Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Google has responded to a report this week from Belgian public broadcaster VRT NWS, which revealed that contractors were given access to Google Assistant voice recordings, including those which contained sensitive information — like addresses, conversations between parents and children, business calls, and others containing all sorts of private information. As a result of the report, Google says it’s now preparing to investigate and take action against the contractor who leaked this information to the news outlet.

The company, by way of a blog post, explained that it partners with language experts around the world who review and transcribe a “small set of queries” to help Google better understand various languages.

Only around 0.2 percent of all audio snippets are reviewed by language experts, and these snippets are not associated with Google accounts during the review process, the company says. Other background conversations or noises are not supposed to be transcribed.

The leaker had listened to over 1,000 recordings, and found 153 were accidental in nature — meaning, it was clear the user hadn’t intended to ask for Google’s help. In addition, the report found that determining a user’s identity was often possible because the recordings themselves would reveal personal details. Some of the recordings contained highly sensitive information, like “bedroom conversations,” medical inquiries, or people in what appeared to be domestic violence situations, to name a few.

Google defended the transcription process as being a necessary part of providing voice assistant technologies to its international users.

But instead of focusing on its lack of transparency with consumers over who’s really listening to their voice data, Google says it’s going after the leaker themselves.

“[Transcription] is a critical part of the process of building speech technology, and is necessary to creating products like the Google Assistant,” writes David Monsees, Product Manager for Search at Google, in the blog post. “We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data. Our Security and Privacy Response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again,” he said.

As voice assistant devices are becoming a more common part of consumers’ everyday lives, there’s increased scrutiny on how tech companies are handline the voice recordings, who’s listening on the other end, what records are being stored, and for how long, among other things.

This is not an issue that only Google is facing.

Earlier this month, Amazon responded to a U.S. senator’s inquiry over how it was handling consumers’ voice records. The inquiry had followed a CNET investigation which discovered Alexa recordings were kept unless manually deleted by users, and that some voice transcripts were never deleted. In addition, a Bloomberg report recently found that Amazon workers and contractors during the review process had access to the recordings, as well as an account number, the user’s first name, and the device’s serial number.

Further, a coalition of consumer privacy groups recently lodged a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission which claims Amazon Alexa is violating the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by failing to obtain proper consent over the company’s use of the kids’ data.

Neither Amazon nor Google have gone out of their way to alert consumers as to how the voice recordings are being used.

As Wired notes, the Google Home privacy policy doesn’t disclose that Google is using contract labor to review or transcribe audio recordings. The policy also says that data only leaves the device when the wake word is detected. But these leaked recordings indicate that’s clearly not true — the devices accidentally record voice data at times.

The issues around the lack of disclosure and transparency could be yet another signal to U.S. regulators that tech companies aren’t able to make responsible decisions on their own when it comes to consumer data privacy.

The timing of the news isn’t great for Google. According to reports, the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing for a possible antitrust investigation of Google’s business practices, and is watching the company’s behavior closely. Given this increased scrutiny, one would think Google would be going over its privacy policies with a fine-toothed comb — especially in areas that are newly coming under fire, like policies around consumers’ voice data — to ensure that consumers understand how their data is being stored, shared, and used.

Google also notes today that people do have a way to opt-out of having their audio data stored. Users can either turn off audio data storage entirely, or choose to have the data auto-delete every 3 months or every 18 months.

The company also says it will work to better explain how this voice data is used going forward.

“We’re always working to improve how we explain our settings and privacy practices to people, and will be reviewing opportunities to further clarify how data is used to improve speech technology,” said Monsees.

There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention.

Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One reason is that it emerged from a whole generation of gaming portals and platforms. Some, like King.com, got lucky or pivoted their business. Others by and large failed.

Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to build your own platform — and thus not worth talking about. Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.

But overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an insignificant story for many, many years. The company had millions of users, sure. So did any number of popular games. In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much faster.

Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform. It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number. And it’s unique. Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like Steam.

This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform.

Seeds of an idea

(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Before Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software. While designed to allow students to simulate physics experiments, perhaps predictably, they also treated it like a game.

“The fun seemed to be in building your own experiment,” says Baszucki. “When people were playing it and we went into schools and labs, they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” Provided with a sandbox, kids didn’t just make dry experiments about mass or velocity — they made games, or experiences they could show off to friends for a laugh.

