A proposed witness list filed by Apple for its upcoming trial against game-maker Epic reads like a who’s who of executives from the two companies. The drawn out battle could well prove a watershed moment from mobile app payments.
The two sides came to loggerheads when the Fortnite maker was kicked out of the App Store in August of last year after adding an in-game payment system designed to bypass Apple’s – along with Apple’s cut of the profiles.
Epic has accused Apple of monopolist practices pertaining to mobile payment. Apple, meanwhile, has argued that Epic broke the App Store agreement in order to increase its revenue.
Filed late last night by the hardware giant, the document includes top executives from bot sides. For Apple, the list includes CEO Tim Cook, Software Engineering SVP Craig Federighi and Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. On team Epic, it’s Tim Sweeney and VP Mark Rein. Executives from Microsoft, Facebook and NVIDIA are also included, for good measure.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple notes,
Our senior executives look forward to sharing with the court the very positive impact the App Store has had on innovation, economies across the world and the customer experience over the last 12 years. We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues, which is what resulted in their removal from the App Store. By doing that, Epic circumvented the security features of the App Store in a way that would lead to reduced competition and put consumers’ privacy and data security at tremendous risk.
The trial is expected to kick off May 3. We’ve reached out to Epic for additional comment.
In an Extra Crunch Live this past week, Cleo Capital founding partner Sarah Kunst broke down what founders can learn from Supreme, a sought-after streetwear brand. She argued that founders, similar to Supreme, should build a brand around themselves that is so well-respected and has clout that whenever they start something new, investors will line up.
“A Supreme shirt that costs $100 bucks in the store will cost $1,000 online so, as an investor, I am just a kid on the street corner flipping sportswear,” Kunst mentioned. “Who do I think is going to be an investment with such velocity that getting in early is going to be more than worth it as they grow.”
I think this is the best framing I’ve seen about how to drum up excitement for a startup as a founder. FOMO isn’t a strategy, it’s a tactic. What really works, as Kunst alluded to, is when founders can point to key insights they’ve had throughout their career beyond the context of a fundraising process. In other words, anyone can create a nice t-shirt and slap a logo on it. Which founder in this sector is going to give it meaning? It might be the one with the big former exit, the one that was the first Black woman to ever build a unicorn, or the one that was on the ground facing the pain point they now want to solve.
We get into how to build a fundraising process, the concept of soft-circling an investor and what Kunst says is one of her biggest pet-peeves in a pitch deck on the site, but I wanted to give you that sneak peek for now.
Here’s what to know: As we discussed on Equity, Airtable is far more than a savvy Excel sheet with bells and whistles. It is one of the leaders in the no-code movement, and founder Howie Liu recently opened up its API to promote developer innovation atop its platform.
Here’s what to know: One startup, AcreTrader, is trying to create a Robinhood for buying farmland, which I think is indicative of how lucrative some view a patch of land. CEO Carter Malloy thinks that while private equity often gets press for being in the land game, most land is owned by smaller ownership through families.
“Over the last few months, we’ve consistently seen our offering sizes grow while our funding windows shrink, showcasing the fast-growing desire surrounding this resilient asset class,” he said.
A green row celery field in the Salinas Valley, California USA. Image Credits: Pgiam (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Around TechCrunch
Consider these upcoming notes as the coupon section for your early-stage founder and investor dreams.
First up, I’m tossing you a discount code to our TechCrunch Early Stage conference, our two-day virtual event for founders, investors and operators. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20% off your ticket so you can attend super cool events like how to bootstrap with Calendly’s Tope Awotona and OpenView’s Blake Bartlett, how to pitch your Series A fundraise with Kleiner Perkins’ Bucky Moore, and finance for founders with Alexa von Tobel.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.
Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This week, there was a lot of headline-making app ecosystem news, including Google’s impactful decision to drop its Play Store commissions, an App Store lawsuit over scammy apps with fake ratings, battles over Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and the arrival of a notable new feature on YouTube — a TikTok rival called Shorts.
Developer sues Apple over lost revenue due to App Store scams
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Kosta Eleftheriou, a co-founder of the Fleksy keyboard app, has been raising awareness about App Store scams in recent weeks, after his own app was targeted by copycat subscription scammers leveraging fake ratings and reviews to gain traction. This week, Eleftheriou filed a lawsuit that attempts to hold Apple accountable for his own app’s lost revenue, saying that Apple promises developers a safe and trustworthy marketplace, but then allows these scammers to operate to the detriment of legitimate apps like his own. Though some news articles positioned the case as some sort of antitrust lawsuit, it’s really more focused on scammers and the accountability Apple has for how its App Store operates, which apps are listed and how well it’s managed and policed. Eleftheriou is asking Apple to compensate him for his lost revenue and other damages as a result of Apple’s ill-run app marketplace, as well as what he claims are unfair App Review rejections.
Google Play drops commissions to 15% on some earnings
Google Play Store screen
Google has followed Apple’s lead in reducing commissions for the Google Play store. But in its case, it has dropped commissions from 30% to 15% on developers’ first $1 million in revenue. Apple, by comparison, starts charging 30% once the developer tops $1 million. Google said 99% of developers who sell goods and services through the Play Store will see a 50% reduction in fees. According to App Annie data, very few Google Play developers make more than $1 million — in fact, only 2,035 developers do on Google Play, compared with 3,611 on iOS. To put this in perspective in terms of revenue, developers making up to $1 million in consumer spend only comprised 5% of total Google Play consumer spend in 2020, the firm noted.
Apple fended off an attempt by advertisers in France who wanted to derail the IDFA change in iOS, which will require users’ permission in order to track them. The complaint had attempted to contrast Apple’s ATT (App Tracking Transparency) requirements for third parties with Apple’s own, where its first-party apps are allow to track by default for the purpose of personalizing ads in various Apple apps. France’s competition regulator decided Apple’s plans “don’t appear to be abusive” and said it can’t intervene just because some apps may see a negative impact. But the authority did say it will investigate Apple further to determine if any of its changes are “self-preferencing.”
YouTube launches its TikTok rival in the U.S.
Image Credits: YouTube
The short-form video experience known as YouTube Shorts first launched in India, where TikTok has been banned, in September. It’s now coming to the U.S. in its first major expansion. The feature, still in beta, offers a very TikTok-like experience both in terms of recording content and viewing. Users can tap to record video segments for up to 60-second long videos, and use a small handful of editing features like text captions, countdown timers and speed controls. Meanwhile, viewing the videos is also presented in a TikTok-like format with vertical feeds of video where you can double-tap to like, duck into comments or tap on hashtags or sounds to participate in trends.
YouTube believes the feature has potential because it’s connected to the larger YouTube ecosystem, including YouTube Music and the main platform itself — you can subscribe to YouTube channels right from Shorts, for example. But Shorts lacks a lot of what makes TikTok successful for the time being, like its numerous AR effects and editing tools, sound sync and its ability for creators to react and respond to other videos through stitches and duets.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
Apple will allow the Russian government to pre-install apps on the iPhone starting on April 1, 2021. In accordance with a new law, Apple users will be shown a dialog box at setup that prompts them to install web browsers, antivirus, messenger and email apps. Users can choose to deselect these apps or delete them from the device later.
Report claims Apple may soon deliver standalone iOS security updates. According to code found in the latest iOS 14.5 beta, Apple could be preparing to introduce a way to update older iPhones with critical security updates without requiring users to download new versions of iOS. This could be helpful in patching older devices where users don’t download iOS updates for fear of slowing down their phone.
Apple says the App Store now supports 300K jobs in the U.K., up 10% YoY, as well as 250K jobs in Germany and another 250K in France. The figures were released in response to increased antitrust scrutiny by regulators, as a way to demonstrate the App Store’s contribution to local economies.
Platforms: Google
Image Credits: App Annie
App Annie data shows how few Google Play developers will pay the higher 30% commission after the policy change, announced this week. Google says developers’ first $1 million in revenue will be commissioned at 15%, not 30%. This covers the vast majority of the Play Store’s developer base, as only 2,035 developers make $1 million or more.
Google updates its People API, which will replace the Contacts API being deprecated on June 15, 2021. The new API will now support two new endpoints for batch mutates and Contacts searches, the company said.
Google updates its parental controls for Android, Family Link. The updates acknowledge that not all screen time is the same, by allowing parents to set some apps — like those used for virtual school — as “always allowed” and not counting toward daily limits. It also updated reporting to better show where kids were spending time outside of these necessary apps.
Google is now allowing third-party developers to build Tiles for Wear OS smartwatches. Tiles are small, fast-loading experiences that can deliver specific, timely information users need, but can be tapped to open a related app on the watch or phone for a deeper experience.
Image Credits: Google
E-commerce
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said his company has been preparing for the Apple IDFA changes by investing in more commerce products on its own platforms, like Facebook and Instagram Shops. In a Clubhouse session on Thursday, he announced Facebook has 1 million active Shops which are used by 250 million people every month.
Social
Twitter is testing a way for users to watch YouTube videos from within the home timeline directly on iOS devices, instead of being redirected to YouTube. Finally! The test was made possible through YouTube’s iFrame Player API, which Twitter gained access to.
TikTok will no longer allow users to opt out of personalized advertising starting on April 15th. The app alerted users to the change via a notice that appeared on screen at launch. This means uses will see ads based on what they watch and engage with on TikTok.
TikTok may add a group chats feature sometime early this year,according to Reuters. The feature is already a part of the Chinese version of the TikTok app, Douyin, and would make the app more social.
Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up. TikTok has been making its app safer for teens and this week Instagram followed suit — but instead of locking down teens accounts by default, it made it more difficult for adult predators to reach teens on Instagram, through a variety of alerts and blocking features.
Leaked recordings detail conservative donor Rebekah Mercer’s role at right-wing social app Parler, where she joined meetings to rally employees to fight against the shut down of free speech, and other matters, Bloomberg reports.
Facebook is preparing to add an age-gate to Instagram that would allow for a curated, and likely COPPA-compliant, under 13 experience, according to a report from BuzzFeed. TikTok today does the same thing, following its FTC fines. Instagram could be doing the same to ward off any FTC investigation into underage use of its app as well as to better cater to the younger users who are already on Instagram today.
China banned Signal. The encrypted messaging app became unavailable on the mainland on March 16, following a ban of the Signal website the day prior. The app had been one of the few Western social networks that was accessible in China without a VPN.
Telegram is working on an audio experience that allows users to create voice chats in Telegram Channels that you can join either with your personal profile or channel profile. The feature is in beta testing and no official announcement has been made.
Clubhouse hires Instagram alum Fadia Kader as its new head of Media Partnerships and Creators. The hire follows that of OWN and Netflix alum Maya Watson to serve as head of Global Marketing, and points to an increased interest in establishing Clubhouse in the world of media. Kader’s background is in music and tech, having led music partnerships at Twitter, and having worked at Def Jam.
Clubhouse promises its accelerator participants either brand deals or $5,000 per month during its three-month program. The company plans to work with around 20 creators to help them produce, book guests and promote their shows on the platform, as well as source brand deals.
Clubhouse is also currently being investigated by France’s privacy watchdog, CNIL, in an attempt to determine whether or not GDPR will apply to the app and how it’s complying with EU rules. Germany’s regulator last month was doing something similar, as it began looking into how the app was protecting the privacy of European users and their contacts.
Premium content, entertainment and streaming have helped drive up the prices of in-app purchases (IAPs). In 2020, the median price for IAPs among the top non-game apps was $5.99, up from $3.99 in 2017. The median price of subscription IAPs alone, meanwhile, has remained flat at $9.99 over the past four years, Sensor Tower found.
AT&T will begin counting HBO Max streams through the app against data limits. The company owns HBO via WarnerMedia and was previously exempting streams from data caps, but says a California net neutrality law will now no longer allow it to do so. AT&T spoke out against a patchwork of state regulations for net neutrality, saying they will create roadblocks to pro-consumer solutions.
Gaming
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
U.S. mobile puzzle game spending jumped 30% YoY to $4.6 billion in 2020, per a Sensor Tower report. The pandemic likely contributed to the rise, with top game Candy Crush Saga pulling in $643 million following by Homescapes and Gardenscapes.
Health & Fitness
Apple Maps has been updated with COVID-19 vaccine locations in the U.S. Apple is sourcing data from VaccineFinder, an initiative led by Boston Children’s Hospital, which is also one of the sources Google Maps is using. Apple is allowing healthcare providers, labs and other businesses to submit their information about vaccine locations.
Facebook will label all COVID-19 vaccine posts with a pointer to official, authoritative sources of information across Facebook and Instagram. It also said it will reduce the distribution of content from users who repeatedly violated policies on vaccine misinformation or who shared debunked claims, as well as any claims that fact checkers say are “Missing Context.”
Facebook expands support for security keys to mobile users on iOS and Android. The social network has supported the use of security keys, which generate encrypted, one-time security codes, for desktop users since 2017.
California passed new regulations that ban so-called “dark patterns,” or designs used by websites and apps to frustrate or trick users into doing things they wouldn’t normally do — like subscribing to a service they didn’t want or opting-in to sharing their data with the company, for example.
An iPhone app privacy report from cloud storage company pCloud showed how much personal data is being accessed by apps. The apps collecting the most data were Facebook and Instagram, while Klarna and Grubhub tied for second place, followed by Uber and Uber Eats.
Big tech, including Apple and Google, are ramping up their lobbying in U.S. state capitals, reports The WSJ, as a number of bills that could regulate their industries are arriving in state legislatures. One of these is an app store payments bill that is going to be debated in Arizona’s Senate in the next several weeks. If passed, developers would be able to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases instead of Apple’s and Google’s systems. Other legislation is being proposed in states including Maryland and Virginia.
A government-backed consortium of Chinese companies introduced a new method for tracking iPhone users as an alternative to IDFA (paywalled source: FT). The system could be a workaround for Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, as it won’t require user permission. Tencent and ByteDance are reportedly testing the system, known as CAID.
Google finally rolls out iOS privacy labels for Chrome and Google Search. Competitor DuckDuckGo trolled the company for its delay, saying “after months of stalling, Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome and the Google app. No wonder they wanted to hide it.” Burn!
After months of stalling, Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome and the Google app. No wonder they wanted to hide it. ⁰ Spying on users has nothing to do with building a great web browser or search engine. We would know (our app is both in one). pic.twitter.com/lJBbLTjMuu
App Annie partners with Snowflake and introduces a new Salesforce integration. The former allow data teams to access and transform a variety of mobile estimates, both live and continually updated. The new App Annie Intelligence Salesforce Connector, meanwhile, lets App Annie customers build a better pipeline through mobile-metric enriched CRM records.
Google Meet rolls out the tile view on iOS, to be soon followed by Android support. This view allows a user to see more of the people on the video call, even on the small screen. The app also introduced support for live captions in four new languages on mobile (French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the latter for Spain and Latin America)
Funding and M&A
Snap acquired a Berlin-based clothing size recommendation engine Fit Analytics that helps online shoppers buy the right sized clothes. Deal terms were undisclosed. The acquisition will see over 100 Fit team members joining Snap as the company pushes into e-commerce.
Riva Health raised $15.5 million in seed (!!) funding to turn your smartphone into a blood pressure monitor, in a round led by Menlo Ventures. The company is co-founded by scientist Tuhin Sinha and Siri and Viv (exited to Samsung) co-founder Dag Kittlaus. The system being developed would have users place their finger over the phone’s camera light, which would then flash, allowing the app to use the light to track the blood pressure reading.
Mobile banking app Kuda raised $25 million led by Valar to become the neobank for all of Africa. The company today offers mobile-first banking services in Nigeria and has doubled its user base from its seed round to now 650,000.
London-based mobile investing app Invstr raised $20 million to pair Robinhood-like commission-free stock trades with digital banking services and educational and learning tools. The app has over 1 million global users.
Investing app Gatsby raised a $10 million Series A for its Robinhood competitor. The app is aimed at younger users, offering commission-free options and stock trading and is aiming to have more than 100K accounts by the end of the year.
Digitail’s app for veterinary surgery practices raised $2.5 million in seed funding, in a round led by byFounders and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund). The company currently has 2,000 vets in 16 countries using its services.
Match Group makes a seven-figure investment in background check nonprofit Garbo. The Tinder parent company plans to integrate its apps with Garbo’s tools, which alert users to background checks of concern to daters like assault or stalking charges, among other things.
Telegram is selling more than $1 billion in debt to investors to fund its operations and pay creditors, with the promises of discounted equity if the company later goes public. The messaging app owes its creditors around $700m by the end of April, The WSJ reported.
Downloads
Swell
Image Credits: Swell
A new startup called Swell has a different take on voice conversations than Clubhouse. Instead of real-time conversations, Swell users engage in asynchronous chats where one user posts an audio clip of up to five minutes in length that others can listen to and then respond to with their own recording. These mini-podcasts can be private chats or public conversations. Swell is available as a free download on both iOS and Android.
1v1Me launches its app that lets anyone gamble on their ability to win in a player versus player game. The iOS app is now available in an invite-only mode, with the first invites going to creators who play games like Call of Duty and Fortnite — the first games that will be supported on the betting platform. Users can sign up for early access on the company’s website for the time being, then stalk the company on Twitter for invites.
This clever iOS recipes app, Half Lemons, does that thing you’ve always wanted a recipe app to do: it serves up dish ideas using the ingredients you have at home. To use the app, you take a quick digital inventory of your kitchen in order to customize the app to deliver recipes that are specifically tailored to your own ingredients. You can then save or share the recipes, in addition to making them right away with a screen that stays powered on as you cook. Future versions of the app will help you shop for ingredients and plan meals.
Bored with your iOS 14 customizations? Take your iPhone old-school with this super retro iOS 14 icon and wallpaper set featuring over 110 Mac OS ’84 icons and six monochromatic wallpapers. The set has been handcrafted by freelance digital product designer Ben Vessey, who many years ago had created a similar theme for “retrofying” your desktop screen. When he heard about the Shortcuts feature in iOS 14, he got to work to build a version of this retro experience for iPhone. The pack is £3.99, or £79.99 if you want to request five custom icons of your choice in addition.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.
Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This week, there was a lot of headline-making app ecosystem news, including Google’s impactful decision to drop its Play Store commissions, an App Store lawsuit over scammy apps with fake ratings, battles over Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and the arrival of a notable new feature on YouTube — a TikTok rival called Shorts.
Developer sues Apple over lost revenue due to App Store scams
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Kosta Eleftheriou, a co-founder of the Fleksy keyboard app, has been raising awareness about App Store scams in recent weeks, after his own app was targeted by copycat subscription scammers leveraging fake ratings and reviews to gain traction. This week, Eleftheriou filed a lawsuit that attempts to hold Apple accountable for his own app’s lost revenue, saying that Apple promises developers a safe and trustworthy marketplace, but then allows these scammers to operate to the detriment of legitimate apps like his own. Though some news articles positioned the case as some sort of antitrust lawsuit, it’s really more focused on scammers and the accountability Apple has for how its App Store operates, which apps are listed and how well it’s managed and policed. Eleftheriou is asking Apple to compensate him for his lost revenue and other damages as a result of Apple’s ill-run app marketplace, as well as what he claims are unfair App Review rejections.
Google Play drops commissions to 15% on some earnings
Google Play Store screen
Google has followed Apple’s lead in reducing commissions for the Google Play store. But in its case, it has dropped commissions from 30% to 15% on developers’ first $1 million in revenue. Apple, by comparison, starts charging 30% once the developer tops $1 million. Google said 99% of developers who sell goods and services through the Play Store will see a 50% reduction in fees. According to App Annie data, very few Google Play developers make more than $1 million — in fact, only 2,035 developers do on Google Play, compared with 3,611 on iOS. To put this in perspective in terms of revenue, developers making up to $1 million in consumer spend only comprised 5% of total Google Play consumer spend in 2020, the firm noted.
Apple fended off an attempt by advertisers in France who wanted to derail the IDFA change in iOS, which will require users’ permission in order to track them. The complaint had attempted to contrast Apple’s ATT (App Tracking Transparency) requirements for third parties with Apple’s own, where its first-party apps are allow to track by default for the purpose of personalizing ads in various Apple apps. France’s competition regulator decided Apple’s plans “don’t appear to be abusive” and said it can’t intervene just because some apps may see a negative impact. But the authority did say it will investigate Apple further to determine if any of its changes are “self-preferencing.”
YouTube launches its TikTok rival in the U.S.
Image Credits: YouTube
The short-form video experience known as YouTube Shorts first launched in India, where TikTok has been banned, in September. It’s now coming to the U.S. in its first major expansion. The feature, still in beta, offers a very TikTok-like experience both in terms of recording content and viewing. Users can tap to record video segments for up to 60-second long videos, and use a small handful of editing features like text captions, countdown timers and speed controls. Meanwhile, viewing the videos is also presented in a TikTok-like format with vertical feeds of video where you can double-tap to like, duck into comments or tap on hashtags or sounds to participate in trends.
YouTube believes the feature has potential because it’s connected to the larger YouTube ecosystem, including YouTube Music and the main platform itself — you can subscribe to YouTube channels right from Shorts, for example. But Shorts lacks a lot of what makes TikTok successful for the time being, like its numerous AR effects and editing tools, sound sync and its ability for creators to react and respond to other videos through stitches and duets.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
Apple will allow the Russian government to pre-install apps on the iPhone starting on April 1, 2021. In accordance with a new law, Apple users will be shown a dialog box at setup that prompts them to install web browsers, antivirus, messenger and email apps. Users can choose to deselect these apps or delete them from the device later.
Report claims Apple may soon deliver standalone iOS security updates. According to code found in the latest iOS 14.5 beta, Apple could be preparing to introduce a way to update older iPhones with critical security updates without requiring users to download new versions of iOS. This could be helpful in patching older devices where users don’t download iOS updates for fear of slowing down their phone.
Apple says the App Store now supports 300K jobs in the U.K., up 10% YoY, as well as 250K jobs in Germany and another 250K in France. The figures were released in response to increased antitrust scrutiny by regulators, as a way to demonstrate the App Store’s contribution to local economies.
Platforms: Google
Image Credits: App Annie
App Annie data shows how few Google Play developers will pay the higher 30% commission after the policy change, announced this week. Google says developers’ first $1 million in revenue will be commissioned at 15%, not 30%. This covers the vast majority of the Play Store’s developer base, as only 2,035 developers make $1 million or more.
Google updates its People API, which will replace the Contacts API being deprecated on June 15, 2021. The new API will now support two new endpoints for batch mutates and Contacts searches, the company said.
Google updates its parental controls for Android, Family Link. The updates acknowledge that not all screen time is the same, by allowing parents to set some apps — like those used for virtual school — as “always allowed” and not counting toward daily limits. It also updated reporting to better show where kids were spending time outside of these necessary apps.
Google is now allowing third-party developers to build Tiles for Wear OS smartwatches. Tiles are small, fast-loading experiences that can deliver specific, timely information users need, but can be tapped to open a related app on the watch or phone for a deeper experience.
Image Credits: Google
E-commerce
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said his company has been preparing for the Apple IDFA changes by investing in more commerce products on its own platforms, like Facebook and Instagram Shops. In a Clubhouse session on Thursday, he announced Facebook has 1 million active Shops which are used by 250 million people every month.
Social
Twitter is testing a way for users to watch YouTube videos from within the home timeline directly on iOS devices, instead of being redirected to YouTube. Finally! The test was made possible through YouTube’s iFrame Player API, which Twitter gained access to.
TikTok will no longer allow users to opt out of personalized advertising starting on April 15th. The app alerted users to the change via a notice that appeared on screen at launch. This means uses will see ads based on what they watch and engage with on TikTok.
TikTok may add a group chats feature sometime early this year,according to Reuters. The feature is already a part of the Chinese version of the TikTok app, Douyin, and would make the app more social.
Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up. TikTok has been making its app safer for teens and this week Instagram followed suit — but instead of locking down teens accounts by default, it made it more difficult for adult predators to reach teens on Instagram, through a variety of alerts and blocking features.
Leaked recordings detail conservative donor Rebekah Mercer’s role at right-wing social app Parler, where she joined meetings to rally employees to fight against the shut down of free speech, and other matters, Bloomberg reports.
Facebook is preparing to add an age-gate to Instagram that would allow for a curated, and likely COPPA-compliant, under 13 experience, according to a report from BuzzFeed. TikTok today does the same thing, following its FTC fines. Instagram could be doing the same to ward off any FTC investigation into underage use of its app as well as to better cater to the younger users who are already on Instagram today.
China banned Signal. The encrypted messaging app became unavailable on the mainland on March 16, following a ban of the Signal website the day prior. The app had been one of the few Western social networks that was accessible in China without a VPN.
Telegram is working on an audio experience that allows users to create voice chats in Telegram Channels that you can join either with your personal profile or channel profile. The feature is in beta testing and no official announcement has been made.
Clubhouse hires Instagram alum Fadia Kader as its new head of Media Partnerships and Creators. The hire follows that of OWN and Netflix alum Maya Watson to serve as head of Global Marketing, and points to an increased interest in establishing Clubhouse in the world of media. Kader’s background is in music and tech, having led music partnerships at Twitter, and having worked at Def Jam.
Clubhouse promises its accelerator participants either brand deals or $5,000 per month during its three-month program. The company plans to work with around 20 creators to help them produce, book guests and promote their shows on the platform, as well as source brand deals.
Clubhouse is also currently being investigated by France’s privacy watchdog, CNIL, in an attempt to determine whether or not GDPR will apply to the app and how it’s complying with EU rules. Germany’s regulator last month was doing something similar, as it began looking into how the app was protecting the privacy of European users and their contacts.
Premium content, entertainment and streaming have helped drive up the prices of in-app purchases (IAPs). In 2020, the median price for IAPs among the top non-game apps was $5.99, up from $3.99 in 2017. The median price of subscription IAPs alone, meanwhile, has remained flat at $9.99 over the past four years, Sensor Tower found.
AT&T will begin counting HBO Max streams through the app against data limits. The company owns HBO via WarnerMedia and was previously exempting streams from data caps, but says a California net neutrality law will now no longer allow it to do so. AT&T spoke out against a patchwork of state regulations for net neutrality, saying they will create roadblocks to pro-consumer solutions.
Gaming
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
U.S. mobile puzzle game spending jumped 30% YoY to $4.6 billion in 2020, per a Sensor Tower report. The pandemic likely contributed to the rise, with top game Candy Crush Saga pulling in $643 million following by Homescapes and Gardenscapes.
Health & Fitness
Apple Maps has been updated with COVID-19 vaccine locations in the U.S. Apple is sourcing data from VaccineFinder, an initiative led by Boston Children’s Hospital, which is also one of the sources Google Maps is using. Apple is allowing healthcare providers, labs and other businesses to submit their information about vaccine locations.
Facebook will label all COVID-19 vaccine posts with a pointer to official, authoritative sources of information across Facebook and Instagram. It also said it will reduce the distribution of content from users who repeatedly violated policies on vaccine misinformation or who shared debunked claims, as well as any claims that fact checkers say are “Missing Context.”
Facebook expands support for security keys to mobile users on iOS and Android. The social network has supported the use of security keys, which generate encrypted, one-time security codes, for desktop users since 2017.
California passed new regulations that ban so-called “dark patterns,” or designs used by websites and apps to frustrate or trick users into doing things they wouldn’t normally do — like subscribing to a service they didn’t want or opting-in to sharing their data with the company, for example.
An iPhone app privacy report from cloud storage company pCloud showed how much personal data is being accessed by apps. The apps collecting the most data were Facebook and Instagram, while Klarna and Grubhub tied for second place, followed by Uber and Uber Eats.
Big tech, including Apple and Google, are ramping up their lobbying in U.S. state capitals, reports The WSJ, as a number of bills that could regulate their industries are arriving in state legislatures. One of these is an app store payments bill that is going to be debated in Arizona’s Senate in the next several weeks. If passed, developers would be able to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases instead of Apple’s and Google’s systems. Other legislation is being proposed in states including Maryland and Virginia.
A government-backed consortium of Chinese companies introduced a new method for tracking iPhone users as an alternative to IDFA (paywalled source: FT). The system could be a workaround for Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, as it won’t require user permission. Tencent and ByteDance are reportedly testing the system, known as CAID.
Google finally rolls out iOS privacy labels for Chrome and Google Search. Competitor DuckDuckGo trolled the company for its delay, saying “after months of stalling, Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome and the Google app. No wonder they wanted to hide it.” Burn!
After months of stalling, Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome and the Google app. No wonder they wanted to hide it. ⁰ Spying on users has nothing to do with building a great web browser or search engine. We would know (our app is both in one). pic.twitter.com/lJBbLTjMuu
App Annie partners with Snowflake and introduces a new Salesforce integration. The former allow data teams to access and transform a variety of mobile estimates, both live and continually updated. The new App Annie Intelligence Salesforce Connector, meanwhile, lets App Annie customers build a better pipeline through mobile-metric enriched CRM records.
Google Meet rolls out the tile view on iOS, to be soon followed by Android support. This view allows a user to see more of the people on the video call, even on the small screen. The app also introduced support for live captions in four new languages on mobile (French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, the latter for Spain and Latin America)
Funding and M&A
Snap acquired a Berlin-based clothing size recommendation engine Fit Analytics that helps online shoppers buy the right sized clothes. Deal terms were undisclosed. The acquisition will see over 100 Fit team members joining Snap as the company pushes into e-commerce.
Riva Health raised $15.5 million in seed (!!) funding to turn your smartphone into a blood pressure monitor, in a round led by Menlo Ventures. The company is co-founded by scientist Tuhin Sinha and Siri and Viv (exited to Samsung) co-founder Dag Kittlaus. The system being developed would have users place their finger over the phone’s camera light, which would then flash, allowing the app to use the light to track the blood pressure reading.
Mobile banking app Kuda raised $25 million led by Valar to become the neobank for all of Africa. The company today offers mobile-first banking services in Nigeria and has doubled its user base from its seed round to now 650,000.
London-based mobile investing app Invstr raised $20 million to pair Robinhood-like commission-free stock trades with digital banking services and educational and learning tools. The app has over 1 million global users.
Investing app Gatsby raised a $10 million Series A for its Robinhood competitor. The app is aimed at younger users, offering commission-free options and stock trading and is aiming to have more than 100K accounts by the end of the year.
Digitail’s app for veterinary surgery practices raised $2.5 million in seed funding, in a round led by byFounders and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund). The company currently has 2,000 vets in 16 countries using its services.
Match Group makes a seven-figure investment in background check nonprofit Garbo. The Tinder parent company plans to integrate its apps with Garbo’s tools, which alert users to background checks of concern to daters like assault or stalking charges, among other things.
Telegram is selling more than $1 billion in debt to investors to fund its operations and pay creditors, with the promises of discounted equity if the company later goes public. The messaging app owes its creditors around $700m by the end of April, The WSJ reported.
Downloads
Swell
Image Credits: Swell
A new startup called Swell has a different take on voice conversations than Clubhouse. Instead of real-time conversations, Swell users engage in asynchronous chats where one user posts an audio clip of up to five minutes in length that others can listen to and then respond to with their own recording. These mini-podcasts can be private chats or public conversations. Swell is available as a free download on both iOS and Android.
1v1Me launches its app that lets anyone gamble on their ability to win in a player versus player game. The iOS app is now available in an invite-only mode, with the first invites going to creators who play games like Call of Duty and Fortnite — the first games that will be supported on the betting platform. Users can sign up for early access on the company’s website for the time being, then stalk the company on Twitter for invites.
This clever iOS recipes app, Half Lemons, does that thing you’ve always wanted a recipe app to do: it serves up dish ideas using the ingredients you have at home. To use the app, you take a quick digital inventory of your kitchen in order to customize the app to deliver recipes that are specifically tailored to your own ingredients. You can then save or share the recipes, in addition to making them right away with a screen that stays powered on as you cook. Future versions of the app will help you shop for ingredients and plan meals.
Bored with your iOS 14 customizations? Take your iPhone old-school with this super retro iOS 14 icon and wallpaper set featuring over 110 Mac OS ’84 icons and six monochromatic wallpapers. The set has been handcrafted by freelance digital product designer Ben Vessey, who many years ago had created a similar theme for “retrofying” your desktop screen. When he heard about the Shortcuts feature in iOS 14, he got to work to build a version of this retro experience for iPhone. The pack is £3.99, or £79.99 if you want to request five custom icons of your choice in addition.
Facebook develops a new way to interact with AR, Uber’s facial recognition policy faces scrutiny and SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster hits a major milestone. This is your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2021.
The big story: Facebook shows off wrist-based interface
In a blog post, Facebook said a wrist-based device “could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts,” while allowing the company to “bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.”
Facebook identifies this as a research prototype, so don’t expect it to turn into a commercial product anytime soon. But it’s still suggestive, particularly given the company’s sometimes-surprising hardware strategy and rumors that it might be working on an Apple Watch competitor.
Attend Disrupt 2021 for less than $100 — If three jam-packed days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 wasn’t enough to get your startup motor running, listen up.
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Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.
This week brings a few unusual applications of or developments in machine learning, as well as a particularly unusual rejection of the method for pandemic-related analysis.
One hardly expects to find machine learning in the domain of government regulation, if only because one assumes federal regulators are hopelessly behind the times when it comes to this sort of thing. So it may surprise you that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has partnered with researchers at Stanford to algorithmically root out violators of environmental rules.
When you see the scope of the issue, it makes sense. EPA authorities need to process millions of permits and observations pertaining to Clean Water Act compliance, things such as self-reported amounts of pollutants from various industries and independent reports from labs and field teams. The Stanford-designed process sorted through these to isolate patterns like which types of plants, in which areas, were most likely to affect which demographics. For instance, wastewater treatment in urban peripheries may tend to underreport pollution and put communities of color at risk.
The very process of reducing the compliance question to something that can be computationally parsed and compared helped clarify the agency’s priorities, showing that while the technique could identify more permit holders with small violations, it may draw attention away from general permit types that act as a fig leaf for multiple large violators.
Another large source of waste and expense is processing scrap metal. Tons of it goes through sorting and recycling centers, where the work is still mostly done by humans, and as you might imagine, it’s a dangerous and dull job. Eversteel is a startup out of the University of Tokyo that aims to automate the process so that a large proportion of the work can be done before human workers even step in.
Image Credits: Eversteel
Eversteel uses a computer vision system to classify incoming scrap into nearly two dozen categories, and to flag impure (i.e., an unrecyclable alloy) or anomalous items for removal. It’s still at an early stage, but the industry isn’t going anywhere, and the lack of any large data set for training their models (they had to make their own, informed by steelworkers and imagery) showed Eversteel that this was indeed virgin territory for AI. With luck, they’ll be able to commercialize their system and attract the funding they need to break into this large but tech-starved industry.
Another unusual but potentially helpful application of computer vision is in soil monitoring, a task every farmer has to do regularly to monitor water and nutrient levels. When they do manage to automate it, it’s done in a rather heavy-handed way. A team from the University of South Australia and Middle Technical University in Baghdad show that the sensors, hardware and thermal cameras used now may be overkill.
