Author: azeeadmin

Last fall, Google’s in-house incubator Area 120 introduced a new work-tracking tool called Tables, an AirTable rival that allows for tracking projects more efficiently using automation. Today, Google says Tables will officially “graduate” from Area 120 to become an official Google product by joining Google Cloud, which it expects to complete in the next year.

The Tables project was started by long-time Google employee, now Tables’ GM Tim Gleason, who spent 10 years at the company and many more before that in the tech industry. He said he was inspired to work on Tables because he always had a difficult time tracking projects, as teams shared notes and tasks across different documents, which quickly got out of date.

Instead of tracking those sorts of notes and tasks associated with a project across various documents that have to be manually updated by team members, Tables uses bots to help take on some of the administrative duties involved in guiding team members through a project — like scheduling recurring email reminders when tasks are overdue, messaging a chat room when new forms are received, moving tasks to other people’s work queues, or updating tasks when schedules are changed.

The team saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including of course project management, as well as I.T. operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

Image Credits: Google

The service was launched last September to test product market fit, Google says, and quickly found traction.

According to VP/GM and Head of Platform for Google Cloud, Amit Zavery, early customer feedback was positive and the team saw customers adopting the service for multiple projects — another strong signal for its potential growth. He declined to say how many customers were already using the service, however.

The pandemic also likely played a role in Tables’ adoption, Zavery noted.

“If you saw what happened COVID, I think work-tracking became a pretty big area of interest for many customers who we’re speaking to,” he says, explaining that everyone was trying to quickly digitize.

Popular use cases included inventory management, healthcare supply tracking, and use in mortgage lending workflows. However, the team found Tables was adopted across a variety of industries beyond these, as hoped. On average, customers would use Tables in a department with around 30 to 40 people, they found.

Most customers were abandoning more manual processes to use Tables instead, not coming from a rival service.

“Things were very fragmented in different documents or with different people, so using technologies like this really seems to have resonated very well,” Zavery says. “Now you had one central place for structured information you can access and do things on top of it versus trying to have 15 different sheets and figuring out how they are related because there’s no structure behind each of them.”

Another factor that prompted Tables’ adoption was how quickly people could be productive, thanks in part to its ability to integrate with existing data warehouses and other services. Currently, Tables supports Office 365, Microsoft Access, Google Sheets, Slack, Salesforce, Box and Dropbox, for example.

Tables was one of only a few Area 120 projects to launch with a paid business model, along with ticket seller Fundo, conversational ads platform AdLingo and Google’s recently launched Orion WiFi. During its beta, an individual could use Tables for free, with support for up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid plan was supposed to cost $10 per user per month, with support for up to 1,000 tables and 10,000 rows. This plan also included support for larger attachments, more actions and advanced history, sharing, forms, automation and views.

However, Google never began charging for its Paid tier during the beta, it says.

As Tables graduates into Google Cloud’s lineup, it will be integrated with Google’s no-code app building platform, AppSheet, which has a free tier, allowing the freemium model to continue. Users who want additional features will be able to upgrade to a premium plan. It will also be offered as a standalone product, for those who want that experience.

Google will leverage Workspace to get Tables in front of more users, as well.

“it’s going to be delivered through Workspace integration, because that’s a very large community of users who expect some similar kind of functionality,” Zavery says. “That will be a big differentiator, when you talk about the breadth of things we can do — because of having that community of users on Sheets, the things they do with Drive, and the data they collect — we can automatically add this and augment their experience.”

Image Credits: Google

The project taps into the growing interest in no-code, spreadsheet-powered database platforms — like AirTable, for example, which had closed on $185 million in Series D funding in the days before Tables’ release, valuing its business at $2.585 billion, post-money.

As Tables transitions to Google Cloud, the Tables beta version will remain free until a fully-supported Cloud product becomes available in the next year. At that point, users will migrate to the new service.

