TechCrunch+

Abby started its journey selling 120 or so of its “All-In-One Smart Hydroponic Grow Box” on Kickstarter, with a relatively modest $100,000 raised on the crowdfunding platform. The device promises to help you make growing your favorite plants more or less foolproof, especially if your “favorite plants” are marijuana. In its marketing, the company is careful to share that you can grow any plant you like, but realistically, there are not a lot of plants that need “replacement carbon filters delivered to your house every 3 months,” and the website issues a “you must be 21 or older to enter this site” warning. The community is eager and ardent about its love for smokable plants. Let’s just say that if you’re going to spend $1,000 on a single-plant hydroponic box, you’d really have to love tomatoes for it to make sense; most of its users appear to be growing a more, er, valuable crop.

Being based in California, where these things are legal, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I bought some seeds, got the plant to about 3 inches in height, and planted it in the Abby to see what would happen.

On paper, the product should be such a solid solution. The device features a water culture system with advanced automatic intelligent lighting with Samsung’s LM301H Full Spectrum Plant Lights and high-power LEDs that are specifically designed to maximize plant photosynthesis growth potential. It supposedly has “advanced sensors to consistently track growth, with ultrasonic, temperature/humidity, water temperature, water level, and 5.8G radar sensors so you never have to worry about plant growth again.”

The product is an elegantly designed cabinet. Sleek and white, with wooden legs and a wooden top, with a bunch of smart features on the inside of the device: water pumps, lighting and what it claims are “advanced algorithms, state-of-the-art sensors” and more. Measuring around 16x16x48 inches (40x40x122 cm), it’s sleek and you could probably find a spot for it in any home.

When the device arrived at my house, it had a dented door and a missing door hinge (!) which could presumably be attributed to shipping rather than poor QA. The Abby team was quick to get a replacement door shipped out, along with replacement instructions for the door, which involved unscrewing and re-screwing nine screws. I’m no stranger to taking tools to equipment, but it wasn’t the best first impression. On the whole, the hardware seems very well designed, which makes it all the more painful that, at every turn, the product’s software tries to prevent you from being able to grow efficiently. The list of issues is as long as my arm; there wasn’t an Android app for starters (the company did finally release an Android app last month), and from there, it just got worse.

The app and integration with Abby is so bad that I originally had just given up on writing a review altogether, but when the cabinet flooded my apartment floors due to a software error, I figured it might be best to write up some of my experiences…

One thing after another

Connecting to the device in the first place was impossible, and it took a fair chunk of troubleshooting to figure out what was going on; it turns out that the Abby only supports 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi, which I didn’t have set up in my house.

The app supposedly is able to give you 1-on-1 expert live support from the company, but the first few times I tried to submit a photo on my (admittedly old) iOS device, the app kept crashing. When I was finally able to upload a message, the message simply vanished. I don’t believe I ever got a reply from Abby. The app itself is riddled with typos and bugs, and I’d almost be able to look past that if it hadn’t been for the fact that the device itself doesn’t seem to have any interest in notifying me about what I need to do with the plants.

The Abby occasionally chimes at me, and pulses a pretty green light, but whenever it does that, the app doesn’t seem to have an opinion on what I need to do, and the display on the device itself — which would have been such a good place to communicate what the device needs — just shows the Abby logo.

The water needs changing every once in a while, but the app never notified me when that needed to happen. The Abby box itself has a small display on it, which rotates left and right, and has a button — much like a Nest thermostat. However, the display never shows anything useful. Such as “hey, you need to change the water,” for example.

When I finally did figure out that I needed to change the water manually, the app gives you simple instructions: Take the hose out of the box, and put it in a “minimum 1-gallon container.” Which I did, but it didn’t stop automatically after a gallon, and the app crashed when I pressed the “stop pumping water” button, which meant that the pump just kept going and sent the full amount of water in the device’s tank all over my floor as I was running to the sink with my overflowing one-gallon container. Not… ideal.