Image Credits: UNISA/Middle Technical University
Surprisingly, their answer is a standard RGB digital camera, which analyzes the color of the soil to estimate moisture. “We tested it at different distances, times and illumination levels, and the system was very accurate,” said Ali Al-Naji, one of the creators. It could (and is planned to) be used to make a cheap but effective smart irrigation system that could improve crop yield for those who can’t afford industry-standard systems.
Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative.
I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one of those desks. Everyone I know who’s obtained a home or business loan in the recent past started with an online application process.
For this morning’s column, Alex Wilhelm interviewed Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart, an AI-powered fintech lender that expects to see growth increase 114% this year.
A forecast like that suggests that retail banks have gotten comfortable with using automated tools to calculate risk, which may help explain all the empty desks at my local branch.
“If Upstart hits its 2021 numbers, we will be able to read into them broader adoption of AI among old-guard firms,” says Alex.
According to PitchBook, investors are also more bullish on AI: Q4 2020 saw record funding for AI and ML startups, and exit totals are increasing as well.
I wouldn’t mind adding a gently used desk to my home office; perhaps I should call my bank and see if they have one to spare.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch. Have a great weekend!
Data is a gold mine for a company. If managed well, it provides the clarity and insights that lead to better decision-making at scale, in addition to an important tool to hold everyone accountable.
To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI
Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images
Why are developers still solving everyday pain points with manual, archaic processes, as opposed to employing “Little AI”?
There are millions of everyday use cases for AI, where technology is empowered to learn and decide on a course of action that offers the best outcome for consumers and companies alike.
3 steps to aid the transition to becoming a no-code company
Image Credits: Korrawin / Getty Images
No-code is changing how organizations build and maintain applications.
It democratizes application development by creating “citizen developers” who can quickly build out apps that meet their business-facing needs in real time, realigning IT and business objectives by bringing them closer together.
No taxation without innovation: The rise of tax startups
Image Credits: jokerpro / Getty Images
The idiosyncrasies of sales taxes are a burden on small- and medium-sized businesses, but a new legion of startups is emerging to help companies manage the intricacies of cross-jurisdictional taxes.
Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares: Should you?
Image Credits: VectorInspiration / Getty Images
Some founders and investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted.
Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.
So why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool?
MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships.
Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.
I knew African founders lacked the same access to capital as entrepreneurs based in Europe or the United States, but the numbers are far less favorable than I thought.
According to Dauda Barry, CEO of Adaplay Esports, African startups have raised $500 million so far in 2021. If that trend continues, he estimates that the region’s tech companies will exceed the $1.4 billion they raised in 2020.
For perspective: “Stripe raised more yesterday than Barry had reported for the entire African continent this year,” Alex Wilhelm noted in today’s column.
Digging deeper, he pulled numbers from Crunchbase and PitchBook to track VC activity in Africa over the last three months. Once he filtered private equity funding from nonequity investments, the numbers were “staggering.”
“I am surprised that more VCs aren’t investing in Africa,” says Alex. “It smells like investing arbitrage.”
Companies that help farmers raise money for agricultural development projects are revolutionizing the way farm and forestland are acquired, developed and commercialized across the United States.
While private equity has gotten a lot of press for expanding the size of their farmland investments, those investments are still dwarfed by the size of the potential farm industry in the U.S., meaning there’s still plenty of opportunity for investors to provide additional capital.
The crypto art craze might seem silly and expensive, but it could empower artists from emerging economies and underrepresented groups to access the global art market in ways that they couldn’t before.
That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company’s rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different.
Stripe’s $600 million round values the payments and banking software company at $95 billion, near the top end of the valuation range at which the company was said to be raising funds back in November 2020.
Sadly, Stripe is still being coy with growth metrics. The Exchange digs in, no matter how vague.
Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process
Julia Collins, the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn, and investor Sarah Kunst offer fundraising pointers on Extra Crunch Live.
Kunst says good design is critical, but:
If you’re not a graphic designer, then any incremental minute that you’re spending on trying to make your deck pretty is a waste of time. You need to be focusing on content. Hire somebody, pay them a tiny bit of money to be able to do a nice graphics pass on your deck, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for people to to get the information that you need them to know.
Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. This column offers tactical advice for finding, reaching out to, cultivating relationships with and working at deep tech companies as a nontechnical candidate.
Abodu, one of a slew of startup companies pitching backyard homes and office spaces to Californians in an effort to help address the state’s housing shortage, has instituted a new “Quickship” program that can take an order from contract to construction and installation in about thirty days.
Behind the quick turnaround time is a pre-approval process that was first rolled out in Santa Fe and came to Los Angeles in recent weeks.
Abodu began installing homes through a pre-approval process back in 2019, when the city of San Jose created a program that allowed developers of alternative dwelling units to submit plans for pre-approval to cut the time for homeowners.
Beyond the cities where Adobu’s ADUs have received pre-approval, the company has built across California in cities ranging from, Palo Alto, Millbrae, Orange County, to LA and Oakland. Units in the Bay Area cost roughly $189,000 as a starting price, compared to the $650,000 to $850,000 it takes to build units in a mid-rise apartment building, or $1 million per unit in a steel-reinforced highrise, according to the company.
“Our Quickship program is the fastest way to add housing,” said John Geary, CEO at Abodu. “Homeowners with immediate needs, be it family situations or those looking for investment income, can now complete an ADU project in as little as four weeks. A key mission for Abodu is to make a serious dent in our state’s housing deficit while providing people and municipalities the necessary blueprint to enact real change. ”
For former TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler, who serves on the Abodu board of directors the achievement of a 30 day construction milestone is almost a dream come true. Cutler wrote the book (or the equivalent of a book) on the housing crisis and its impact on the Bay Area and California broadly.
Cutler backed the company because of her deep knowledge of the issues associated with housing.
“The reason this is a big deal is because Northern California has been the most expensive and unpredictable place to build new housing in the world. Projects typically take several years because of uncertainty with entitlements and materials,” Cutler wrote. “Over the past year, Abodu co-founders John Geary and Eric McInerney have put homes in the backyards of parents bringing kids home from college, a mother-and-son pair that each bought one for their homes in Millbrae, a couple looking to eventually house a grandmother in San Jose and on and on.”