Over time, Tables plans to add more functionality as it ties in with AppSheet, to make using the service more seamless — so people don’t have to hop around from one product to another to accomplish tasks. It will also work to provide better ease of use, mobile support, and connectivity with more backend systems.

Official pricing hasn’t been finalized but shouldn’t be very different from the beta version.

Automattic is expanding its lineup of online writing platforms with its acquisition of Day One, a popular journaling app for Mac and Apple mobile devices. The app has been downloaded more than 15 million times since its March 2011 launch on the Mac and iTunes App Store, offering users a private place to share their thoughts. Since then, it’s been awarded the App Store Editor’s Choice, App of the Year, and the Apple Design Award, along with praise from various reviewers.

Deal terms were not immediately available. The companies were asked for comment.

The addition makes for an interesting expansion of Automattic’s now growing collection of online writing tools, which today include blogging platforms WordPress.com and Tumblr — the latter as of 2019, when Automattic took the aging social blogging network off parent company Verizon’s hands for a fraction of its earlier $1 billion acquisition price. (Verizon still owns TechCrunch, too…for now.)

Unlike WordPress and Tumblr, which tend to focus on publishing to a public audience, Day One’s focus has been on privacy. The app offers end-to-end encryption for all your journal entries, which can include text, media and even audio recordings. It has also offered advanced features like automatic backups, auto-import of Instagram posts, voice transcriptions, templates, rich text formatting, location history, optional printed books, as well as integrations with other platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more.

With its addition to Automattic, Day One will allow users to choose to publish select journal entries to WordPress.com and Tumblr, and soon, import content from either platform back into Day One, too. The app may also make sense as a way for existing Tumblr users to sync their private entries over to a more protected and backed up writing tool — instead of accidentally publishing them to their main blog.

Automattic, in an announcement, notes Day One CEO Paul Mayne will continue to lead the development of Day One following the acquisition. The team will also remain intact.

Meanwhile, in a blog post, Mayne hints at why he sold the app, noting the deal will allow Day One access to same technological, financial, and security benefits that help power WordPress.com and Tumblr.

“This is incredibly exciting news. For the past 10 years since I started Day One, I’ve worked to not only create the best digital journaling experience in the world, but one that will last,” shares Mayne. “By joining Automattic, I’m now more confident than ever that the preservation and longevity of Day One is sure,” he adds.

Mayne also noted there were no current plans to change the private nature of Day One, but the app would integrate with other Automattic products going forward, while continuing to sustain itself via a subscription model.

Throughout its four or so years of life, the Equity podcast crew has had the good fortune to record a few live shows. We sat on the small stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, for example, with Garry Tan one year, and Charles Hudson another. We’ve also ventured to other venues and events with varying levels of success.

But it’s 2021 and there are no IRL events coming up, so we’re bringing back the live show, but on Hopin. That means that no matter where you are, you can swing by, talk a little shit with us, troll Danny in the comments, and generally have a good time as we try to remember how to be charismatic.

And you will be able to see the show recorded before Chris and Grace cut out all the awkward mistakes, ums, pauses, and other shenanigans that you miss in the finished versions that we send out.

It’s free, of course, so click here to register.  If it goes well, we’ll probably get to do more. So, please do swing by if you are free. We’d love to see you.

More details:

• June 24 at 2:00PM PT
• Get your ticket HERE

Chat soon! — The Equity Team

Every day in the United States, more than 100 people die because of a car crash. Some are teenagers, like the daughter of writer Michael Lewis and Tabitha Soren, and her boyfriend, who died in a wrong-way crash. Some are well known, like Kevin Clark, who played the drummer in “School of Rock,” who was hit and killed by a driver while biking. Others are not household names, like Janell Katesigwa, who was killed by a drunk driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and left behind four children.

Something else happens every day, too: a lack of congressional urgency to require available technology to prevent the next tragedy.

Sadly, what is stopping advanced technology from preventing these deaths is business as usual in Washington, which means a lot of talk about saving lives, but little action.

