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Twitter is making the algorithmic timeline named “For You” the default feed on iOS. If you are getting a sense of déjà vu, you are not dreaming. The company has tried to pull this stunt previously only to give the option to switch back to a chronological timeline after a lot of backlashes.

So what’s different this time? The Elon Musk-led company is now showing both algorithmic and chronological feeds side-by-side. Users can switch between them by swiping on their phone screens. Until now, users had to tap on the sparkle icon in the top right corner to switch between the “Home” and “Latest” timelines. Twitter is justifying its latest change by saying that users can now easily swipe between the renamed “For You” and “Following” timelines.

But the flaw with this design is that users will see the algorithmic timeline by default and eventually they might use the chronological timeline less.

Another annoying thing about this change is that if you use pinned list on your account for alternative timelines, you will now need to swipe more to switch between these lists.

We can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Musk tweeted last month that the “main timeline should allow for an easy sideways swipe between top, latest, trending, and topics that you follow.”

Last month, Twitter noted that it was taking steps to show more tweets from people you don’t follow in your timeline. At the time, the company said that this change would contribute to showing the “best” content on the platform to everyone.

Twitter is not the only guilty party in pushing algorithmic feeds. TikTok already shows users an algorithmic feed, also named “For You,” by default when users open the app. Instagram has been pushing suggested content to users as well. While the company gives users the option to switch to a chronological or a favorites feed, there is no setting to set one of these timelines as the default timeline. But Instagram is not stopping there. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is planning to double the amount of recommended content by this year’s end.

Making an algorithmic timeline the default feed is not the only change the company is bringing. Musk said Twitter is building features for people to change font size, and add styles like bold, italic, and underline. He noted that the goal for this is to have users “publish long-form content natively” on the platform.

Twitter makes algorithmic timeline default on iOS by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

The app ecosystem’s nonstop growth finally slipped this past year. An annual review of the app economy by mobile analytics firm data.ai (previously App Annie) found that consumer spending on mobile apps declined for the first time in 2022 after seeing 19% year-over-year growth the year prior. Consumer spending dropped by 2% in 2022, the report said, reaching $167 billion. Meanwhile, downloads grew by 11% year-over-year to 255 billion while hours spent in Android app apps alone grew 9% to reach 4.1 trillion.

The new analysis, found in the firm’s annual “State of Mobile” report is based on consumer spending across all app stores, including third-party Android app stores in China. It shows the impact of a down economy on what, until now, has largely been a growth industry where every year saw apps raking in more money than the year before.

“For the first time, macroeconomic factors are dampening growth in mobile spend,” noted data.ai CEO Theodore Krantz, in a statement about the firm’s new findings. “Consumer spend is tightening while demand for mobile is the gold standard,” he added.

In years past, mobile games drove much of consumer spending on apps, but as subscriptions became a more popular way to generate revenue from non-game apps, that gap has narrowed.

As it turned out, non-game apps have proven to be more resilient in a down economy, data.ai found, possibly because consumers view apps as more essential than games. In 2022, spending on games dropped 5% to $110 billion, while spending on non-game apps increased 6% to $58 billion — the latter, driven by streaming subscriptions, dating apps, and short-form video apps.

Another angle that demonstrates the disproportionate impact the economy had on games is by looking at how many games in 2022 surpassed either $10 million, $100 million, or $1 billion in revenues. This year, the number of games in each of those categories fell by 1%, 4% and 33%, respectively.

In total, 1419 apps and games topped $10 million annually in 2022, 224 topped $100 million and just 10 topped $1 billion.

Ahead of data.ai’s report, Apple on Tuesday released its own 2022 App Store metrics which touted a record $320 billion in money paid to developers since the App Store’s founding. While some back-of-the-napkin math suggested consumer spending may have slowed on its platform, it’s not possible to come up with exact figures because app developers, as a group, no longer pay Apple a 30% commission on in-app purchases. Some indie developers may have qualified for an Apple small business discount. Plus, Apple offers different commission structures for apps providing access to media and those run by some news publishers (as does Google).

Though data.ai’s report shows tha consumer spending clearly took a hit in 2022, other areas of the app economy saw growth, including daily time spent per user which grew a modest 3% year-over-year to reach 5 hours per day in top mobile markets — or as much as 1/3 of daily waking hours, the firm notes.

Among the top ten markets analyzed, several topped 5 hours per day, including Indonesia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Korea. Meanwhile, time spent grew the fastest over four years in Saudi Arabia, Australia and Singapore at 68%, 67%, and 62%, respectively.