The box comes with a really clever nutrient system: It has two spots where you can place the “silver” and “gold’ nutrient packs. It does this because one of the packs needs to dissolve fully before the other one is added, to avoid a chemical reaction between the two packs. Unfortunately, this only worked the very first time I set up the machine: After that, it never asked for additional nutrition packs, so the packs I had so diligently placed in the supply holes eventually just dissolved in place, and made a sticky mess all over the machine.

Toward the end of my review period, the plant had grown quite a bit — I eventually just resorted to dumping the nutrition packets in manually, since the cabinet and app never asked for nutrients. Which seemed suspect; for my own, home-built hydroponic system, I have to balance and add more nutrients every few weeks at least. Unfortunately, because Abby never warned me that the thirsty plant drank almost all of the water, the plant went for a few days with almost all of its roots out of the water, leading to a lot of the leaves on the plant dying. Not great, and another strike against the “foolproof” nature of the Abby cabinet.

I had the Abby plugged into a power meter to see how much power it was consuming during my review. Over the course of 108 days, it burned through 198 KwH, which translates to around $50 spent for a crop of weed.

The final complaint I have about Abby is that the charcoal filters aren’t as efficient as they might need to be; especially toward the end there, my apartment stank to high heaven of weed. Not the best first impression for my landlord and a plumber when they came by to repair something. I did manage to stammer “Er, it’s for work?” which was true, of course, but… yeah. Not great.

I should add that the app is in active development, and a lot of the original complaints I had about the device have been addressed, at least partially. The company launched an Android version, and the process for changing water was “optimized” last month. How-tos and troubleshooting instructions are built in to the app, and more detailed instructions are being added. The company is also adding a growing calendar, metric units and later batches of the device are quieter than the one I reviewed (the company claims it hums along at 40 dB now, which is an improvement).

All in all, you’d have to be very interested in growing a plant indoors if you’re willing to drop a grand for the admittedly neat hardware that’s so heavily hampered by impossible-to-use, buggy software) and $50 worth of power to keep it all growing. It’s frustrating; I really wanted to love Abby, but ultimately it needed way too much manual babysitting to warrant the cost. If someone launches a product that actually delivers on Abby’s promises, I can imagine it being a great buy. This ain’t it yet.

We review Abby, a sleek one-plant weed farm for your apartment by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

The 2022 perspective that startups should cut their losses and chart a clearer path to profitability does not only apply to upstart tech companies. After a multiyear spending binge, larger technology companies are also pulling back on costs.

For some major tech concerns, the cuts have come in the form of explicit layoffs and staffing reductions created by not backfilling departing employees, while other tech shops are cutting costs, including perks and related employment-enticement efforts. But while some major technology companies are trimming spending to bolster profitability, others remain miles away from making money.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Such is the case of Bilibili, a Chinese online video service with a social component. Today, shares of Bilibili are performing strongly, up sharply after the company reported better-than-anticipated Q3 earnings results. Naturally on the hunt for some good news amid a year of bearish headlines, compressing multiples, and chaos, we took a look.

What we found was a business further from profitability than we expected. The Chinese company, worth around $5 billion today per financial databases including Yahoo Finance, has done a fantastic job capturing a growing audience in its home market and keeping those netizens engaged. But when it comes to building a more profitable company — its stated goal, as we’ll examine shortly — it has much work ahead of it.

That shares of Bilibili are up more than 20% today is good news, albeit in a limited sense. The company’s shares trading on U.S. exchanges crested the $150 per-share threshold in booming 2021. They closed yesterday at $12.59 per share, before today’s uptick of nearly $3 per share.

The work ahead of Bilibili to reach profitability — measured in GAAP terms, mind — reminds us of other tech companies that saw their values skyrocket and losses stick during the 2021 era. Some of those concerns, like Twilio, are still growing quickly, and at scale, but their losses appear to have set a weight around their shoulders, compressing their total value.

Put more simply, Bilibili’s unprofitability tells us that unwinding 2021’s excesses will take years, in some cases. For already-public tech companies, this can mean a painful march to the black. For startups, it serves more as a warning about what happens when growth fails to generate sufficient operating leverage.