Knowledge Revolution was founded in 1989, by Dave Baszucki and his brother Greg (who didn’t later co-found Roblox, but is now on its board). Nearly a decade later, it was acquired for $20 million by MSC Software, which made professional simulation tools. Dave continued there for another four years before leaving to become an angel investor.

Baszucki put money into Friendster, a company that pre-dated Facebook and MySpace in the social networking category. That investment seeded another piece of the idea for Roblox. Taken together, the legacy of Knowledge Revolution and Friendster were the two key components undergirding Roblox: a physics sandbox with strong creation tools, and a social graph.

Baszucki himself is a third piece of the puzzle. Part of an older set of entrepreneurs, which might be called the Steve Jobs generation, Baszucki’s archetype seems closer to Mr. Rogers than Jobs himself: unfailingly polite and enthusiastic, never claiming superior insight, and preferring to pass credit for his accomplishments on to others. In conversation, he shows interests both central and tangential to Roblox, like virtual environments, games, education, digital identity and the future of tech. Somewhere in this heady mix, the idea of Roblox came about.

The first release

When it comes to applying AI to the world around us, Andrew Ng has few if any peers. We are delighted to announce that the renowned founder, investor, AI expert and Stanford professor will join us on stage at the TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise show on Sept. 5 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. 

AI promises to transform the $500 billion enterprise world like nothing since the cloud and SaaS.  Hundreds of startups are already seizing the AI moment in areas like recruiting, marketing and communications, and customer experience. The oceans of data required to power AI are becoming dramatically more valuable, which in turn is fueling the rise of new data platforms, another big topic of the show. 

Last year, Ng  launched the $175 million AI Fund, backed by big names like Sequoia, NEA, Greylock, and Softbank. The fund’s goal is to develop new AI businesses in a studio model and spin them out when they are ready for prime time. The first of that fund’s cohort is Landing AI, which also launched last year and aims to “empower companies to jumpstart AI and realize practical value.” It’s a wave businesses will want to catch if Ng is anywhere near right in his conviction that AI will generate $13 trillion in GDP growth globally in the next 20 years. You heard that right. 

At TC Sessions: Enterprise, TechCrunch’s editors will ask Ng to detail how he believes AI will unfold in the enterprise world and bring big productivity gains to business. 

As the former Chief Scientist at Baidu and the founding lead of Google Brain, Ng led the AI transformation of two of the world’s leading technology companies. Dr. Ng is the Co-founder of Coursera, an online learning platform, and founder of deeplearning.ai, an AI education platform. Dr. Ng is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department and holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

Early Bird tickets to see Andrew at TC Sessions: Enterprise are on sale for just $249 when you book here, but hurry prices go up by $100 soon! Students, grab your discounted tickets for just $75 here.

Real estate computer vision platform startup Matterport is set to acquire Arraiy, an AI startup aiming to automate special effects processing in film.

Arraiy raised $13.9 million according to Crunchbase, most recently a $10 million Series A in March of 2018. Lux Capital and Softbank Ventures Asia led the round. Lux Capital notably also led Matterport’s Series A back in 2013. In comparison, Matterport has raised about $114 million to date.

Arraiy used AI tech to more seamlessly overlay digital content on physically captured spaces. The company had been firmly focused on changing the way digital effects houses in Hollywood made films. While plenty of computer vision startups were aiming to use AI and AR technologies to bring live Snapchat-like AR functionality to different corners of the web, Arraiy was banking on the high-fidelity world of film where special effects production is an expensive, time-intensive process.

Arraiy’s founders previously started Industrial Perception, a robotics startup which Google acquired in 2013.

The startup tackling Hollywood special effects and a startup best known for digitizing real estate properties to give potential buyers 3D tours might not seem like the most idyllic pairing, but the acquisition might allow Matterport to expand its ambitions further beyond its real estate customer base.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to vulnerability that could allow iPhone eavesdropping

The Walkie Talkie app on Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted an invite from each other to receive audio chats via a “push to talk” interface reminiscent of the PTT buttons on older cell phones.

Apple has apologized for the bug and for the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while a fix is made.

2. Amazon invests $700 million to retrain a third of its US workforce by 2025

The company’s stated goal is to “upskill” 100,000 of its U.S. employees for more in-demand jobs by 2025. That’s one in three of Amazon’s U.S. workers.

