Category: UNCATEGORIZED

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ongoing protests for racial justice, people have been looking for different ways to contribute, which in turn has led tech companies to launch new features and campaigns.

And now there’s a new fundraising platform called Project Bento, created by chef and restauranteur Marcus Samuelsson (best known as the chef behind Red Rooster Harlem), Derek Evans (CEO of the Marcus Samuelsson Group) and the team at Sage Digital (a startup creating tools for reviewers, chefs and other experts to publish content and build a following).

Samuelsson told me that he’d already been working with Sage Digital to create a presence on the platform. Then he mentioned Harlem Serves Up, this year version of the annual Harlem EatUp festival — Samuelsson and his team reinvented the event during the pandemic as as a fundraising telethon for nonprofits fighting food insecurity.

But, Samuelsson said that when he surveyed the options available to manage the online fundraising, he wasn’t quite satisfied with any of the available options.

Image Credits: Project Bento

“We were thinking very much about our needs — what were we building, how do we want consumers to utilize it,” he said.

So the Sage Digital team ended up building Project Bento in seven or eight weeks, on top of the startup’s existing platform. Sage CEO Samir Arora said that along with allowing nonprofits to collect funds (without having to pay a platform fee), publish content, promote on social media and track their campaigns, the platform also includes tools for managing sponsorships and matching donors.

The rapid development, Samuelsson said, was a perfect demonstration of “what entrepreneurship is.” Thus far, Project Bento has been used to raise more than $350,000 for Harlem Serves Up, as well as $4.8 million for the Project Bento Fund (which Arora described as a “completely new nonprofit whose purpose is to create matching funds” for campaigns on the platform).

There are several other campaigns live already, as well as links to employee relief fundraisers on other platforms, but Project Bento is also accepting applications from other nonprofits that want to fundraise on the platform. Samuelsson said he wants the website to be a place that can bring many of these campaigns together.

“There are communities not just in Harlem, but across the country, that need a campaign, they need to connect,” Samuelsson said. “[Project Bento] will continue because that need, raising money and connecting a community, will continue.”

U.S. prosecutors have charged two Chinese nationals, said to be working for China’s state intelligence bureau, for their alleged involvement in a massive global hacking operation that targeted hundreds of companies and governments for more than a decade.

The 11-count indictment, unsealed Tuesday, alleges Li Xiaoyu, 34, and Dong Jiazhi, 33, stole terabytes of data from high-technology companies, around the world — including the United States, the prosecutors said.

More recently, the prosecutors accused the hackers of targeting the networks of several U.S. companies in Maryland, Massachusetts and California developing vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.

The indictment comes just weeks after both the FBI and Homeland Security warned that China was actively trying to steal U.S. research data related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The hackers were first discovered after they targeted a U.S. Department of Energy network in Hanford, Washington, the Justice Department said. The hackers also targeted companies in Australia, South Korea, and several European nations. The hackers used known but unpatched vulnerabilities in widely-used web server software to break into their victims’ networks. By gaining a foothold onto the network, the hackers installed password-stealing software to gain deeper access to their systems. The prosecutors said that the hackers would “frequently” return to the networks — in some cases years later.

According to the indictment, the hackers stole “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of trade secrets and intellectual property. The prosecutors also allege that the hackers stole data related to military satellite programs, military wireless networks, and high-powered microwave and laser systems from defense contractors.

The hackers are said to have targeted their victims on behalf of China’s intelligence services, but also hacked personal financial gain. Prosecutors said in one case, the hackers “sought to extort cryptocurrency” from a victim company by threatening to publish the victim’s stolen source code online.

John C. Demers., U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, said that the indictments were “concrete examples” of how China used hackers to “rob, replicate, and replace” non-Chinese companies in the global marketplace.

Demers also accused China of providing a safe-haven for the hackers.

“China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state, here to feed the Chinese Communist party’s insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies’ hard-earned intellectual property, including COVID-19 research,” said Demers.

If prosecuted, the hackers could face more than 35 years in prison. But since the hackers are believed to still be in China, any extraditions to the U.S. are unlikely.

After Wisam Dakka and André Madeira left Snap in 2018 the two longtime product developers and coders cast about for a new app to build. 

Looking around they realized there was no financial product that spoke to the generation of consumers they’d spent the last bit of their professional lives working to build for, so they decided it would be their next project.