As tech companies seek to limit losses, a reminder of how far some have to go by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

TechCrunch Early Stage — our premier event designed for budding entrepreneurs and founders at the very start of their startup journey — returns by popular demand on April 20, 2023. And we’re excited to announce that this year, we’re taking it on the road to Boston, Massachusetts.

We’re mixing the East Coast vibe with unparalleled opportunity. This is our only event where you get hands-on training with top industry experts to help you build a successful business.

Register, save and secure your place: We have a limited number of passes available for a special launch price. They’re here until they’re not — get ’em while they’re hot. Buy your TC Early Stage pass now, and reserve your seat for just $149.

During small group sessions, roundtables and workshops, you’ll learn best practices and gain valuable insights from successful startup founders, subject-matter experts and seasoned investors. We’re talking core topics that anyone interested in building their own business needs to know. TC Early Stage has your name written all over it if you:

Dream of starting your own business and want to learn how to turn your idea into a viable startup.
Work your startup on the side and need to figure out the next steps that will move you closer to being your own boss.
Code, develop and engineer new products and wonder what it takes to monetize your ideas.
Need to move beyond friends-and-family financing and learn how to attract institutional investors.
Want to join a supportive community of like-minded businesspeople sharing a similar path.

You’ll engage with the experts and other founders and get real-time feedback about issues facing your company. Plus, you’ll walk away with actionable strategies and advice. We’re talking tips that you can use now — when you need them most.

TC Early Stage, which takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides access to essential information, resources and community connection to help you realize your entrepreneurial potential. Buy your $149 pass now, and shift your startup dream into high gear.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

See you in Boston for TechCrunch’s Annual Founder Summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

The Federal Trade Commission this week announced that it has settled lawsuits against Google and iHeartMedia relating to “deceptive endorsements” of the Pixel 4 phone. According to a statement issued by the FTC, nearly 29,000 ads were aired featuring radio personalities.

The suit notes specifically that the promoters in question never used the handset, in spite of claiming to have had experience with the device. Google is said to have paid iHeartMedia – the United States’ largest radio owner – along with 11 other networks in 10 major markets millions to promote the product.

Those endorsements included scripted lines, including “It’s my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode,” “I’ve been taking studio-like photos of everything,” and “It’s also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once.”

“Google and iHeartMedia paid influencers to promote products they never used, showing a blatant disrespect for truth-in-advertising rules,” Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in a statement provided by the FTC. “The FTC will not stop working with our partners in the states to crack down on deceptive ads and ensure firms that break the rules pay a price.”

Google and iHeartMedia have agreed to settle the suit to the tune of $9.4 million. The news arrives as federal regulators are taking a closer look at regulation around big tech, including a $400 million Google settlement for data tracking and increased scrutiny over potential monopolistic practices.

“We are pleased to resolve this issue,” Google Spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “We take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards.”

We have reached out to iHeartMedia for addition comment.

Google/iHeartMedia will pay $9.4M to settle FTC charges for ‘deceptive’ Pixel 4 radio ads by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

When I went to book a rental car for Thanksgiving a few months ago, all that Hertz had left at O’Hare International Airport were Teslas. Usually, I end up with something like a Nissan Altima — not an amazing car, but one that gets the job done. Cheaply. But not this time.

Hertz is in the process of adding 100,000 Teslas to its rental fleet, so it was statistically probable that one day I’d end up renting one. I’m certainly in their target demo — all of our cars over the last seven-plus years have had a plug, and while none of them have been Teslas, I am what you might call Tesla-curious. Aside from a test drive of a Model Y a couple of years ago, I’d never driven one for an extended period of time.

What the heck, I thought. Let’s go for it.

Even though I’m far from an EV novice, I still wasn’t sure about renting an EV. I do the vast majority of my charging at home, and I’m familiar enough with my vehicles to know their real-world range and how the weather will affect it. I don’t have that same familiarity with the Model 3, and I wouldn’t have anything more than a 120v outlet at my parents’ house, which is two hours from the airport.

But I’ve got a weak spot for new technology and new ways of experiencing it, especially when it comes to electrification. Here went nothing.