Existing advanced vehicle safety technology, such as driver monitoring systems, automatic emergency braking and lane-departure warnings, can dramatically reduce crashes like the three described above — and the thousands of others that are a result of drunk, drugged, drowsy and distracted driving.

But only if the technology becomes standard equipment in new vehicles. When technology — underwritten by standards, bolstered by oversight and backstopped by accountability — can annually spare tens of thousands of families from tragedy, our federal government must act.

Over the coming weeks and months, Congress will debate the future of motor vehicles in the United States. The debate will be focused on renewing the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act, which is also referred to as the “highway bill.”

But make no mistake: While issues such as the future of the gas tax and arcane parliamentary procedures will grab headlines, vital decisions will be made about whether the growing and preventable public health crisis of car crash deaths will be prioritized or once again considered non-essential.

Despite the estimated 38,680 highway fatalities last year, which represented a 7.2% increase over 2019, some federal policymakers have failed to focus on available remedies that would result in fewer funerals and a reduction in lifelong debilitating injuries.

Perhaps the delay is a result of too many in Congress who believe the only available solution is rushing unsupervised driverless vehicles into the marketplace. Even if a green light for mass driverless vehicle production were given today, it would be decades before they could make a significant impact on improving overall safety. This single-minded focus on a unicorn to fix all transportation issues misunderstands the technical challenges and misreads the public mood.

A recent AAA survey found 86% of respondents would not trust riding in driverless vehicles, while another found consumers do not feel comfortable sharing the road with them. The technology industry’s habit of beta-testing unproven software on the public, combined with car companies’ track record of delaying safety in exchange for profit, will not increase consumer trust of the safety, inclusivity and equity of driverless technology.

Vehicle safety is based on using layers of protection that have led to a five-fold reduction in the occurrence of car crash deaths in the United States over the last 50 years. Seatbelts and airbags protect you when you crash. Electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes help you avoid rolling over. Regulations provide minimum levels of performance and recalls serve as a backstop to provide oversight when there is a defect.

It is hard to remember, but there was once a time when dual braking systems, intended to provide a safe stop even in the event of a catastrophic failure of one braking system, were considered revolutionary. Now such a layer of protection is standard.

At a time when the promise of automated vehicle technology could make or break America’s place atop the automobile industry, many in Congress want to ignore history and cut away layers of protection to rush driverless vehicles into the marketplace. One Senate proposal creates a fast track for manufacturers to sell tens of thousands of automated vehicles based on a flimsy promise that their vehicle is as safe as the least safe vehicle meeting current minimum standards. No one should forget that the Ford Pinto met all the minimum standards when it was recalled for exploding upon impact when hit from behind. Driverless vehicles should be held to a higher standard than the minimum.

Congress has an opportunity to help build public trust in the safety of driverless technology by requiring existing innovations that will be the building blocks of driverless vehicles into cars right away, with immediate benefits. For example, in the future, automated vehicles will need driver monitoring systems to make smooth handoffs between machine and driver, automated braking to avoid crashes and lane-keeping technology to keep vehicles where they belong. Today these systems, when working correctly, can help limit crashes by assisting human drivers, just as someday these features may assist computer drivers. Using technology to save lives now does not preclude saving more lives later.

As Congress begins to actively debate the future of the automobile industry, there is a lot of talk about upgrading roads, encouraging electric battery-powered vehicles and accelerating the introduction of driverless cars. Yet, there is not nearly enough talk about what is needed to make us all safer sooner.

There have been a variety of reasonable bills introduced to help the U.S. catch up to the rest of the developed world when it comes to vehicle safety and safeguarding pedestrians. They include improving the safety of our back-seat passengers in crashes, better recall procedures, and more robust and transparent data collection, along with requiring advanced safety features now common around the world.

Unfortunately, we have a long way to go and no time to waste. The European Union, despite a larger population and an almost identical number of vehicles and land size, had under 19,000 crash deaths last year, less than half of the U.S. death toll. Further, the EU’s record-low vehicle-related deaths came without a single driverless vehicle on the road, but with robust consumer information and a regulatory scheme that mandates safety.