3. Hospitality business Sonder confirms new investment, $1B+ valuation

Sonder, which rents serviced apartments akin to boutique hotels, has raised $225 million at a valuation north of $1 billion.

4. N26 launches its challenger bank in the US

If you’re familiar with N26, the product going live today won’t surprise you much. Customers in the U.S. can download a mobile app and create a bank account from their phone in just a few minutes.

5. Apple has pushed a silent Mac update to remove hidden Zoom web server

Zoom took flack from users following a public vulnerability disclosure on Monday by Jonathan Leitschuh, in which he described how “any website [could] forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user’s permission.”

6. OneTrust raises $200M at a $1.3B valuation to help organizations navigate online privacy rules

It’s an outsized round for a Series A, being made at an equally outsized valuation, but according to CEO Kabir Barday, that’s because of the wide-ranging nature of the issue, and OneTrust’s early moves tackling it.

7. The future of car ownership: Cars-as-a-service

Previously, we explored the different startups attempting to change car buying. But not everyone wants to buy a car. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Facebook has been adding new tools to provide more transparency about why users are seeing certain ads and content (and what they can do about it), but in a blog post today, Product Manager Sreethu Thulasi wrote, “We heard feedback from people that they can still be hard to understand and difficult to navigate.”

To address that, the company said it’s making two changes. First, when you select the “Why am I seeing this ad?” option on an advertisement, you’ll get more info:

In the past, “Why am I seeing this ad?” highlighted one or two of the most relevant reasons, such as demographic information or that you may have visited a website. Now, you’ll see more detailed targeting, including the interests or categories that matched you with a specific ad. It will also be clearer where that information came from (e.g. the website you may have visited or Page you may have liked), and we’ll highlight controls you can use to easily adjust your experience.

An accompanying video shows how a user might dig into an an ad to see how their interests, location, demographic information and a past visit the advertiser’s website all played a role in the targeting. If you don’t like what you see, you can adjust your interests on Facebook, or your can click through to the “What You Can Do” section, which will point out options like blocking all ads from that advertiser or limiting the personal data that’s shared by third-party companies.

Speaking of third-party data, Facebook said it’s also telling you more about the businesses that are uploading data about you, dividing the listing (found in your Ad Preferences) into two sections — one that shows advertisers who have uploaded a list with your information and used it to run an ad in the past seven days, and another of businesses that have shared lists with your data, along with advertisers who have used that data to show you an ad in the past seven days.

Like many privacy tools, these may not get used by most Facebook users. But for those who are curious or concerned, this seems like a clear way to make the information accessible without dumbing it down too much.

And of course, this just one of a number of steps Facebook has taken recently to increase transparency as it faces regulatory scrutiny (and even proposals for a break-up).

Immigration may not seem to be a tech issue. But for Americans with some personal or family experience with the idea of separated families and/or concentration camps, it can be hard to see what is currently going on in our names thanks to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (better known as “ICE”) as anything less than the single most urgent moral or ethical issue in this country today.

This begs a disclaimer: I have Eastern European Jewish family roots in what became the Holocaust. I have a Cuban Jewish mother who came to this country by herself as a young girl refugee and was separated from her family for multiple years due to U.S. immigration policy.

I am a father myself. This piece is personal for me, in other words. If you want to know whether I can be objective here, I would have to admit that seeing repeated images of thousands of children, as young as 4 months old, facing inhumane and abusive conditions in my government’s name and supported by my tax dollars, has been quite possibly the most morally disturbing experience of my life.

Still, given that I write specifically about the ethics of technology here at TechCrunch, is this topic “a fit” for this column? Well, “fortunately,” if not for me or any of us personally, then at least regarding my desire to write up ICE for this column: the Silicon Valley tech industry has a long and deep history of entanglement with undocumented immigrants to this country. And in fact, “thanks” to tech companies such as Palantir, Wayfair, and Amazon Web Services and their present-day collaboration with ICE and its concentration camps, tech and immigration ethics is very much a live topic for today.

It’s also a disturbing and depressing topic. Which is why I’m hoping to offer some hope, by concentrating not only on camps and detentions, but more on a series of innovative and impactful recent protests, in which tech companies played leading roles — both as objects of criticism in some cases and as helpful resources for the critics in others.

First, let’s focus on Palantir. As Manish Singh wrote in TechCrunch in May, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents, obtained by advocacy organization Mijente through Freedom of Information Act litigation, note that agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations used Palantir’s software to build profiles of immigrant children and their family members for the prosecution and arrest of any undocumented person they encountered in their investigation.”

In other words, along with beds from multibillion-dollar furniture unicorn Wayfair, and web hosting from Amazon, the Peter Theil-funded Palo Alto software power is making this country’s showdown over immigration actively about the tech world, and this Monday, July 8, hundreds of protestors went to Palantir’s offices as part of a week of coordinated activities nationwide.

As Mijente campaigns director Priscilla Gonzalez told me, “We noticed the escalation of ICE operations, their invasions of homes, workplaces, and communities, and we began investigating just how people were being monitored and tracked like never before.”

Gonzalez continued, “We found that Palantir’s software allows ICE agents to build profiles of undocumented immigrants filled with personal information like their home address, work address, financial information, social media profile, and more. Palantir is the reason ICE has been able to accelerate its operations, conduct mass raids and rip families and communities apart.”

While it remains to be seen whether such protests will persuade Palantir to drop their contracts with ICE, what is clear is that the trend of staging significant protests against such institutions is only going to grow, as more and more grassroots groups, students, tech workers, faith leaders, elected officials, and others unite to hold them accountable.

Which brings me to my interview for this week.

A few days before the Palantir protest, and less than a week after an employee walkout from the Boston headquarters of Wayfair also drew hundreds of employees and supporters, another major ICE protest took place in Boston. This time, on July 2nd, it was a group of Jewish activists collaborating with Movimiento Cosecha, an organization representing undocumented immigrants.

Echoing yet another protest just a day earlier in which 36 Jewish activists were arrested while protesting an ICE facility in New Jersey, while carrying banners imploring “Never Again Para Nadie” (for no one), in Boston 18 protestors were arrested in similar fashion (multiples of 18 are culturally and religiously significant in Jewish tradition). While the Boston protest was not specifically tied to the tech industry, it was a moving — and telling — example of what tech companies might begin to expect if they continue involvement with ICE.

One of the arrestees in the Boston protest, moreover, was someone I had already been hoping to interview for this column — the nationally renowned sexual ethicist, author, and activist Jaclyn Friedman. As you will see below, Friedman has a lot to say about the intersection of sex, ethics, and tech. She insisted, however, that this interview focus almost exclusively on the ICE protest and the ethical issues behind it. I think the resulting conversation was powerful and educational.

Greg Epstein: I know you through your work as an expert in sexual ethics, and I’ve been wanting to interview you about work you’ve done on the intersection of sex, ethics, and tech. But then I saw you’d participated in this — what I think may have been a landmark protest — and I had to talk with you about it. Given your background, what led you to participating in this protest?

Jaclyn Friedman: I certainly can and will make connections between what we just did with the Jews Against Ice action [and] sexual ethics, but I honestly just came to it as a human person, and as a Jew who’s just panicked and outraged, and felt a strong need to do something more. This action appealed to me as a Jew, because my activism stems from my Judaism.

That’s where I learned about social justice, where I get the fire in my belly, both in terms of Jewish teachings about tikkun olam, as well as, it just happened the Temple I grew up in was led by the first woman ordained in the modern era, Sally Priesand. [She] was, before I even knew the word feminism, my first feminist role model.

But also obviously the US is running concentration camps, and it’s impossible for me to not take that personally as a Jew. It certainly has everything to do with my work on sexual ethics which is functionally work about bodily autonomy.

If you’re talking about mass incarceration, that’s an issue about bodily autonomy. If you’re talking about concentration camps, it’s certainly an issue about bodily autonomy, and that’s even before we start talking about the amount of sexual assault and molestation that has been allowed to be perpetrated by the folks who are running these detention camps.

After cracking down on ICOs, the SEC just okayed the first two RegA+ tokens that offer an alternative way for anyone to gain a financial stake in a company, even unaccredited investors. Blockstack got approved for a $28 million digital token sale to raise money, while influencer live streaming app YouNow’s spin-off Props received a formal green light for a consumer utility ‘Howey’ token users can earn to get loyalty perks in multiple apps.

Props has already raised $21 million by pre-selling tokens to Union Square Ventures, Comcast, Venrock, Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon, and YouTuber Casey Neistat, so it isn’t raising any money with the RegA+ by selling its tokens like Blockstack. Instead, users earn or ‘mine’ Props by engaging with apps like YouNow, which will award the tokens for creating broadcasts, watching videos, and tipping creators. Having more Props entitles YouNow’s 47 million registered users bonus features, VIP status, and more purchasing power with the app’s proprietary credits called Bars which users have bought $70 million-worth of to date.

But unlike most virtual currencies that can only be used in a single app and don’t technically belong to consumers, the open-sourced Props blockchain system can be integrated into other apps via an API and people can export their Props to cryptocurrency wallets. That lets them apply their Props in other apps beyond YouNow. Four partnered apps have been lined up including xSplit, a 17 million registered user app for video game streaming.

While Props aren’t currently redeemable for fiat currency, they were valued at $0.1369 each by the SEC-approved filing. The company is working to have Props listed on Alternative Trading Systems that work similarly to cryptocurrency exchanges. That lets Props give everyday app users a financial incentive to see the network of apps that adopt them grow. Since there’s a finite supply of 1 billion Props (with 600 million mined so far), if demand for Props rises then users could sell them for more. This creates a new growth hacking method for startups by providing a way to reward early and hardcore users.

“Our offering of Props is the first consumer-facing offering of “Howey tokens” to be qualified by the SEC. It makes it the first offering of consumer-oriented utility tokens that the SEC deems compliant, outside of Bitcoin and Ether” Props CEO Adi Sideman tells me. While SEC officials have said Bitcoin and Ether aren’t securities thanks to their sufficient decentralization, they haven’t received formal approval. “We used Regulation A+ (Reg A) for this qualification, so that Props may be earned by, and provide functionality to, non accredited investors, users, apps and validators, in compliance with US regulations.”

However this could also create risk for less savvy users who might misunderstand the token system and be overly convinced they’ll get rich by watching tons of musicians or comedians streaming on YouNow. Props will need to ensure partners that integrate its tokens don’t exaggerate their potential. It’s spent two years working on SEC approval but could still face consequences if Props are misrepresented.

“Props enables us to turn creators into stakeholders in the network, meaning they become partners in the success of the network. It’s an important tool for us to better incentivize and align with the most important users of our apps” PeerStream CEO Alex Harrington writes. “Props abstracts, for us as developers, the technical and regulatory complexity associated with blockchain-based tokens, through a simple set of APIs that we can use to integrate the token into our apps’ experience.”

With Blockstack and Props having pioneered the RegA+ approach, we could see more companies filing to use this method of raising money or sharing stakes with their users.

Luminar is one of the major players in the new crop of lidar companies that have sprung up all over the world, and it’s moving fast to outpace its peers. Today the company announced a new $100M funding round, bringing its total raised to over $250M — as well as a perception platform and a new, compact lidar unit aimed at inclusion in actual cars. Big day!

The new hardware, called Iris, looks to be about a third of the size of the test unit Luminar has been sticking on vehicles thus far. That one was about the size of a couple hardbacks stacked up, and Iris is more like a really thick sandwich.

Size is very important, of course, since few cars just have caverns of unused space hidden away in prime surfaces like the corners and windshield area. Other lidar makers have lowered the profiles of their hardware in various ways; Luminar seems to have compactified in a fairly straightforward fashion, getting everything into a package smaller in every dimension.

Test model, left, Iris on the right.

Photos of Iris put it in various positions: below the headlights on one car, attached to the rear-view mirror in another, and high up atop the cabin on a semi truck. It’s small enough that it won’t have to displace other components too much, although of course competitors are aiming to make theirs even more easy to integrate. That won’t matter, Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell told me recently, if they can’t get it out of the lab.

“The development stage is a huge undertaking — to actually move it towards real-world adoption and into true
series production vehicles,” he said (among many other things). The company who gets there first will lead the industry, and naturally he plans to make Luminar that company.

Part of that is of course the production process, which has been vastly improved over the last couple years. These units can be made quickly enough that they can be supplied by the thousands rather than dozens, and the cost has dropped precipitously — by design.

Iris will cost under $1,000 per unit for production vehicles seeking serious autonomy, and for $500 you can get a more limited version for more limited purposes like driver assistance, or ADAS. Luminar says Iris is “slated to launch commercially on production vehicles beginning in 2022,” but that doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re shipping to customers right now. The company is negotiating more than a billion dollars in contracts at present, a representative told me, and 2022 would be the earliest that vehicles with Iris could be made available.

The Iris units are about a foot below the center of the headlight units here. Note that this is not a production vehicle, just a test one.

Another part of integration is software. The signal from the sensor has to go somewhere, and while some lidar companies have indicated they plan to let the carmaker or whoever deal with it their own way, others have opted to build up the tech stack and create “perception” software on top of the lidar. Perception software can be a range of things: something as simple as drawing boxes around objects identified as people would count, as would a much richer process that flags intentions, gaze directions, characterizes motions and suspected next actions, and so on.

Luminar has opted to build into perception, or rather has revealed that it has been working on it for some time. It now has 60 people on the task split between Palo Alto and Orlando, and hired a new VP of Software, former robo-taxi head at Daimler Christoph Schroder.

What exactly will be the nature and limitations of Luminar’s perception stack? There are dangers waiting if you decide to take it too far, since at some point you begin to compete with your customers, carmakers who have their own perception and control stacks that may or may not overlap with yours. The company gave very few details as to what specifically would be covered by its platform, but no doubt that will become clearer as the product itself matures.

Last and certainly not least is the matter of the $100 million in additional funding. This brings Luminar to a total of over a quarter of a billion dollars in the last few years, matching its competitor Innoviz, which has made similar decisions regarding commercialization and development.

The list of investors has gotten quite long, so I’ll just quote Luminar here:

G2VP, Moore Strategic Ventures, LLC, Nick Woodman, The Westly Group, 1517 Fund / Peter Thiel, Canvas Ventures, along with strategic investors Corning Inc, Cornes, and Volvo Cars Tech Fund.

The board has also grown, with former Broadcom exec Scott McGregor and G2VP’s Ben Kortland joining the table.

We may have already passed “peak lidar” as far as sheer number of deals and startups in the space, but that doesn’t mean things are going to cool down. If anything the opposite, as established companies battle over lucrative partnerships and begin eating one another to stay competitive. Seems like Luminar has no plans on becoming a meal.

Walmart’s grocery pickup business has been scaling quickly in recent years, and is now on track to reach 3,100 U.S. stores by year-end. Now, Walmart’s Sam’s Club business is making its own move to satisfy consumers’ demand for online ordering with same-day pickup. The retailer this week announced that same-day Club Pickup is now available at its nearly 600 U.S. locations.

The company began testing pickup at select locations starting last summer.

To order from Sam’s Club, members can either go online to SamsClub.com or use the Sam’s Club app to shop for items, check out, and pay. The orders will be ready for pick up within four hours — and often quicker, the retailer notes. The members will receive a text or email when their order is ready.

However, unlike Walmart, Target, or Amazon-owned Whole Foods order pickup programs, Sam’s Club has put a cap on order size. To qualify for same-day pickup, orders can’t exceed more than 15 items, the company says. To some extent, this limit makes sense, as many Sam’s Club shoppers use the warehouse club to shop in bulk to restock a large household — or even their small business — with various essentials. There may not be enough staff and time for Sam’s Club personnel to pull and prep more sizable orders for same-day pickup.

That said, knowing there’s a limit on how much you can order could dampen consumers’ use of the same-day pickup option — or have them turning to rivals instead.

Sam’s Club says members can order a range of items through the new service, including groceries, paper goods, electronics, and even alcohol. Produce and meat have so far been the most frequently ordered items.

Pickup is offered after 10 AM Monday through Friday, and after 9 AM on Saturday. Sam’s Club Plus members, who also have the option of shopping early, now will also have access to early pickup hours, too. These members can opt to schedule pickups between 7 AM and 10 AM, Monday through Friday.

Like parent company Walmart, some Sam’s Club location will offer a drive-up pickup area where employees will bring the order out to the car and load it.

Same-day grocery pickup has been one of the many ways U.S. retailers have been challenging Amazon. By leveraging their existing brick-and-mortar footprint and proximity to shoppers’ homes, businesses like Walmart, Target, and even local grocers (often in partnership with Instacart), have been making it easier for shoppers to order online for same-day pickup.

Sam’s Club, too, has an Instacart deal in place. The partnership, focused on same-day grocery delivery, was first announced in February 2018 and significantly expanded to over half of Sam’s Club locations in October. Last month, the Instacart partnership expanded again to include alcohol delivery at 215 stores across nearly a dozen U.S. states.

The company also last year announced free shipping by way of its Plus membership, as an alternative to Amazon Prime.