How it went

When we picked up the car at the airport, I was directed to the kiosk, where a nice Hertz rep behind the counter explained that she had to give me a spiel, the same one she gives to all Tesla renters. She asked if I had any questions, and I told her that while I didn’t own a Tesla, I was familiar enough with EVs that I was confident I’d get by.

One difference she pointed out was that in place of the usual offer to pre-pay for a tank of gas, there was an option to place a $35 deposit in case I wasn’t able to return the car more than 70% charged. If I was able to charge it before returning it, the $35 would go back on my credit card. Seemed like a reasonable offer, so I took her up on it.

In our conversation, she mentioned that Hertz’s O’Hare fleet was largely being replaced with Teslas. Ah, so that’s why only Teslas remained.

We found the car, got the kids situated, adjusted the mirrors and steering wheel (no small feat), and headed out. Anyone who’s driven an EV is addicted to instant torque, and the Model 3 has it in spades. The twitchy accelerator pedal reminded me of our old BMW i3 — in a good way — as did the one-pedal driving, which activates regenerative braking when you lift your foot, allowing you to largely ignore the brake pedal. The suspension was tight, but not horribly so. It was certainly far better sorted than the Model Y, which on rough roads felt like it was pummeling my kidneys.

Though the car had enough range to make it to my parents’ house, I wanted to charge on the way to ensure we’d have enough for the return. (120v outlets are excruciatingly slow.) After entering our destination into the nav, we added another stop and searched for “supercharger.” Helpfully, the top hits were Superchargers along our route, starting with the one closest to our destination.

Driving the car was great, but letting it drive itself … not so much.

If EVs can work in rental car fleets, they can work anywhere by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

When Covid shut down much of the world down in 2020, it ended up wreaking havoc on the supply chain. Suddenly companies built for just-in-time production couldn’t find parts they needed to build their products.

Even as Covid subsided, the supply chain woes continued. Veterans of supply management like the founder of startup Amplio watched, and figured there had to be a better way to guard against these kinds of disruptions in the future using software to find parts wherever they were.

Amplio launched last year with that goal in mind, and today the startup announced a $6 million seed to build a system to help track parts shortages. Trey Closson, CEO and co-founder at Amplio says his company’s goal is to build more resilience into the electronic components supply chain.

“We help our customers understand the components that are at highest risk of leading to material shortages, and then we connect our customers to alternative sources of supply to mitigate those shortages,” Closson told TechCrunch.

He knows what he’s talking about. He spent his entire career in supply chain management, and he’s seen firsthand how disruptions can have a negative impact on a business’s ability to function. He blames “Just-in-time production” techniques for the problems we are seeing today.

“The supply chains have been designed for 30 or 40 years to optimize for cost and for the best case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t live in a world of best case scenarios. We live in a world of constant disruptions,” he said.

“The way that our platform works is that we’re connected to our customers’ systems of record or their ERP solutions, and we take in in their bill of materials and their operational data, and then combine that with external datasets to be able to show the customer their ability to source their particular components over the next six to 18 months,” he said.

What’s more, in cases where the customer isn’t able to source the components, customers can go to the Amplio marketplace to find suppliers or other manufacturers who might have surplus inventory they are trying to sell.

Closson’s most recent job was working at Koch Industries, leading international supply chain for Georgia Pacific, where he was on the front line of the Covid-induced toilet paper shortages. But he decided to focus his startup on electronic components.

“So while supply chain resilience is really critical across the market, we want to focus on the electronics industry, because it has such a tremendous impact on the global economy,” he said. He conceived of and incubated the company as part of a program run by Koch and High Alpha Innovation, the program launched by former Exact Target execs to help startups with enterprise-focused ideas.

The company currently has 6 employees, but plans to expand with the funding (which closed in May). He says as he grows the company, diversity and inclusion is a core building block. “Diversity is one of the core principles for our hiring and in decision making processes. So just from a selfish standpoint, diverse organizations make better decisions and have more creative ideas, and are ultimately more successful,” he said.