Consumers tended to spend most of their time in 3 app categories, which accounted for half the time spent on mobile: Social Media/Communication (19.5% of total time); Entertainment/Short Video (17% of total time); and Entertainment/Video Sharing (12.7% of total time).

The first category — Social Media/Communication — includes WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Telegram, LINE, and Discord, while the Entertainment and Short Video category is where you’ll find TikTok as well as Kwai, Vido Video, Baidu Haokan, and Snack Video. The last category of Entertainment and Video Sharing includes long-form video like YouTube, YouTube Kids and bilibili.

Mobile ad spending also grew 14% year-over-year to reach $336 billion in 2022, though data.ai warns this growth will slow in the face of economic headwinds. Short-form video apps, like TikTok and YouTube, are expected to drive much of this ad spend as social networking platforms decline.

Downloads climbed in 2022 as well, including an 8% year-over-year rise in game installs to reach 90 billion, and non-game downloads reaching 165 billion, up 13%. Popular genres driving this trend included Simulation Driving, Hypercasual Simulation, and Simulation Sports in games. App downloads were driven by personal loan apps (up 81%), Buy Now, Pay Later apps (up 47%), Coupons & Rewards app (up 27%), and Budget & Expense trackers (up 19%).

However, both the crypto trading and investing app categories saw their app downloads drop by 55% year-over-year.

The full report takes a deeper dive into other mobile trends in 2022, including those impacting sectors like finance, retail, social, video, food & drink, travel, health & fitness/sports, and more. Gen Z trends are highlighted as well, such as their commitment to video, user-generated content, mindfulness apps, and their interest in friend-finding apps like Yubo, Hoop and Bumble (which has a friend-finding feature).

Data.ai also revealed the year’s top apps across downloads, consumer spend and monthly active users.

Last year, TikTok was the top app by downloads and spending, but Facebook was top by monthly active users.

2022 delivers a bit of a twist as Instagram edged out TikTok for the No. 1 spot by downloads, though the other two categories’ No. 1’s remained the same. And while much has been said about Meta’s decline this year, its apps are still holding their own by active users — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger hold the top four spots on the list by monthly actives.

Video and dating apps continue to pull in the most revenue, with Tinder and Disney+ still highly ranked, behind TikTok — which was also the top app social app by consumer spending. The report noted that TikTok also this year bacme the second non-game app to top $6 billion in all-time consumer spending — only Tinder has seen higher revenues. This year, TikTok reached the top spot with more than $3 billion in consumer spending.

The app economy slowed for the first time in 2022, with consumer spend down 2% to $167 billion by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Project Eaden, a Berlin-based food technology company, believes it has cracked the code for producing whole cuts of plant-based meat alternatives using a proprietary fiber spinning technology.

Investors think so too, adding €2.1 million (about $2.3 million) of additional funding to a previous seed round so that Project Eaden can continue development and accelerate the launch of its first product, a plant-based steak, this year.

Materials scientist David Schmelzeisen, mymuesli founder Hubertus Bessau and ex-Zalando manager Jan Wilmking founded Project Eaden in early 2022.

The pre-revenue company is using bio fibers, the building blocks of most animals and plants and a key component in the creation of meat cuts, as the center of its technology, Schmelzeisen explained to TechCrunch.

Project Eaden produces edible plant-based protein fibers, similar to those already being used by the textiles, aerospace and automotive industries, that mimic the texture and appearance of animal meats. The fibers start out thin, like thread, and increasingly are built upon and wound around spools and fed into a machine that bundles the fiber together into the finished product.

Schmelzeisen says this type of technology yields a better-tasting product that looks and acts like traditional meat; for example, it is juicy.

“The major thing is texture,” he added. “We create fibers which have several material components so that when you bite through each of the million fibers, you have this kind of bite resistance that real meat has when you chew it. It makes a real difference. We believe we have a unique chance to build an outstanding company, from a unique technology angle and to create something that is cool.”

U.S. regulators are still developing how the alternative protein industry will be labeled and monitored. Meanwhile, with scalability and cost being some of the biggest challenges to mainstream production of alternative proteins, Schmelzeisen believes the fiber technology is more scalable and can be used beyond traditional meat, like chicken, pork and beef, but also to make fish and seafood. In addition, it is less costly than other methods of producing alternative proteins, like extrusion, which extracts moisture to create a “lump” of plant-based protein that can be shaped into various meat-like products.

Project Eaden is one of a handful of companies utilizing fiber spinning technology and attracting venture capital for its approach. Last March, Tender, formerly known as Boston Meats, raised $12 million for its fiber technology that it uses to create both plant-based and cell-cultivated proteins.