“Our insight is that an individual’s relationship with money is a delicate and an emotional one. Most financial apps are not adopted by the masses because they are strict, lack empathy, and are unconsciously perceived as judgmental, which is why they are often downloaded and then ignored,” said Madeira, in a statement. 

Their solution, launching today, is Meemo .

It’s a combination of a personal financial monitoring, rewards and gifting, and social shopping app all rolled into one.

“One of the things we learned at snap if you want to reach the masses you need to change how you create an app. It has to be effortlessly,” said Madeira. “It has to be automatic and social as well so we want to build an app that is all of that combined.”

Once a user downloads Meemo and connects their main bank account or credit card to the app, Meemo will give that person insights into their spending history and potential rewards.

For most users, the initial experience will be through a gift card. Gifting, it turns out is what Dakka and Madeira think will be the secret sauce for the company’s growth (although getting people to use something if they’re being given money or free stuff is hardly rocket science).

There’s also the social element which the two men think will be a draw as well. Meemo provides recommendations and social validation from friends by harvesting their buying history and sharing it with you.

Once a user downloads Meemo and has the history of their transactions, the app will surface the places where user’s spend the most money. They can then send gift cards to their friends for their favorite restaurants. The goal, eventually, is to get restaurants to subsidize the gifting portion and have their shoppers act as a direct marketing channel.

Image Credits: Meemo (opens in a new window)

Shops won’t be able to see who’s getting the gifts until they come into the store. What Meemo hopes to do is gather a profile of a user’s shopping behavior based on their purchases and offer them discounts to places that they may not frequent as often, but match their consumer profile.

Backing the company are investors including Saama Capital, Greycroft, monashees, and Sierra Ventures along with individual investors Amit Singhal, Hans Tung, and serial entrepreneurs and the co-founders’ colleagues from Google and Snap.

Madeira and Dakka first met working on Google Search and went on to found Snap’s San Francisco office. And the team is rounded out by long-time friends like Robson Araújo and Ranveer Kunal.

“We are very excited to back Dakka and Madeira in their creation of a new age finance app at Meemo that will combine improved financial management with deeper social engagement for today’s generation”, said Ash Lilani, Managing Partner at Saama Capital, in a statement. “With Dakka and Madeira’s past experience of assembling talented teams and building viral products, we believe Meemo has an opportunity to become a leader in this space”. 

The company’s name is taken from a Portuguese word “mimo”, which means an affectionate treat, according to a statement. It’s available to download on iOS and Android.

At Microsoft Inspire today, the company made several Dynamics 365 announcements, including Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, a real-time customer feedback tool that could compete with Qualtrics, the company SAP bought in 2018 for a cool $8 billion.

Microsoft General Manager Brenda Bown says that as more customers move online during the pandemic, it’s more important than ever to capture real-time customer feedback that you can combine with other data to build a more complete picture of the customer that could lead to more successful interactions in the future.

“Customer Voice is a feedback management solution, and it’s designed to empower businesses and organizations to build better products, deliver better experiences to customers, and really build the relationships for the customers with that feedback management tool,” Bown told TechCrunch.

The data gets shared with Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP), and is built on top of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. The latter provides a way to customize the Customer Voice tool to meet the needs of an individual company.

Brent Leary, partner and co-founder at CRM Essentials, says this solves the problem of getting feedback as the interaction is happening. He adds that being able to share that data directly with the CDP makes it even more valuable.

“Customer feedback has to be done as close to the interaction/transaction as possible and as frictionless as possible for it to really work, or else customers won’t give it to you. And then the data has to be integrated into the CDP with all the other data automatically to really be of use. And having a platform to handle both the feedback capture and the data integration optimizes the likelihood of this happening,” Leary said.

The company also announced Dynamics 365 Connected Store, a set of tools designed to help stores manage in-store and curbside traffic, among other things. As the pandemic limits the number of people in a store at one time, using sensors and cameras, Connected Store can help managers understand and manage the number of people inside the store at any given time to help aid in social distancing.

It can also help add a level of automation to curbside pickup, letting an employee know when the customer has pulled up. “It alerts the employee and they can bring out the order for a more seamless and quick pickup. And obviously this scenario is super important today because of [more people wanting] contactless pick up,” Bown said.