Today’s round was led by Construct Capital with participation from Slow Ventures, High Alpha Capital, Flexport Ventures, Alpaca Venture Capital and various industry angels.

Amplio helps companies find components when supply chain breaks down by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

YouTube Music announced today that it’s starting to roll out its personalized end-of-year Recaps to allow users to relive their favorite music moments of 2022. The launch comes ahead of Spotify’s highly-anticipated Wrapped feature, which tends to takes social media by storm every year.

YouTube Music introduced the Recap feature last year to compete with Spotify. The feature lets users see their top artists, songs, music videos, playlists and more. This year, the company says it’s making the experience more immersive.

The 2022 Recaps includes a new “Top Trends” stat that will show you which artists you discovered before others. There’s also a new “Identity” feature that will give you a personalized “music personality” that captures your music vibe based on your listening habits. In addition, the Recaps share the unique-to-YouTube content, such as remixes and live performances, that you loved the most this year.

You can also see shareable cards highlighting your top songs from each season. You can even choose to personalize them by adding your own images directly from Google Photos.

Last year, you could only access your Recap through YouTube Music. This year, the experience is accessible through the main YouTube app. You can access your Recap by heading to the YouTube app on iOS or Android and searching for “2022 Recap.” You will then see your Recap playlist and you can click on the stories banner to view your personalized stories.

Once you see your stats, you can share your 2022 Recap on apps such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook by tapping the arrow at the bottom of each story. A big part of the success behind Spotify Wrapped is the ability to share your stats on social media, so it’s no surprise that Youtube has also made it possible to share your results with others.

YouTube is getting ahead of the game against Spotify, which hasn’t rolled out its Wrapped experience yet. The streaming service sent an email to users last week saying that Wrapped would be coming soon. The launch of YouTube’s Recap experience comes the same day as Apple Music rolled out its revamped Replay feature.

YouTube Music starts rolling out its personalized end-of-year Recaps by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Apple Music has launched a revamped 2022 Replay experience to let subscribers explore their top songs, artists, albums, genres and more. Although Replay is still only accessible via the web, the redesign brings the annual recap feature closer to the interactive nature of Spotify’s Wrapped experience.

Replay now includes a Stories-like highlight reel that displays your listening activity for the year. Each page includes animated transitions with music playing in the background. You can also see if you are the in the top 100 listeners of a specific artist or genre, which is similar to Spotify’s Wrapped functionality that notifies users if they’re in the top percentage of listeners for a specific artist.

One feature that sets Replay apart from Wrapped is that users can continue checking Replay until December 31 to see if their listening patterns evolve before the start of 2023. Unlike Wrapped, the Replay feature will continue evolving until the end of the year.

Once you see your stats, you can share your 2022 Replay on social media or messaging platforms. A big part of the success behind Spotify Wrapped is the ability to share your stats on social media, so it’s no surprise that Apple has also made it possible to share your results with others.

You can see your Apple Music Replay by visiting replay.music.apple.com and logging in with the same Apple ID you use for Apple Music. From there, you can play highlights or scroll through the page for more detailed insights.

Apple Music’s Replay rollout comes ahead of Spotify’s Wrapped launch. The streaming service sent an email to users last week saying that Wrapped would be coming soon. The launch of Replay comes the same day that YouTube rolled out its Recap feature.

Apple Music launches revamped 2022 Replay experience with new highlight reel by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Expectations for this year’s holiday spend online were lukewarm, but initial activity — driven by deep discounts — has bucked predictions. Cyber Monday pulled in $11.3 billion in sales online according to figures from Adobe Analytics, which tracks seasonal e-commerce activity. This is 5.8% more than consumers spent on the same day last year (when $10.7 billion was recorded in sales, a drop on 2020’s $10.8 billion), and sets a record both for the day and the year so far.

The day is typically the biggest of the long weekend — in part because sales continue but people have returned to work — and it rounds out five days that overall exceeded estimates. As we reported, Thanksgiving saw $5.29 billion in sales and Black Friday had $9.12 billion in sales — both also up on earlier forecasts. The weekend between had $9.55 billion in sales. Altogether, “Cyber Week” — the period including those holidays and the days back at work as people continue to shop online — will reach $35.27 billion in sales online, up 4% over last year and accounting for 16.7% of all sales in the months of November and December.