In the U.S., however, car manufacturers concerned about challenges from new market entrants — foreign and domestic — are lobbying for looser regulations and immunity from responsibility for automated vehicle crashes. Congress must push the industry to move quickly to protect lives before profits and stand behind their products when things inevitably go wrong. The best time to appropriately assign accountability regarding who will be held responsible if a car with a computer driver kills your loved ones, or a systemwide defect impacts an entire driverless fleet, is before the crash.

Moreover, history demonstrates that thoughtful requirements for all vehicles, crafted in a way to keep pace with major innovations in the automobile industry, have always been necessary to ensure vehicle safety is not reserved for the rich alone.

Federal legislation requiring objective performance standards based on data collected from driverless cars being tested on public streets can provide a path to this future. Yet Congress seems poised to do little, or nothing, once again. It is time for policy makers to reconcile the notion that the long-term viability of the driverless vehicle industry and keeping public roads safer now with incremental improvements, federal oversight and legal responsibility are not opposing ideas but necessary partners.

There is no question the U.S. can lead in the coming era of vehicle innovation while improving safety for all drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Success in this ambitious task will require moving forward quickly with existing safety technology and dispensing with the idea that innovations, safety and accountability are incompatible when, in fact, each is integral to the long-term success of the other.

Raquel Urtasun, the former chief scientist at Uber ATG, is the founder and CEO of Waabi, an autonomous vehicle startup that came out of stealth mode last week. The Toronto-based company, which will focus on trucking, raised an impressive $83.5 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures. 

Urtasun joined Mobility 2021 to talk about her new venture, the challenges facing the self-driving vehicle industry and how her approach to AI can be used to advance the commercialization of AVs.

Why did Urtasun decide to found her own company?

Urtasun, who is considered a pioneer in AI, led the R&D efforts as a chief scientist at Uber ATG, which was acquired by Aurora in December. Six months later, we have Waabi. The company’s mission is to take an AI-first approach to solving self-driving technology. 

I left Uber a little bit over three months ago to start this new company, Waabi, with the idea of having a different way of solving self-driving. This is a combination of my 20-year career in AI as well as more than 10 years in self-driving. Thinking about a new company was something that was always in my head. And the more that I was in the industry, the more that I started thinking about going away from the traditional approach and trying to have a diverse view of how to solve self-driving was actually the way to go. So that’s why I decided to do this company. (Timestamp: 1:21)

The Supreme Court has given LinkedIn another chance to stop a rival company from scraping personal information from users’ public profiles, a practice LinkedIn says should be illegal but one that could have broad ramifications for internet researchers and archivists.

LinkedIn lost its case against Hiq Labs in 2019 after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the CFAA does not prohibit a company from scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet.

The Microsoft-owned social network argued that the mass scraping of its users’ profiles was in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization.

Hiq Labs, which uses public data to analyze employee attrition, argued at the time that a ruling in LinkedIn’s favor “could profoundly impact open access to the Internet, a result that Congress could not have intended when it enacted the CFAA over three decades ago.” (Hiq Labs has also been sued by Facebook, which it claims scraped public data across Facebook and Instagram, but also Amazon, Twitter, and YouTube.)

The Supreme Court said it would not take on the case, but instead ordered the appeal’s court to hear the case again in light of its recent ruling, which found that a person cannot violate the CFAA if they improperly access data on a computer they have permission to use.

The CFAA was once dubbed the “worst law” in the technology law books by critics who have long argued that its outdated and vague language failed to keep up with the pace of the modern internet.

Journalists and archivists have long scraped public data as a way to save and archive copies of old or defunct websites before they shut down. But other cases of web scraping have sparked anger and concerns over privacy and civil liberties. In 2019, a security researcher scraped millions of Venmo transactions, which the company does not make private by default. Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition startup, claimed it scraped over 3 billion profile photos from social networks without their permission.