Finally, the company announced a fraud protection component. She says that Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps protect businesses online or in physical stores from fraudulent activities, which she says is even more important as more transactions are conducted digitally. New capabilities include account protection and loss prevention tooling.

Inspire is the company’s annual partner conference, which is being held virtually this year. Bown says by running it virtually, the company can involve even more partners than a typical in-person conference because companies that couldn’t previously attend because of cost and distance, are able to participate this year.

Think back to the last time you onboarded at a new job. Was it a mishmash of documents and calendar invites and calls and, generally speaking, a mess?

Probably. That’s likely because onboarding is a process that often depends on disparate, unconnected HR tools. Sora, a startup that today announced $5.3 million in collected fundraising, wants to shake up the HR software world with a low-code service that helps companies connect their tooling and automate their HR processes. The startup might be able to make things like onboarding better for employees and companies alike.

Low-code, no-code

Startups looking to bring low, and no-code tooling to non-engineering teams have become a trend in recent quarters. TechCrunch recently covered a $2.2 million round for no-code text analysis and machine-learning shop MonkeyLearn, for example. There have been hundreds of millions of dollars raised by low, and no-code tools in 2020 alone.

By building tools to assist non-engineers do more, faster without developer help — be it analysis, or visual programming — some technology upstarts are helping non-technical teams do what only technical teams were able to in previous years.

Sora fits into the trend because its service allows non-developers create workflows, to use a term that the startup’s co-founder and CEO Laura Del Beccaro employed when she walked TechCrunch through her company’s product.

The Sora workflows can be built from templates, and employ triggers to fire off various processes (sending emails, pulling in data from other apps and services, that sort of thing), allowing non-engineers to create visual logic flows. The Sora system is “like a no-code workflow builder,” Del Beccaro said in an interview, allowing users to “add tasks where you have to tell someone to do something, and automate the follow up. That’s actually one of our biggest pain point relievers. A lot of HR teams right now are manually tracking people down: Did you set up this laptop yet? Did you set up this new hire launch for these three people?”

Sora CEO Laura Del Beccaro, via the company.

The Sora workflow system is slick in practice, allowing, for example, customization around a single employee. Del Beccaro explained that her startup’s software can do things like ask a manager who a new hire’s work-buddy might be, and then send that person an email later saying that the hire has arrived.

According to Del Beccaro, Sora, wants to help “democratize your [HR] processes.” Today’s HR denizens are too dependent on data analysts for “people analytics reporting” she said, adding that once a company has all its HR “data in one place, which again, is our core offering, you can set up all these automations that you want by yourself, you don’t have to go to IT or engineering.”

And because Sora can handle swapping out different providers as needed, Sora should help HR teams at growing companies lower the “risk of changing systems,” helping them “stay flexible no matter what [their] processes look like.”

It’s a neat tool.

Money

Sora has raised $5.3 million in capital to date, a funding total that includes a pre-Seed round from September, 2018. First Round and Elad Gil led its most recent round, which makes up a majority of its capital raised thus far.

With 11 employees today, Sora has around “25 people on [its] cap table,” the CEO said, telling TechCrunch that it was “pretty important to [her] to have a relatively diverse set of investors.” Del Beccaro provided this publication with a full list, which we’ve included below.

Sticking to the subject of money, after Mixpanel served as an early customer, Sora opened to more customers earlier this year. The CEO said that its customers are on one, or two-year contracts, and charges per-employee, per-month, which seems reasonable. With its new cash, Sora has around 2.5 years of runway she said.

First Round’s Bill Trenchard liked Sora’s approach to building its service, saying in an email that the company was “never interested in scaling for the sake of scaling,” highlighting its work in concert with “a development partner to make sure what they were working on was actually solving real HR pain points before they took it to the market” as evidence of its “thoughtful and intentional” product approach.

Today, thanks to that method, in his view “what’s compelling about Sora is their sales momentum this year after launching” the investor said. The next question for Sora, then, is how fast it can grow now that it has more capital in the bank than it has likely ever had before.