Adobe expects $210 billion in sales for the two months, and so far in the season mobile has accounted for 44% of sales.

Salesforce separately released its own preliminary figures of $6 billion for Cyber Monday in the evening Monday. We’ll update these as we get more complete results.

Notably, although inflation is definitely being felt in the U.S., Adobe said that these figures were based on more transactions overall. At the peak, people were spending $12.8 million per minute on Monday, and Adobe said that its digital price index, which tracks prices across 18 categories, said that prices have been nearly flat in recent months.

Deep discounts — retailers perhaps anticipating needing to have something more to lure shoppers — have played a big role, too, as have the sheer availability of goods after shortages of the years before.

“With oversupply and a softening consumer spending environment, retailers made the right call this season to drive demand through heavy discounting,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights, in a statement. “It spurred online spending to levels that were higher than expected, and reinforced e-commerce as a major channel to drive volume and capture consumer interest.”

Discounts on electronics were as strong as 25% off (they were 8% in the same period last year), and the biggest sales were in toys with average discounts of 34%.

Adobe says it calculates its data based on one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, covering 100 million SKUs, and 18 product categories.

A lot of the buying was being done in preparation for the holidays, and that’s reflected in most popular categories. Top products included games, gaming consoles, Legos, Hatchimals, Disney Encanto, Pokémon cards, Bluey, Dyson products, strollers, Apple Watches, drones, and digital cameras, it said. Toys as a category saw a 452% boost in sales versus a day in October.

In other trends, buy-now-pay-later transactions (BNPL) continued to be force in how purchases are being made, although they appeared to be down slightly on Monday compared to Black Friday and the weekend: part of the reason has to do with shopping-cart sizes, Adobe said: people are more likely to use BNPL when totals are higher. Overall Cyber Week BNPL orders were up 85% over last week, with revenues up 88%.

Mobile also continues to account for a big proportion of buying, although Cyber Monday’s 43% of all online sales when people are back at their desks, was definitely down from the 55% of purchases on Thanksgiving.

The big question now will be whether online retailers, and shoppers, sustain this activity or whether this was an outsized push around discounts that will settle down in the days and weeks to come. Layoffs that we’ve been seeing in the e-commerce sector, and depressed valuations for companies in the space, are two indicators of more challenging times to come.

Cyber Monday online sales hit a record $11.3B, driven by demand, not just inflation, says Adobe by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Apple debuted its first podcast award today with Slate’s “Slow Burn” as a winner for this year. The company said that the award is to celebrate the “outstanding quality, innovation, and impact” of the show.

“Slow Burn” first launched in 2017, and its latest season about Roe v. Wade was released on June 1, 2022 — a month after the draft decision of the reversal leaked. The season, hosted by Slate executive editor Susan Matthews had four episodes that discuss historical events leading up to the 1973 decision by the Supreme Court ruled that constitution grants a right to abortion.

Apple said that “Slow Burn” is one of the all-time popular podcasts on the platform clocking more than 100 million downloads. While the show is free, Slate offers bonus content from its catalog through its Slate Plus subscription available for $9.99 per month. The company is also offering a $99.99 per year annual subscription for a limited time.

The company said that the showmakers are releasing six “Slow Burn” extra episodes for free that contain personal stories and extended follow-up interviews with people featured in the series.

Apple’s podcast award comes nearly three years after the company first introduced its Music Awards. In August, the company introduced two new charts — Top Subscriber Shows and Top Subscriber Channels — for paid podcasts.

The Cupertino-based tech giant said that next month, its editors from 100 countries will publish a podcast list called “shows we loved” along with year-end charts for popular podcasts.

Apple also announced a list of App Store Awards winners earlier today with social networking app BeReal snagging the iPhone app of the year title.

Slate’s ‘Slow Burn’ is the winner of Apple’s first podcast award by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch