greycroft Partners and SignalFire, with additional participation from Primary Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Red Sea Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The virtual concert industry didn’t have as big of a lockdown moment as some hoped for. Spotify experimented with virtual events. Meanwhile, startups like Wave raised huge bouts of VC funding to turn real performers into digital avatars in a bid to create more digital-native concerts. And while some smaller artists embraced shows over Zoom or worked with startups like Oda who created live concert subscriptions, there were few mainstream hits among bigger acts.

To make FlyMachine’s brand of virtual concerts a thing, the startup isn’t trying to convert potential in-person attendees of a show into virtual participants, instead hoping to create an attractive experience for the folks who would normally have to skip the show. Whether those virtual attendees were too far from a venue, couldn’t get a babysitter for the night, or just aren’t jazzed about a mosh pit scene anymore, FlyMachine is hoping there are enough potential attendees on the bubble to sustain the startup as they try to blur the lines between “a night in and a night out,” CEO Andrew Dreskin says.

The startup’s strategy centers on building up partnerships with name brand concert venues around the US — Bowery Ballroom in New York City, Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, The Crocodile in Seattle, Marathon Music Works in Nashville and Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, among them — and live-streaming some of the shows at those venues to at-home audiences. FlyMachine’s team has deep roots in the music industry, Dreskin founded Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora) while co-founder Rick Farman is also the co-founder of Superfly which puts on the Bonnaroo and Outside Lands music festivals.

In terms of actual experience — and I had the chance to experience one of the shows before writing this — FlyMachine has done their best to recreate the experience of shouting over the tunes to talk with your buddies nearby. In FlyMachine’s world this is attending the show in a “private room” with your other friends live-streaming in video chat bubbles from their homes. It’s well-done and doesn’t distract too much from the actual concert, but you can adjust the sound levels of your friends and the music when the time calls for it.

FlyMachine’s platform launch earlier this year, arriving as many Americans have been vaccinated and many concert-goers are preparing to return to normal, might have been considered a bit late to the moment, but the founding team sees a long-term opportunity that COVID only further highlighted.

“We weren’t in a mad dash to get the product out the door while people were sequestered in their homes because we knew this would be part of the fabric of society going forward,” Dreskin tells TechCrunch.