We kicked off this year’s TC Sessions: Mobility with a talk featuring three leading players in the field of autonomous delivery. Gatik co-founder and chief engineer Apeksha Kumavat, Nuro head of operations Amy Jones Satrom, and Starship Technologies co-founder and CTO Ahti Heinla joined us to discuss their companies’ unique approaches to the category.

The trio discussed government regulation on autonomous driving, partnerships with big corporations like Walmart and Domino’s, and the ongoing impact the pandemic has had on interest in the space.

The pandemic effect

Delivery is one of the countless categories that have been profoundly impacted by COVID-19. Interest in autonomous delivery has compounded, but will this be a permanent sea change? Or will things regress some when life returns to normal?

Kumavat : Even before the pandemic hit, this whole e-commerce trend was already on the rise. No one wants their deliveries to be done after a week or two weeks. Everyone is expecting them to be done on the same day, as well as curbside pickup options. There was already a rise in the expectations of e-commerce and on-demand deliveries even before the pandemic hit. Post-March 2020, what we have seen is a huge increase in that trajectory. (Timestamp: 1:55)

Jones Satrom: When you think about the number of trips the consumer used to take just for shopping, that’s roughly 40% of the trips they would take. They now have habits around that kind of stuff. It’s a timesaver for the consumer. We do see those trends continuing and we do see folks sustaining the online ordering piece and wanting to be able to get things when they want them. (Timestamp: 8:39)

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, has purchased 100 acres of land near the Gigafactory that Panasonic operates with Tesla in Sparks, Nevada as part of an expansion plan that aligns with the Biden Administration’s drive to increase adoption of electric vehicles and boost domestic battery recycling and supply chain efforts.

The company said Monday that its existing 150,000-square-foot facility in Carson City, Nevada will also nearly triple in size. Redwood is adding another 400,000 square feet onto the Carson City recycling facility. As part of its growth plans, Redwood is also hiring hundreds of workers. The company, which is backed by Amazon, employs 130 people today and expects to add more than 500 jobs over the next two years.

Redwood’s expansion announcement follows the Biden Administration’s 100-day review of the U.S. supply chain and the release of a Department of Energy’ document that lays out a plan to improve the domestic supply chain for lithium-based batteries.

“America has a clear opportunity to build back our domestic supply chain and manufacturing sectors, so we can capture the full benefits of an emerging $23 trillion global clean energy economy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said Monday in a statement. “Private sector investment like this is a sign that we can’t slow down. The American Jobs Plan will unlock massive opportunities for US businesses as it spurs innovation and demand for technologies–like vehicle batteries and battery storage–creating clean energy jobs for all.”

Redwood Materials, which was founded in 2017, is trying to create a circular supply chain. The company has a business-to-business strategy, recycling the scrap from battery cell production as well as consumer electronics like cell phone batteries, laptop computers, power tools, power banks, scooters and electric bicycles. Redwood collects the scrap from consumer electronics companies and battery cell manufacturers like Panasonic. It then processes these discarded goods, extracting materials like cobalt, nickel and lithium that are typically mined, and then supplies those back to Panasonic and other customers. The aim is to create a closed loop system that will ultimately help reduce the cost of batteries and offset the need for mining.

Redwood Materials has a number of customers, and has only publicly disclosed that it is working with Panasonic, Amazon and AESC Envision in Tennessee

Redwood Materials says it recovers about 95% to 98% of the elements from the batteries such as nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper. Today, it receives 3 gigawatt-hours annually, a figure that the company says is equivalent to about 45,000 cars.

In December 1991, about 20 days before the Soviet Union formally disintegrated, my family landed in San Francisco as religious refugees fleeing persecution. I was a 9-year-old kid who had just experienced his first airplane trip and was utterly mesmerized by the skyscrapers of the city’s skyline as we drove past. It felt like arriving into the future.