The new portion of capital was driven by Creandum, Magnetic and Atlantic Food Labs and closed in December. Including the seed extension, Project Eaden has raised €10.1 million (about $10.8 million) in seed funding to date.

A previous round of €8 million was raised last June from a group of investors, again led by Creandum, and included Atlantic Food Labs, Shio Capital, Trellis Road and a group of angel investors, including former Rügenwalder Mühle managing director Godo Röben.

“Eating meat is associated with excessive land and water usage and unsustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions,” Carl Fritjofsson, general partner at Creandum, said in a statement. “But, for most people, it’s simply too much of a pleasure to give up on. Until today, existing plant-based options haven’t solved this dilemma, as they lack compelling taste, texture and look despite higher prices. Project Eaden has the potential to become the industry’s game changer.”

The majority of the financing will go into technology development, including building up Project Eaden’s R&D and food grade materials teams and partnering with culinary experts that will debut the product once it is ready. Additionally, the company is refurbishing a manufacturing space so that it can produce its own product at scale, Wilmking said in an interview.

A future round of funding will accelerate the plant build, Schmelzeisen said. The company is currently at a stage where a laboratory is set up and will begin prototype production soon, with plans to be able to go to market toward the end of this year.

Looking into the future, plans are for the company to move from prototype manufacturing to a highly automated production facility, and then potentially into more facilities and or partnerships, Schmelzeisen added.

Project Eaden’s fiber technology poised to spin threads into whole cuts of ‘meat’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

TikTok has revolutionized the way people consume and share information. Now a startup called Vylo wants to take the short video format a step further and lets users share their thoughts about sports, current affairs, and other categories of news by filming themselves talking.

My first reaction to the idea was: why does one need to share news comments via video clips? Can’t it just happen in the text-based comment section of The New York Times or other news websites?

Tyler Reynolds, founder and CEO of Vylo, believes the future of news lies in videos. “We’re looking forward to building the kingdom of news and discourse and what news platforms will look like very shortly in the future,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Developed by a team in the U.S., the Netherlands and Ukraine, Vylo combines news aggregation and video-driven social media. Its home tab features a stream of news compiled from major publications and curated by an in-house team. Under each story is an option to add one’s video response. For those who don’t feel comfortable showing faces, audio is an option, too.

A big VC name is vouching for Vylo. Kleiner Perkins Fairchild Fund IV led the startup’s $2 million pre-seed round that has recently closed. Other investors from the round included Brian Cornell, CEO of Target; Ryan Howard, a 3x Major League Baseball All-Star; Curt Shi from Welinder Shi Capital; 8808 Ventures, the venture firm of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse; among other angel investors.

One of the appeals of video-based news discussion is that it adds a human touch, Reynolds argued. “You and I and eight other friends go out to lunch and we’re talking about everything from COVID to Joe Biden to travel to whatever because we’re each other’s trusted sources. There’re these moments that we have all the time… We could recreate those moments with a tech platform.”

User-generated video commentary is nothing new, but Reynolds thinks the barrier of entry is too high on existing channels like YouTube, where users need to first eloquently and succinctly sum up the news. With Vylo, on the other hand, creators can simply give their two-minute take on a news piece item that already exists on the app, an aspect that the founder believes lowers the bar for news commentary.

In effect, Vylo is visualizing the response section on traditional news sites and democratizing video commentary.

The “social” aspect of Vylo is the “Trending” tab that displays popular video and audio comments, which are ranked by their “insightfulness”, similar to how readers upvote comments on traditional news websites. For a more personalized news digest, users can create their own “Newsstand” by following various outlets and topics. Comments are vetted by the third-party content moderation provider Hive before going live.

Break from the past

Twitter has long been the world’s digital public square, but as Elon Musk turns the social media giant upside down, upset users are leaving in droves.

Nonetheless, Vylo doesn’t plan to be a Twitter alternative like Mastodon. “It’s like a bunch of dogs chasing tails,” said Reynolds. “Everyone’s focused on the here and now. But our tech and tech platforms will evolve. We have no interest to be a Twitter competitor. We are looking much further into what’s the future of these things.

“One important note is the factor of people showing their faces and showing their voices. That’s something that we really aren’t afraid to be rolling out now because it’s going to be a mainstay very soon,” he added.

“I think the future of news is decentralized,” suggested Shi from Welinder Shi Capital, pointing to the participatory nature of Vylo. “The young generation doesn’t really get their news from news sites anymore. They are on Twitter and Instagram, but these platforms aren’t primarily for news, so there is a gap to be filled.”