For fun, here’s the full investor list that Del Beccaro provided, which I’m including as it’s rare to get a full cap table:

• Sarah Adams (Plaid)
• Shan Aggarwal (Coinbase, Greycroft)
• Scott Belsky (Adobe)
• Mathilde Collin (Front)
• Cooley Investment Fund
• David Del Beccaro & Arleen Armstrong (Music Choice/Legal)
• Viviana Faga (Emergence Capital)
• Avichal Garg (Electric Capital)
• Elad Gil
• Kent Goldman (Upside VC)
• Jonah Greenberger (Bright)
• Daniel Gross (Pioneer, YC)
• Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures)
• Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)
• Oliver Jay (Asana)
• Nimi Katragadda (BoxGroup)
• Nicky Khurana (Facebook)
• Brianne Kimmel (Work Life Ventures)
• David King (Curious Endeavors)
• Fritz Lanman (ClassPass)
• Lisa & Mat Lori (Perfect Provenance/New Mountain Capital)
• Shrav Mehta (SecureFrame)
• Sean Mendy (Concrete Rose)
• Jana Messerschmidt (#Angels, Lightspeed)
• Katie Stanton (#Angels, Color)
• Erik Torenberg (Village Global)
• Bill Trenchard (First Round Capital)
• Jeannette zu Fürstenberg (La Famiglia VC)

Instagram today announced a new tool for personal fundraisers. The company says it’s beginning a small test of the feature, which will allow users to link directly to a fundraiser from their profile page. The test will initially run in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland on Android, followed by iOS. While users can choose to either start a cause or supporting an existing one, Instagram says all fundraisers will be first vetted to ensure they meet the existing guidelines and rules.

These rules include a list of supported fundraising categories, and detail in which cases a fundraiser would not be approved. The same rules also apply to Facebook fundraisers.

To get started with Personal Fundraisers, users with access to the feature will tap “Edit Profile,” “Add Fundraiser,” followed by “Raise Money.” You’ll then choose a photo, select the fundraiser category, and enter further details to tell the story and encourage donations. When approved, you’ll be able to raise funds for 30 days with the option to extend fundraising just once for 30 more days.

In other words, the feature is meant to support more time-sensitive causes, rather than serve as a replacement for ongoing fundraising efforts.

Donations to the fundraiser itself will be powered by Facebook Pay, which also powers Instagram’s new shopping features. 

In the next several months, Instagram says it will expand the feature to allow users to share their fundraiser in both their Feed and within Stories.

The addition isn’t the only way Instagram is supporting fundraising.

The company had already offered eligible nonprofits and supporters to raise money for charity with Donation Stickers for Stories, and more recently with a Live Donations feature for livestreams. While the company covers fees made to nonprofits, it does charge fees for personal fundraisers based on the country where the creator of the fundraiser is located.

Fundraising has become a popular activity across Facebook’s platforms. Already, users have raised more than $65 million for COVD-19 and racial justice initiatives and causes on Instagram and Facebook combined since January, for example. And in the last 30 days, donations on Instagram have doubled in the U.S.

The test of Personal Fundraisers is rolling out to a small number of users, but Instagram says the plan is to expand the feature in the months ahead.

Bang & Olufsen is taking its excellent track record for delivering maximum quality, natural-sounding audio and wrapping it in a sports-oriented package with the Beoplay E8 Sport ($350). These totally wireless earbuds come with a long list of great features, including IP57 water resistance, 30 total hours of battery life including up to seven hours on a single charge, and transparency mode for external audio pass-through.

The basics

The E8 Sport is a new version of the three-generation E8 totally wireless earphone that Bang & Olufsen has produced for a while now. It’s the first in the series to feature sport-specific water and sweat-resistance. That’s not to say you couldn’t probably get away with using the existing E8 headphones for exercise (I definitely have), but the the E8 Sport’s IP57 rating, you can be confident they’ll stand up to a run in the rain or any amount of sweat, since they’re technically able to be fully submerged in shallow water for as long as 30 minutes.

These aren’t for swimming, however; that water resistance gets you durability, as well as the option to quickly run them under water to clean them off if you so desire. It’s basically a peace-of-mind feature, but a welcome one.

The E8 Sport also includes a new more rubberized exterior finish, a charge case that offers just slightly less reserve power (only by around 30 minutes) but that provides USB-C and wireless charging as well as 23 hours of backup battery life on top of the seven contiained in the earbuds themselves.

You’ll also get four different sizes of silicone earbuds, as well as one set of Medium Comply memory foam tips, and there are three sets of different sized silicone fins that provide a bit more anchor stability in your ear for when you’re using these while running or doing other vigour exercise. The Beoplay E8 Sport is available in two basic colors, including a pastel turquoise called ‘oxygen blue’ and black. There’s also a new special edition created with partner On, the Swiss running brand, which features a contrast color grand and gray design.

