There’s quite a bit wrong with real estate in Brazil, according to QuintoAndar founder and CEO Gabriel Braga. Those seeking long term rentals in big Brazilian cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are throttled by bureaucratic policies that enforce outrageously expensive deposits, the requirement of local cosigners and sky-high insurance fees. On the supply side, amateur landlords are tunnel visioned on making money from transactions, creating a low quality of service and many wasted hours of apartment hunting for tenants.

This is where QuintoAndar, a São Paulo-based rental marketplace, comes in. Now, the 600-person company has raised a $64 million (R$ 250 million) round led by General Atlantic to accelerate expansion in Brazil. Existing investors Kaszek Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and QED also participated in the round.

Marketplaces like OLX, Craigslist and VivaReal all surface listings for rentals in Brazil. But QuintoAndar wants to set itself apart as an end-to-end service that lets users search, book, rent and advertise rental properties. The site provides the listings, allows users to schedule tenant visits to the property (the founder says more than 86,000 property showings were booked in October), and processes the transactions. Landlords and tenants negotiate through the platform, where they also sign the contract. Braga says this process is much easier than working with  – and paying for – an agent. QuintoAndar guarantees landlords that they’ll get rent every month as well as protection against any damages the renter may make to a property. Contracts are digitized and renters don’t need to physically go to a notary to finalize a contract, allowing landlords to be anywhere. If a property needs a repair or maintenance, users can tap into QuintoAndar’s network of service providers through the site. 

The company believes there’s a big opportunity to make renting in Brazil more efficient. “20% of the population in Brazil lives in rented properties, and the sentiment toward buying homes in Brazil is changing,” says Braga, citing data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Brazilians are seeing home ownership as less of a long term goal and are opting to rent, meaning more money in the bank and freedom to relocate. 

Brazil remains undercapitalized relative to other countries, meaning smaller check sizes for early stage tech companies. So a private equity growth round like this represents a solid deal for tech-enabled businesses looking to gain market share of the world’s fifth most populous country. 

Before the private equity round, QuintoAndar had raised $25 million. General Atlantic is fairly active in Latin America, with 18 portfolio companies based in the region, according to its website. “GA is one of the largest investors in online marketplaces across the globe combined with deep pockets, a long-term mindset, and a strong commitment and success within Latin America,” says the founder of the GA partnership.

Braga certainly believes Brazil is a large enough market to build a digital service for people who want to rent properties, but doesn’t want to stop there. The new capital will enable QuintoAndar to consolidate its already-existing operations in Belo Horizonte, Brasília and Goiânia, and start new operations in Porto Alegre and Curitiba. The investment will also be used to create a partnership system with the country’s main real-estate agencies who will be able to use the platform to offer QuintoAndar’s renting experience to clients, both landlords and tenants. 

Investment into Latin American tech companies reached an all time high in 2017 thanks to mega rounds from US and Chinese investors – and the investment wave continued well in to 2018. Brazilian credit card processor Stone recently filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq. VCs continue pumping money into Latin America-based unicorns like Rappi and Nubank, and younger players are punching up against antiquated industries like banking and real estate.

QuintoAndar’s Series C brings the company’s total funding to $95 million (R$ 367,350,750). Braga declined to disclose the company’s valuation.

Much of the last couple of decades of innovation has centered around finding ways to get what we want without leaving the sofa.

So far, online ordering and on-demand delivery have allowed us to largely accomplish this goal. Just point, click and wait. But there’s one catch: Delivery people. We can never all lie around ordering pizzas if someone still has to deliver them.

Enter robots. In tech-futurist circles, it’s pretty commonplace to hear predictions about how some medley of autonomous vehicles and AI-enabled bots will take over doorstep deliveries in the coming years. They’ll bring us takeout, drop off our packages and displace lots of humans who currently make a living doing these things.

If this vision does become reality, there’s a strong chance it’ll largely be due to a handful of early-stage startups currently working to roboticize last-mile delivery. Below, we take a look at who they are, what they’re doing, who’s backing them and where they’re setting up shop.

The players

Crunchbase data unearthed at least eight companies in the robot delivery space with headquarters or operations in North America that have secured seed or early-stage funding in the past couple of years.

They range from heavily funded startups to lean seed-stage operations. Silicon Valley-based Nuro, an autonomous delivery startup founded by former engineers at Alphabet’s Waymo, is the most heavily funded, having raised $92 million to date. Others have raised a few million.

In the chart below, we look at key players, ranked by funding to date, along with their locations and key investors.

Who’s your backer?

While startups may be paving the way for robot delivery, they’re not doing so alone. One of the ways larger enterprises are keeping a toehold in the space is through backing and partnering with early-stage startups. They’re joining a long list of prominent seed and venture investors also eagerly eyeing the sector.

The list of larger corporate investors includes Germany’s Daimler, the lead investor in Starship Technologies. China’s Tencent, meanwhile, is backing San Francisco-based Marble, while Toyota AI Ventures has invested in Boxbot.

As for partnering, takeout food delivery services seem to be the most active users of robot couriers.

Starship, whose bot has been described as a slow-moving, medium-sized cooler on six wheels, is making particularly strong inroads in takeout. The San Francisco- and Estonia-based company, launched by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is teaming up with DoorDash and Postmates in parts of California and Washington, DC. It’s also working with the Domino’s pizza chain in Germany and the Netherlands.

Robby Technologies, another maker of cute, six-wheeled bots, has also been partnering with Postmates in parts of Los Angeles. And Marble, which is branding its boxy bots as “your friendly neighborhood robot,” teamed up last year for a trial with Yelp in San Francisco.

San Francisco Bay Area dominates

While their visions of world domination are necessarily global, the robot delivery talent pool remains rather local.

Six of the eight seed- and early-stage startups tracked by Crunchbase are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the remaining two have some operations in the region.

Why is this? Partly, there’s a concentration of talent in the area, with key engineering staff coming from larger local companies like Uber, Tesla and Waymo . Plus, of course, there’s a ready supply of investor capital, which bot startups presumably will need as they scale.

Silicon Valley and San Francisco, known for scarce and astronomically expensive housing, are also geographies in which employers struggle to find people to deliver stuff at prevailing wages to the hordes of tech workers toiling at projects like designing robots to replace them.

That said, the region isn’t entirely friendly territory for slow-moving sidewalk robots. In San Francisco, already home to absurdly steep streets and sidewalks crowded with humans and discarded scooters, city legislators voted to ban delivery robots from most places and severely restrict them in areas where permitted.

The rise of the pizza delivery robot manager

But while San Francisco may be wary of a delivery robot invasion, other geographies, including nearby Berkeley, Calif., where startup Kiwi Campus operates, have been more welcoming.

In the process, they’re creating an interesting new set of robot overseer jobs that could shed some light on the future of last-mile delivery employment.

For some startups in early trial mode, robot wrangling jobs involve shadowing bots and making sure they carry out their assigned duties without travails.

Remote robot management is also a thing and will likely see the sharpest growth. Starship, for instance, relies on operators in Estonia to track and manage bots as they make their deliveries in faraway countries.

For now, it’s too early to tell whether monitoring and controlling hordes of delivery bots will provide better pay and working conditions than old-fashioned human delivery jobs.

At least, however, much of it could theoretically be done while lying on the sofa.

When Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, approached the members-only spirits subscription club Flaviar about bringing an Armenian brandy to market, he saw it as a unique opportunity to honor his paternal heritage.

“My father’s side all fled during the genocide,” Ohanian told me in an interview. “He grew up pretty Americanized, but the food and drink were the big parts of the culture that were passed down.”

Ohanian spent some time in Armenia as an adult and became acquainted with the tradition of taking shots of the local brandy, called “konyak,” out of sliced apricots. And he wanted to expose Americans to the highest-quality aged Armenian brandy.

So when he received the investor update about Son of a Peat, a whiskey that Flaviar made for its members, he saw that the company was capable of bringing its own spirits to market. It was a new direction for Flaviar, and he thought it opened the door for him to have his own product. Ohanian decided to pitch his idea to the team.