My parents had almost nothing to their names. No degrees or specialized skills. Not a word of English. Only a few hundred dollars in cash from selling most of our possessions in Russia. They had just learned that half of our “luggage” — makeshift bags that were hand-sewn by my mother out of used floor rugs — was lost in transit.

Our journey wasn’t made possible by some employer seeking specialized labor, nor by a merit assessment that deemed our family as economically valuable immigrants. Instead, it was made possible by many Americans seeing inherent value in human beings seeking a better life. From people who wrote letters to Congress to increase refugee quotas, to sponsoring families who shared their homes and paychecks and lives to support arriving families, to organizations like World Relief, which funded unsecured loans to pay for airline tickets for those who couldn’t afford them — all did their part with no expectation of economic gain.

Integration into life in the United States wasn’t easy. Our family had to rely on welfare for several years as our parents learned English in night classes and attempted many different ways to make a living for our family of eight. Not being able to find a full-time job, my father tried every mail-order contract gig he could learn about — from cutting out thousands of leather pieces for shoes to soldering electronic boards to order to translation of documents from English to Russian. Eventually, he started his own business repairing and maintaining computers.

In every moment, I saw my parents seeking to pay back what others had selflessly done for us. They taught me there’s dignity to doing good work, even if it’s work that others don’t find glamorous. Even a decade later, our family was still barely scraping by financially. As I was applying to colleges as a senior in high school, our entire family would pack up our minivan on most evenings after dinner to clean dental clinics to make ends meet.

This is the point in my tale where it might make the most sense to insert my own story of living out a wildly unbelievable version of the American dream — especially for a refugee.

I could tell you how after college I co-founded Webflow, a no-code software development company that employs nearly 300 people and is now valued at over $2 billion. And how stories like mine are the reason why we should open our doors to more refugees to come to the United States.

However, I worry that outlier success stories — especially those that are filled with considerable luck and privilege like mine — can send the wrong message. These tales can imply that the value and worth of immigrants and refugees are primarily economic. I worry that especially now, at a time when immigration has become a politically polarizing issue in this country, the conversation about the value of immigrants will continue shifting toward being purely merit-based.

Too often, if “merit” is the criterion, human beings are seen as worthy of joining our country if and only if they’re the “best of the best” or the “cream of the crop” in some skill or industry. In such cases, people are judged solely by how much economic value they can create in the short term.

Yes, merit-based immigration has an important place in our economy to solve shorter-term skill gaps in various industries. But if we only focus on that, I believe that our nation will have lost an important part of its character and heritage. We shouldn’t reduce our efforts to offer a safe haven to people whose lives are threatened back home. Turning our backs on the most vulnerable only to focus on the most economically advantageous would betray the spirit of what I believe makes the United States a beacon of hope and opportunity for so many people.

The good news is that you can get outsized economic benefits in the longer term by accepting more refugees. I know this because for every startup founder story like mine, there are hundreds of thousands of hard-working refugees who needed some help at first but are now contributing massively to our tax base as nurses, doctors, lawyers, firefighters and business owners. In fact, refugees have the highest rate of entrepreneurship.

After experiencing hardship and oppression in their originating countries, refugees have unparalleled drive to make a better living for themselves, their families and their communities — which helps lift our entire economy.

My hope is that more people are given this kind of opportunity and that more industry leaders will start to advocate for immigration on humanitarian terms — not just economic ones. It will make our economy stronger in the end.

When given the chance to live freely without fearing for our lives, my family and so many others like us will work harder than most to contribute to society. Why? Because we feel a deep sense of gratitude to a nation that welcomed and accepted us because of, first and foremost, who we are as human beings.

This weekend, all of your friends morphed one by one into animated, Pixar-inspired characters. This isn’t a fever dream, and you’re not alone.

On Thursday, Snapchat released a Cartoon 3D Style Lens, which uses AR to make you look like a background character from “Frozen.” Naturally, even though TikTok’s own AR cartoon effects aren’t quite as convincing as Snapchat’s, people are turning to TikTok to share videos of themselves as Disney princesses, because of course they are.