Inside, Bang & Olufsen has used mostly the same internals as you’ll find in the standard, non-sport E8 – which means you can expect the same great sound that B&O is known for.

Design and performance

The E8 Sport is a new approach to design for Bang & Olufsen, featuring a more rugged, rubberized exterior vs. the smooth finish of the E8. The case of the E8 is also finished in leather, but the E8 Sport is likewise rubberized plastic. Both feature narrow ridges in their construction as well, which helps with grip, especially when there’s sweat involved.

Unlike a lot of other sport-specific products, the Beoplay Sport E8 still manages to feel mostly understated and refined, however. The buds themselves are pretty low profile when in the ear, and the black version especially will definitely fly under the radar. The ‘oxygen blue’ version has a little more flare, but still presents softer rather than bold or bright.

Inlaid on the face of each bud is an aluminum ring, along with the B&O logo overprinted on the touch-sensitive button faces. The overall look definitely distinguishes them from the standard E8, but doesn’t venture so far afield that you’re left wondering whether they were actually made by the same company.

Performance-wise, the E8 Sport lives up to all its promises, providing long-lasting battery life, excellent passive sound isolation, remarkably clarity and sound separation and a super secure fit. I used them in a variety of different situations, including during 30-minute plus runs, and they offered great connection quality and sound throughout. Especially for a set of sport buds, I was really impressed by the sound quality – normally, I find that in this category manufacturers sacrifice quality for muddy bass, but not so with the E8 Sport.

That’s what really makes these great: They’re all-around earbuds that you can use for exercise, in all weather conditions, and for quiet enjoyment at home, too, thanks to their supreme audio quality. If you want one set of wireless earphones that can do it all, without compromises, these are it.

The B&O app allows you to fine-tune the sound profile to your preferences, as well, and you can easily control playback and access the built-in transparency features using the touch-sensitive earbud control surfaces. All of this works whether you’re in the middle of a run or a conference call, and the call quality is excellent, too. In my testing, people I spoke on the phone with said it was a vast improvement over even using the handset held up to my face, and even approached the sound quality of my podcast (where I use pro audio equipment).

Bottom line

The wireless earbud market is very crowded and getting busier all the time, with plenty of options at a variety of price points. Bang & Olufsen has already delivered what I consider to be the best audio quality on the market with their current third-generation E8, and the new E8 Sport provides all that great sound along with awesome durability, too.

Human Ventures builds and invests in what we call the “human needs economy,” which encompasses products and services that address material human problems — specifically those in the areas of health and wellness, the future of work and community. This spring, our Humans in the Wild cohort program brought together a group of exceptional entrepreneurs, building companies within health and wellness. This fall, we are excited to call upon entrepreneurs who are building companies reimagining the way in which we, as humans, work. Applications are open here.

The human needs economy is the future. Throughout the last few decades, fundamental shifts in technology and human behavior have impacted the nature and life cycle of the “traditional” professional journey — and that disruption has started to shape a new labor economy. The past decade specifically has brought significant technological advancements that help humans work more efficiently, and share and organize information at scale. However, those technological advances are now starting to outpace the human condition, creating a society weary of automation, one that finds individuals searching for their place and purpose in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced labor market.

As COVID-19 saw boardrooms go dark, turning homes into makeshift offices, nascent trends were forced into prominence. Abruptly, the labor force was newly eager for innovative solutions to help them thrive in the new normal. But there is a long way to go before this new normal feels normal. There’s much work to be done to help the human needs economy not just survive this seismic shift, but to use it as an advantage.

Human Ventures has identified four areas of opportunity best positioned to serve the human side of work over the next decade:

Image Credits: Human Ventures (opens in a new window)

If you are building in these areas, we would love to connect with you.

1. New work environments

OnePlus’s first fully wireless earbuds just aren’t very good. It doesn’t give me joy to say that. OnePlus is a fascinating company that has produced some really great handsets at prices that don’t break the bank — and that’s precisely what gave me high hopes for the Buds. But they’re just not good.

They don’t look good, they sound bad and they’re not particularly comfortable. What they are, however, is pretty affordable, at $79 here in the States. Such a price point would have been a tremendous selling point only a few years ago, but the fully wireless earbud category has made some great strides of late, in addition to being downright flooded by cheap brands.