“For most Americans, this is their first exposure. If we can make it a thing in America, I’d love to pull that off,” Ohanian said. “It’s not often that I do this with one of the companies I invest with; I chatted to Jugo Petkovic and Grisa [Soba], the founders of Flaviar, about creating my own spirit. I proposed the idea of Armenian brandy. They were like, ‘this is weird, but we’ll look into it.’ 

He says that there are not many Armenian exports that people are aware of and has a hunch that more than just Armenians will like the brandy. “I hope I can be a good ambassador for it.”

Flaviar agreed to make the brandy for Ohanian who decided to call it Shakmat — “chess” in Armenian. “Chess is a huge part of the Armenian identity. So is Armenian konyak.”

The launch of Shakmat is an expansion of the relationship between Ohanian and Flaviar, which recently began developing its own spirit brands after initial success building a consumer base with subscription deliveries of spirit-tasting boxes.

Since beginning operations in 2012, Flaviar has grown to include thousands of annual subscribers in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, the $210 yearly fee gets members access to live tastings and discounts on exclusive bottlings and private labels.

After initial funding from a local angel investor, and later one of the first investments from Speedinvest’s first fund, says Petkovic, Flaviar went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2014.

It was there where Petkovic and his co-founder Grisa Soba met Ohanian. “He, among several other YC partners, ended up investing personally, as well. We raised a few undisclosed rounds of funding since then.”

Ohanian says that what drew him to Flaviar was its unique approach to connecting with consumers in the spirits marketplace. “This was before ‘direct to consumer’ was a thing,” Ohanian says. “The state laws around liqueur sales were starting to change, because of e-commerce. And what [Flaviar] realized was that you could build a relationship with customers around liquor. We can focus on curating really great juice. And we have enough credibility now that we can make our own.”

The privately held company purchased competitor Caskers.com earlier this year and has an ambitious vision based on the idea that spirits remain inaccessible to most consumers who are interested in educating themselves about what’s out there.

“We always envisioned Flaviar as a lifestyle club to which members would belong for years,” says Petkovic. “We believe new products are best discovered through curated selection, education and engagement with a community of people who share your passion.”

Shakmat launched in the U.S. on November 12. Ohanian says he was thrilled at the opportunity to provide a platform for a deep cultural tradition and to donate 10 percent of revenues to the community by supporting Armenian reforestation efforts.  (Armenian forests were severely depleted during the Soviet occupation because of the need to use wood as an energy source.)

The first run of Shakmat includes 2,400 bottles of the 80 proof (40% ABV) 23-year-old XO brandy, but don’t be surprised if another run hits the market soon. Bottles can be purchased by Flaviar members for $95 and non-members for $110.

In order to have innovative smart city applications, cities first need to build out the connected infrastructure, which can be a costly, lengthy, and politicized process. Third-parties are helping build infrastructure at no cost to cities by paying for projects entirely through advertising placements on the new equipment. I try to dig into the economics of ad-funded smart city projects to better understand what types of infrastructure can be built under an ad-funded model, the benefits the strategy provides to cities, and the non-obvious costs cities have to consider.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

Using ads to fund smart city infrastructure at no cost to cities

When we talk about “Smart Cities”, we tend to focus on these long-term utopian visions of perfectly clean, efficient, IoT-connected cities that adjust to our environment, our movements, and our every desire. Anyone who spent hours waiting for transit the last time the weather turned south can tell you that we’ve got a long way to go.

But before cities can have the snazzy applications that do things like adjust infrastructure based on real-time conditions, cities first need to build out the platform and technology-base that applications can be built on, as McKinsey’s Global Institute explained in an in-depth report released earlier this summer. This means building out the network of sensors, connected devices and infrastructure needed to track city data. 

However, reaching the technological base needed for data gathering and smart communication means building out hard physical infrastructure, which can cost cities a ton and can take forever when dealing with politics and government processes.

Many cities are also dealing with well-documented infrastructure crises. And with limited budgets, local governments need to spend public funds on important things like roads, schools, healthcare and nonsensical sports stadiums which are pretty much never profitable for cities (I’m a huge fan of baseball but I’m not a fan of how we fund stadiums here in the states).