This isn’t the first time that a Disney-esque AR trend has gone viral. In August 2020, Snapchat had 28.5 million new installs, which was its biggest month since May 2019, when it got 41.2 million new installs. It might not be a coincidence that in early August 2020, Snapchat released the Cartoon Face lens, which users realized could be used to “Disneyfy” their pets – the tag #disneydog got 40.9 million views across platforms on TikTok. Then, Snapchat struck viral gold again in December, when they released the Cartoon lens, which rendered more realistic results for human faces than the previous iteration.

According to Sensor Tower, Snapchat’s global installs continued to climb month-over-month throughout the rest of 2020, though installs slightly declined in December. Still, Snapchat got 36 million downloads that month. Now, after the newest Cartoon Style 3D lens went viral again, Snapchat hit number 6 on the App Store’s free apps charts, compared to TikTok’s number 2 slot. Still, Snapchat downloads in May were 32 million, down from 34 million in April, while TikTok saw 80.3 million installs in May, up from 59.3 million in April.

Image Credits: Snapchat, screenshots by TechCrunch

But there’s a new app in the number 1 slot that also made an impact on this weekend’s cartoon explosion. Released in March, Voilà AI Artist is yet another platform that turns us into cartoon versions of ourselves. Unlike the AR-powered effects on Snapchat or TikTok, Voilà is a photo editor. Users upload a selfie, and after watching an ad (the ad-free version costs $3 per week), it reveals what you would look like as a cartoon.

Voilà AI Artist was only downloaded 400 times globally in March 2021. By May, the app surpassed 1 million downloads, and during the first two weeks of this month alone, the app has been downloaded over 10.5 million times.

Again, like the repetitive iterations on the “Disneyfy” trend, apps like Voilà aren’t new. FaceApp went viral in 2019, showing people what they’ll look like when they’re old, graying, and wrinkled. The app became the center of a privacy controversy, since it uploaded users’ photos to the cloud to edit their selfies with AI. FaceApp made a statement that it “might store updated photos in the cloud” for “performance and traffic reasons,” but that “most images” are deleted “within 48 hours.” Still, this ambiguous language set off the warning bells, urging us to think about the potentially nefarious implications of seeing what we’ll look like in sixty years. Two years earlier, FaceApp put out a “hotness” filter, which made users’ skin lighter – FaceApp apologized for its racist AI. Voilà, which is owned by Wemagine.AI LLP in Canada, has also been criticized for its AI’s eurocentrism. As these apps grow in popularity, they can also uphold some of our culture’s most harmful biases.

Image Credits: Voilà

Like FaceApp, Voilà requires an internet connection to use the app. Additionally, its terms outline that users grant the company “a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use in any way, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, and distribute Uploaded and Generated content.” Basically, that means that if you upload an image to the platform, Voilà has the right to use it, but they don’t own it. This isn’t abnormal for these apps – when we upload photos to Instagram, for example, we also grant the platform the right to use our images.

Still, it’s a good thing that apps like Voilà force us to consider what we give up in exchange for the knowledge that we’d make a good Disney princess. Earlier this month, TikTok updated its U.S. privacy policy to dictate that the app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from users’ content. This includes “faceprints and voiceprints,” terms that TikTok left undefined. When TechCrunch reached Tiktok for comment, they couldn’t confirm why the terms now changed to allow for the automatic collection of biometric data, which refers to any features, measurements, or characteristics of our body that distinguish us, even fingerprints.

It’s no wonder that as Voilà climbed to the number one slot on the App Store, Snapchat re-upped their Pixar-inspired AR lens. Facebook’s own Spark AR platform is rolling out new features, and last week at WWDC, Apple announced a major update to RealityKit, its AR software. But these trends reveal more about our growing comfort with face-altering AR than they do about our nostalgia for Disney.