There are a handful of features it’s fairly easy to forgive for not being present at the sub-$100 price point. Active noise canceling for one, and wireless charging for another. And there are some good points here, as well: primarily the stated battery life of seven hours on the Buds and up to 30 hours with the case included. There’s fast charging through USB-C, with up to 10 hours in 10 minutes. I was also pleasantly surprised by the Bluetooth range.

Beyond that, there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of reasons to recommend the Buds, beyond sheer brand loyalty. If you do, for some reason, feel the need to go along with OnePlus here, don’t by the Nord Blue. Seriously. I don’t care if it matches your new budget phone, the color scheme is atrocious. Kind of an electric sky blue accented with a sickly greenish-yellow. I’m not sure I’ve seen that exact color scheme outside of a 1980s boogie board.

The product feels cheap and plasticky throughout. The case has a matte finish and the Buds themselves have a kind of high gloss that seems like it ought to belong to an altogether different product. According to the press material, the product “Looks as good as it sounds.” Which, fair enough, I guess.

As for the sound itself, the company says it’s “Un-BEAT-able,” a not so subtle reference to the extreme reliance on a pumped-up bass to seemingly compensate for other aspects of the listening experience. I suspect, too, that a lot of the less-bassy musical nuance is lost with the inability to get a tight seal. OnePlus really ought to consider silicone tips for a future iteration.

It’s worth mentioning here, however, that a future software update should make the Buds better in a few ways, including additional touch gestures and Dolby Atmos Support — though the latter will only work with the OnePlus 7 and 8 handsets, again limiting the Buds’ appeal. 

There’s a lot OnePlus ought to consider for the next generation. Meantime, there are plenty of better alternatives to recommend before these Buds.

While other premium smartphone makers were exploring mid-tier devices amid slowing sales, OnePlus’s prices were slowly creeping up. It’s true that the company never cracked the $1,000 price point (beyond a few limited-edition models), but for those following the company’s story, it felt like it was straying a bit from its biggest appeal: flagship-quality devices at highly competitive prices.

Today’s introduction of the Nord allows the company to continue to explore a more premium path for its flagship devices, while focusing on additional markets with something more affordable. In that sense, it’s not dissimilar to the tack being taken by Apple, Google and Samsung, all of whom have offered “budget flagships” in recent years as a response to market forces.

Something that warrants mentioning right off the bat, however, is that the Nord is not coming to North America. Instead, the product is — for now, at least — limited to India and certain parts of Europe, where it will start at 27999 INR and 399 Euros, respectively, putting it firmly under the $500 price point. The other important bit of information here is that, in spite of its low price, the handset sports 5G, realizing the promise of low-cost next-gen wireless courtesy of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It is, of course, not Qualcomm’s flagship — the 865 is reserved for the OnePlus 8, which runs a couple hundred bucks more than the Nord. But while the company skimped on certain aspects of the handset, others seem to go above and beyond the price point. OnePlus has experience offering premium design at low prices, and that’s the case here. The Nord doesn’t feel like a budget device. It’s a bit on the thick side, but the build quality is excellent, down to the glass back.

The screen is a 6.44-inch AMOLED with that 90 Hz refresh rate OnePlus has been pushing for a while. It sports the same 49-megapixel main sensor as the 8, coupled with an eight-megapixel wide angle and a depth sensor for improved bokeh effects. Interestingly, it’s actually the first OnePlus device to sport dual-selfie cameras. There’s a 32-megapixel main (the highest res front-facing camera on any of its products), coupled with an 8-megapixel wide-angle, similar to the rear.

The battery is a healthy 4,115mAh. I haven’t had the phone long enough to perform battery tests, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up to the added strain of a 5G connection. That’s coupled with OnePlus’s Warp Charge, which claims to refill it from zero to 70% in 30 minutes.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

There’s a new Blue Marble color; honestly, I’m not a fan. It’s not quite as hideous as the color scheme on the new Buds, but I’m going to strongly recommend going with the Gray Onyx here. But you do you, friend.

It goes on sale in Europe and India on August 4. There’s also an extremely limited (50-person) North America “beta program.” If you’re reading this, you’re probably not going to be on it, however. But good luck. All said, it seems to be a pretty excellent deal for the price.