As city infrastructure has become increasingly tech-enabled and digitized, an interesting financing solution has opened up in which smart city infrastructure projects are built by third-parties at no cost to the city and are instead paid for entirely through digital advertising placed on the new infrastructure. 

I know – the idea of a city built on ad-revenue brings back soul-sucking Orwellian images of corporate overlords and logo-paved streets straight out of Blade Runner or Wall-E. Luckily for us, based on our discussions with developers of ad-funded smart city projects, it seems clear that the economics of an ad-funded model only really work for certain types of hard infrastructure with specific attributes – meaning we may be spared from fire hydrants brought to us by Mountain Dew.

While many factors influence the viability of a project, smart infrastructure projects seem to need two attributes in particular for an ad-funded model to make sense. First, the infrastructure has to be something that citizens will engage – and engage a lot – with. You can’t throw a screen onto any object and expect that people will interact with it for more than 3 seconds or that brands will be willing to pay to throw their taglines on it. The infrastructure has to support effective advertising.  

Second, the investment has to be cost-effective, meaning the infrastructure can only cost so much. A third-party that’s willing to build the infrastructure has to believe they have a realistic chance of generating enough ad-revenue to cover the costs of the projects, and likely an amount above that which could lead to a reasonable return. For example, it seems unlikely you’d find someone willing to build a new bridge, front all the costs, and try to fund it through ad-revenue.

When is ad-funding feasible? A case study on kiosks and LinkNYC

A LinkNYC kiosk enabling access to the internet in New York on Saturday, February 20, 2016. Over 7500 kiosks are to be installed replacing stand alone pay phone kiosks providing free wi-fi, internet access via a touch screen, phone charging and free phone calls. The system is to be supported by advertising running on the sides of the kiosks. ( Richard B. Levine) (Photo by Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images)

To get a better understanding of the types of smart city hardware that might actually make sense for an ad-funded model, we can look at the engagement levels and cost structures of smart kiosks, and in particular, the LinkNYC project. Smart kiosks – which provide free WiFi, connectivity and real-time services to citizens – have been leading examples of ad-funded smart city projects. Innovative companies like Intersection (developers of the LinkNYC project), SmartLink, IKE, Soofa, and others have been helping cities build out kiosk networks at little-to-no cost to local governments.

LinkNYC provides public access to much of its data on the New York City Open-Data website. Using some back-of-the-envelope math and a hefty number of assumptions, we can try to get to a very rough range of where cost and engagement metrics generally have to fall for an ad-funded model to make sense.

To try and retrace considerations for the developers’ investment decision, let’s first look at the terms of the deal signed with New York back in 2014. The agreement called for a 12-year franchise period, during which at least 7,500 Link kiosks would be deployed across the city in the first eight years at an expected project cost of more than $200 million. As part of its solicitation, the city also required the developers to pay the greater of either a minimum annual payment of at least $17.5 million or 50 percent of gross revenues.

Let’s start with the cost side – based on an estimated project cost of around $200 million for at least 7,500 Links, we can get to an estimated cost per unit of $25,000 – $30,000. It’s important to note that this only accounts for the install costs, as we don’t have data around the other cost buckets that the developers would also be on the hook for, such as maintenance, utility and financing costs.

Source: LinkNYC, NYC.gov, NYCOpenData

Turning to engagement and ad-revenue – let’s assume that the developers signed the deal with the expectations that they could at least breakeven – covering the install costs of the project and minimum payments to the city. And for simplicity, let’s assume that the 7,500 links were going to be deployed at a steady pace of 937-938 units per year (though in actuality the install cadence has been different). In order for the project to breakeven over the 12-year deal period, developers would have to believe each kiosk could generate around $6,400 in annual ad-revenue (undiscounted). 

Source: LinkNYC, NYC.gov, NYCOpenData

The reason the kiosks can generate this revenue (and in reality a lot more) is because they have significant engagement from users. There are currently around 1,750 Links currently deployed across New York. As of November 18th, LinkNYC had over 720,000 weekly subscribers or around 410 weekly subscribers per Link. The kiosks also saw an average of 18 million sessions per week, or 20-25 weekly sessions per subscriber, or around 10,200 weekly sessions per kiosk (seasonality might even make this estimate too low). 