The key inspiration that Abodu’s founders hit on was their concentration on granny flats, casitas and backyard dwellings. “While deliberations over mid-rise density were stalling in Sacramento, the state legislature (and legislatures up north in the Pacific Northwest) were passing bill after bill, including Phil Ting’s AB 68 and Bob Wieckowski’s SB 1069, to make it really easy to add backyard units,” Cutler wrote. “This is the kind of change that suburban America wants, is comfortable with and can politically pass and implement easily.”
To Cutler’s thinking, Adobu’s 30 day construction schedule will change consumer behavior, thanks to the fact that the home can be craned in and installed in less than a day on a foundation constructed in less than two weeks. Its incredibly low cost will enable a lot of opportunities to develop new inventory and the simple fact is that inventory remains a scarce commodity. As Cutler noted, only half as many homes are trading across the United States as were available a year ago, which is happening at the same time as when millennials are entering prime family formation years.
Charles Caldwell is VP of product management at Logi Analytics, which empowers the world’s software teams with intuitive, developer-grade embedded analytics solutions. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the analytics market, including 10+ years of direct customer implementation experience.
Organizations spend ungodly amounts of money — millions of dollars — on business intelligence (BI) tools. Yet, adoption rates are still below 30%. Why is this the case? Because BI has failed businesses.
Logi Analytics’ 2021 State of Analytics: Why Users Demand Better survey showed that knowledge workers spend more than five hours a day in analytics, and more than 99% consider analytics very to extremely valuable when making critical decisions. Unfortunately, many are dissatisfied with their current tools due to the loss of productivity, multiple “sources of truth,” and the lack of integration with their current tools and systems.
A gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.
Throughout my career, I’ve spoken with many executives who wonder why BI continues to fail them, especially when data discovery tools like Qlik and Tableau have gained such momentum. The reality is, these tools are great for a very limited set of use cases among a limited audience of users — and the adoption rates reflect that reality.
Data discovery applications allow analysts to link with data sources and perform self-service analysis, but still come with major pitfalls. Lack of self-service customization, the inability to integrate into workflows with other applications, and an overall lack of flexibility seriously impacts the ability for most users (who aren’t data analysts) to derive meaningful information from these tools.
BI platforms and data discovery applications are supposed to launch insight into action, informing decisions at every level of the organization. But many are instead left with costly investments that actually create inefficiencies, hinder workflows and exclude the vast majority of employees who could benefit from those operational insights. Now that’s what I like to call a lack of ROI.
Business leaders across a variety of industries — including “legacy” sectors like manufacturing, healthcare and financial services — are demanding better and, in my opinion, they should have gotten it long ago.
It’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.
Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about why traditional BI platforms and newer tools like data discovery applications fail and what I’ve gathered from companies that moved away from them.
The inefficiency breakdown is killing your company
Traditional BI platforms and data discovery applications require users to exit their workflow to attempt data collection. And, as you can guess, stalling teams in the middle of their workflow creates massive inefficiencies. Instead of having the data you need to make a decision readily available to you, instead, you have to exit the application, enter another application, secure the data and then reenter the original application.
According to the 2021 State of Analytics report, 99% of knowledge workers had to spend additional time searching for information they couldn’t easily locate in their analytics solution.
Facebook’s hardware strategy often looks pretty opaque from the outside. The company has done fairly well with Oculus sales amid pandemic demand. Even its Echo Show competitor Portal has seen a bump as people have been forced to socially distance. The company’s smartphone partnership with HTC, meanwhile, fell flat eight or so years back.
Earlier this year, reports surfaced that the company was working on its own Apple Watch competitor. The smartwatch was said to have a health focus, running on an open-source version of Android. That, of course, would mark an interesting alternative from Google’s chosen wearOS.
This week, the company highlighted another wrist-based wearable. The specifics of the project don’t line up super closely with earlier reports, which could well mean two separate projects. Facebook is a big company, after all.
This particular project out of Facebook Reality Labs is more focused on providing an alternative computer interface. Specifically, it seems in line with the company’s augmented reality efforts.
Per yesterday’s blog post:
A separate device you could store in your pocket like a phone or a game controller adds a layer of friction between you and your environment. As we explored the possibilities, placing an input device at the wrist became the clear answer. The wrist is a traditional place to wear a watch, meaning it could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts. It’s a comfortable location for all-day wear. It’s located right next to the primary instruments you use to interact with the world — your hands. This proximity would allow us to bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.
I will say that, based on the information presented, this seems more conceptual. As in, this could be the key to offering more seamless control for some future augmented reality system. And even still, it’s presented as a step on the way to a more deeply integrated human-computer solution. How deeply you want Facebook to integrate with your neurons is apparently a question we’re all going to have to ask ourselves in the not too distant future.
This interface specifically is designed to use electromyography (EMG) sensors to interpret motor nerve signals and interact with the interface accordingly. The subject interestingly came up during a Clubhouse event featuring Mark Zuckerberg last night. After Pebble founder/YC partner Eric Migicovsky discussed experiences dealing with Apple for his own smartwatch startup, the Facebook CEO said the following:
If you’re trying to build a watch, which we’re exploring as we talked about the wrist thing and I don’t want to call it a watch, but it’s the basic neural interfaces work that our Facebook reality labs team demoed some of our research about today. With the neural interface on the wrist, if you want that to integrate with the phone in any way, it’s just so much easier on Android than iOS. My guess is that this is an area where there probably should be a lot more focus. And I do think the private APIs are just something that makes it really difficult to have a healthy ecosystem.
“Exploring” seems like an operative word here. But it’s always cool/fascinating to see these projects in their early stages. Even if the promises might still seem a tad…overzealous.
EMG will eventually progress to richer controls. In AR, you’ll be able to actually touch and move virtual UIs and objects, as you can see in this demo video. You’ll also be able to control virtual objects at a distance. It’s sort of like having a superpower like the Force.
Snap 
Riva Health 
Telegram is 