And when citizens do use the kiosks, they use it for a long time! The average session for each Link unit was four minutes and six seconds. The level of engagement makes sense since city-dwellers use these kiosks in time or attention-intensive ways, such making phone calls, getting directions, finding information about the city, or charging their phones.   

The analysis here isn’t perfect, but now we at least have a (very) rough idea of how much smart kiosks cost, how much engagement they see, and the amount of ad-revenue developers would have to believe they could realize at each unit in order to ultimately move forward with deployment. We can use these metrics to help identify what types of infrastructure have similar profiles and where an ad-funded project may make sense.

Bus stations, for example, may cost about $10,000 – $15,000, which is in a similar cost range as smart kiosks. According to the MTA, the NYC bus system sees over 11.2 million riders per week or nearly 700 riders per station per week. Rider wait times can often be five-to-ten minutes in length if not longer. Not to mention bus stations already have experience utilizing advertising to a certain degree.  Projects like bike-share docking stations and EV charging stations also seem to fit similar cost profiles while having high engagement.

And interactions with these types of infrastructure are ones where users may be more receptive to ads, such as an EV charging station where someone is both physically engaging with the equipment and idly looking to kill up sometimes up to 30 minutes of time as they charge up. As a result, more companies are using advertising models to fund projects that fit this mold, like Volta, who uses advertising to offer charging stations free to citizens.

The benefits of ad-funding come with tradeoffs for cities

When it makes sense for cities and third-party developers, advertising-funded smart city infrastructure projects can unlock a tremendous amount of value for a city. The benefits are clear – cities pay nothing, citizens are offered free connectivity and real-time information on local conditions, and smart infrastructure is built and can possibly be used for other smart city applications down the road, such as using locational data tracking to improve city zoning and congestion. 

Yes, ads are usually annoying – but maybe understanding that advertising models only work for specific types of smart city projects may help quell fears that future cities will be covered inch-to-inch in mascots. And ads on projects like LinkNYC promote local businesses and can tap into idiosyncratic conditions and preferences of regional communities – LinkNYC previously used real-time local transit data to display beer ads to subway riders that were facing heavy delays and were probably in need of a drink. 

Like everyone’s family photos from Thanksgiving, the picture here is not all roses, however, and there are a lot of deep-rooted issues that exist under the surface. Third-party developed, advertising-funded infrastructure comes with externalities and less obvious costs that have been fairly criticized and debated at length. 

When infrastructure funding is derived from advertising, concerns arise over whether services will be provided equitably across communities. Many fear that low-income or less-trafficked communities that generate less advertising demand could end up having poor infrastructure and maintenance. 

Even bigger points of contention as of late have been issues around data consent and treatment. I won’t go into much detail on the issue since it’s incredibly complex and warrants its own lengthy dissertation (and many have already been written). 

But some of the major uncertainties and questions cities are trying to answer include: If third-parties pay for, manage and operate smart city projects, who should own data on citizens’ living behavior? How will citizens give consent to provide data when tracking systems are built into the environment around them? How can the data be used? How granular can the data get? How can we assure citizens’ information is secure, especially given the spotty track records some of the major backers of smart city projects have when it comes to keeping our data safe?

The issue of data treatment is one that no one has really figured out yet and many developers are doing their best to work with cities and users to find a reasonable solution. For example, LinkNYC is currently limited by the city in the types of data they can collect. Outside of email addresses, LinkNYC doesn’t ask for or collect personal information and doesn’t sell or share personal data without a court order. The project owners also make much of its collected data publicly accessible online and through annually published transparency reports. As Intersection has deployed similar smart kiosks across new cities, the company has been willing to work through slower launches and pilot programs to create more comfortable policies for local governments.

But consequential decisions related to third-party owned smart infrastructure are only going to become more frequent as cities become increasingly digitized and connected. By having third-parties pay for projects through advertising revenue or otherwise, city budgets can be focused on other vital public services while still building the efficient, adaptive and innovative infrastructure that can help solve some of the largest problems facing civil society. But if that means giving up full control of city infrastructure and information, cities and citizens have to consider whether the benefits are worth the tradeoffs that could come with them. There is a clear price to pay here, even when someone else is footing the bill.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

• How California’s Efforts to Prevent Wildfires Reflect a National Crisis on Climate Change – The New Yorker, Carolyn Kormann
• A’s Propose Crazy-Looking Howard Terminal Stadium, Financial Details Still Uncertain – Field of Schemes, Neil deMause
  
• Berlin’s Massive Housing Push Sparks a Debate About the City’s Future – CityLab, Feargus O’Sullivan
• Magnetic Levitation: The Return of Transport’s Great ‘What If?’ – The Guardian, Christopher Beanland
• Addis Ababa Has Overtaken Dubai as the World’s Gateway into Africa – Quartz, Abdi Latif Dahir
• Planning a Neighborhood Square – The Western Planner, Dr. Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard

Sirius XM’s recent all-stock $3.5-billion purchase of the music-streaming service Pandora raised a lot of eyebrows. A big question was why Sirius paid so much. Is Pandora’s music library and customer base really worth that amount? The answer is that this was a strategic move by Sirius in a battle that is far bigger than radio. The real battle, which will become much more visible in the coming years, is over the driving experience.

People spend a lot of time commuting in their cars. That time is fixed and won’t likely change. However, what is changing is the way we drive. We’re already seeing many new cars with driver assist features, and automakers (and tech companies) are working hard to bring fully autonomous cars to the market as quickly as possible. New cars today already contain an average of 100 million lines of code that can be updated to increase driver assist options, and some automakers like Tessla already offer an “autonomous” mode on highways.

According to the Brookings Institute, one-quarter of all cars will be autonomous by 2040 and IHS predicts all cars will be autonomous after 2050. Those are conservative estimates, as we are likely to see major changes in the next 10 years.

These changes will impact the driving experience. As cars become more autonomous, we can do more than simply listen to music or podcasts. We may be able to watch videos, surf the web, and more. The value of car real estate is already valuable, but it’s going to skyrocket as we change the way people consume media while driving.

The Pandora acquisition was a strategic move by Sirius to gain the necessary assets so that it won’t fall behind in this space — and to get into the fast-growing music streaming business, where users consume music at home, work and at play.  While Pandora’s music library is arguably second tier, it’s also good enough that it can provide pretty much every artist most people want. This is often how high-priced mergers happen – one party is concerned about falling behind and pays a premium to purchase the other company’s assets. It’s also a bet by Sirius about the driving experience of the future.

As the battle over the driving experience heats up, we will initially see companies like Google, Amazon and Apple start dipping their toes in the market. They might do that through investments in startups, rolling out their own services, or purchasing competitors. Some of those large tech companies already have projects around autonomous cars. Uber may even be interested in this market.

For now, Sirius probably doesn’t need to worry about competition from startups. They won’t be able to grow big enough fast enough to get a sizable share of the market. A more likely scenario is that startups will work on software that offers a unique functionality, making it an attractive acquisition target by a larger company.

This is going to be an interesting battle to watch in the coming years, as cars essentially become software with four wheels attached. Companies like Sirius know this is an important space and that the battle over the driving experience will be won in software. The acquisition of Pandora is only the beginning.

E Ink — a name synonymous with e-reader screens — just debuted a new writing display technology called JustWrite. The tech offers the company’s familiar monochrome aesthetic — albeit in negative this time, with white on black.

The key here, as with most of E Ink’s technology, is minimal power consumption and low cost, the latter of which it was able to accomplish by dumping the TFT (thin-film-transistor LCD). Instead, it’s a thin roll that could be used to paper surfaces like conference rooms and schools, in order to let people write on the walls using a stylus with practically no latency, as evidenced in the below GIF. 

“The JustWrite film features one of E Ink’s proprietary electronic inks and offers similar benefits as E Ink’s other product lines: a paper-like experience with a good contrast and reflective display without a backlight,” the company writes. “The JustWrite film is an all plastic display, making it extremely durable and lightweight, with the ability to be affixed and removed easily, enabling writing surfaces in a variety of locations.”

The technology could go head to head with the likes of Sony and reMarkable on drawing tablets, but E Ink appears to be more interested in embedding it in non-traditional surfaces. No word yet on how or when it will come to market, though the company is showing it off in person for the first time this week at an event in Tokyo.

Black Friday broke records in terms of sales made from mobile devices, according to reports last week from Adobe. This week, PayPal said it saw a similar trend during the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping event. PayPal saw a record-breaking $1 billion+ in mobile payment volume for the first time ever on Black Friday – a milestone it hit again on Cyber Monday.

Mobile payment volume on Black Friday was up 42 percent over Black Friday 2017, the company said, and it even outpaced the mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday this year.

However, Cyber Monday saw more total payment volume, likely because much of the shopping that takes place that day comes from office workers back at their desktops, wrapping up a few more purchases.

Worldwide, mobile payment volume from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday accounted for a significant 43 percent of PayPal’s total payment volume. Between those days, PayPal was processing more than $25,000 per second, with more than $11,000 per second processed on mobile.

The peak hour took place on Black Friday, which shows the sales event has shifted much of its business online. It’s now coming close to topping Cyber Monday in terms of both online and mobile shopping, PayPal noted.

PayPal’s data also pointed to another trend: that of the blurring of the line as to when holiday shopping begins and ends. Many retailers these days are launching their deals on Thanksgiving or even earlier, then allowing them to run for the week of Black Friday or longer.

Amazon, for example, has decided to capitalize on its own Black Friday/Cyber Monday momentum by launching a “12 Days of Deals” event that will feature hundreds of new deals every day from Sunday December 2 through Thursday December 13.

Other times, the shopping starts early, as PayPal’s data shows. Thanksgiving has now become another major shopping day, the company said, having broken into the top 10 shopping days of the year. It also grew 41 percent over last year.

E-commerce spending wasn’t the only thing that’s up year-over-year, PayPal also found. On Giving Tuesday – the event focused on donating to charities and other worthwhile causes – PayPal said over a million customers from 180 markets donated $98 million this year. That’s a 51 percent increase from 2017, it said.

Meet Cimon. The 3D printed floating robot head was developed by Airbus for the German Space Agency. He’s been a crew member of the International Space Station since June, though as Gizmodo notes, this is the first time we’re seeing him in action.

Really the floating, Watson-powered robot face is like an extremely expensive Amazon Echo designed to study human-machine interactions in space. This video highlights an early interaction between Cimon and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst.

Gerst requests his “favorite song,” leading Cimon to play Kraftwerk’s “Man Machine,” only to shaken by the astronaut, who then demands the robot shoot some video. Once again Cimon complies, though this time he’s clearly a bit annoyed that the music has stopped. Kind of a rough first encounter for the two new coworkers.

“Happy with his initial outing, both Cimon’s developers and Alexander hope to see Cimon back in action again soon,” the ESA says. “While no further sessions are planned during the Horizons mission at this stage, it could mark the beginning of exciting collaboration between astronauts, robotic assistants and possible future artificial intelligence in space.”

Hopefully things go a bit more smoothly next time. Lord knows the last thing you want to do is piss off a space robot.

Two and a half years after the launch of Pokémon GO, it’s still missing one major staple of the main series games: player versus player battling.

That’s about to change.

In a series of teaser tweets this morning, the company confirmed that the battle system is on the way, noting only that it’s “coming soon”.

Battling is the feature perhaps most demanded by the player base — particularly after the other oh-so-demanded feature, trading, was finally added around six months ago. While players have long been able to battle Pokémon stored in gyms, or work together to take down bigger/badder Pokémon that show up in raids, there’s never been the sort of real time, head-to-head battling system the series is so well known for.

In August of this year, a rep for Niantic mentioned that their goal was to get it out by the end of the year. Given this tweet, it’s looking like that’ll happen.