Vylo launched its public beta version a few weeks ago and has drawn over 500 users. Monetization is not something on its imminent agenda, but when the time comes, the startup is weighing a few options, including an ad-free user subscription, a revenue-sharing model with content creators, and helping paywalled publications drive subscriptions from which it can take a cut.

Kleiner Perkins-backed Vylo thinks the future of news is video commentary by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Carta, the 11-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit whose core business is selling software to investors to track their portfolios, has sued its former CTO, Jerry Talton, who the company says was fired “for cause” almost three weeks ago, on Friday, December 23.

In its lawsuit, Carta is suing Talton for damages, citing “his wrongful and illegal acts as an executive of Carta” and suggesting he both betrayed the company and sexually harassed its employees despite being given a role that came with “hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and benefits, and substantial equity awards.”

On first read, it sounds like a company throwing the kitchen sink at a would-be whistleblower whose tactics were ham-handed (and illegal, says Carta).

Specifically, according to the complaint, Talton was put on administrative leave in October of last year after submitting a letter to Carta’s board of directors, flagging various “problems” with the company’s culture.

Carta says Talton’s leave was meant to enable the board to “facilitate” an “independent” investigation, but that during that period, the company discovered that Talton had preserved audio recordings of workplace-video meetings with Carta’s general counsel without her knowledge. How? According to the complaint: “[D]uring a confidential mediation involving a female former Carta employee (a mediation to which Talton was not a party), on November 8, 2022, Carta’s General Counsel April Lindauer was copied on an email from Talton to that former employee and her counsel, seemingly by mistake, stating ‘I think you should read the whole thing’ and including a transcript of an audio recording between Talton and Lindauer from September 27, 2022. The email also included an indication that the audio recording was uploaded to the file-sharing platform, DropBox.”

Oops.

The company says it subsequently demanded that Talton return all recordings and transcripts and other Carta property to Carta and that he also provide copies of all recordings and transcripts to “company-authorized investigators.”

Talton, who Carta believes “also surreptitiously recorded at least two members of Carta’s Board of Directors, as well as Carta’s Founder and CEO, and other Carta executives and employees,” said no.

We reached out to both Carta and Talton earlier this evening for comment; neither had responded as of our publication time.

A spokesperson separately told the San Francisco Business Times that Carta cofounder and CEO Henry Ward is serving as interim CTO until the position is filled.

The lawsuit appears likely to damage both parties.

Toward the end of Carta’s long list of accusations against Talton, Carta says that Talton both sent and received “sexually explicit, offensive, discriminatory and harassing messages with at least nine women including during work hours and on Carta’s systems,” and that Talton sought and obtained “benefits and privileges to which he was not entitled, including without limitation, misuse of his corporate credit card for personal matters, and repeated attempts to book travel outside of company policy.”

Before Carta, Talton — who has a PhD in computer science from Stanford and two degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — spent a year-and-a-half as an engineering manager at Slack. He also co-founded a since-shuttered software startup that was seed funded by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, and spent two years as a research scientist at Intel, according to LinkedIn.

He joined Carta as a director of engineering in 2018 and was promoted to CTO in 2020.

Carta meanwhile has previously been flagged for having a”culture” problem. In 2020, the company’s former VP of marketing sued Carta, accusing the outfit of gender discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination and of violating the California Equal Pay Act. (We featured that case here.) Soon after, four employees spoke on the record with the New York Times, telling the outlet that when they voiced concerns about the way the company is run, they were sidelined, demoted or given pay cuts.

The problem appears to extend to the company’s treatment of some of its customers. Several who TechCrunch interviewed over the last couple of months have expressed dissatisfaction with Carta and the service they have received from its representatives. One, a fund manager who is in the midst of transitioning off the platform currently, told this editor last week that his team had “four different account managers in the less than a two-year engagement at Carta; it certainly didn’t help with continuity and understanding of our fund and needs.”

A separate fund manager who we interviewed last week complained of a “lack of communication internally,” saying that it’s “like working with four service providers.” Carta will “ask you for a document that they have on file and should know that they have on file,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to keep track; that’s why I’m paying for fund administration. They’ll tell you to check out ‘the portal’ and the portal is terrible.”

It’s “miserable,” this person added. “It’s like a tech-first solution to a service industry and I think they need an awakening.”

Carta has roughly 2,000 employees, judging by its LinkedIn profile, though that number is presumably lower in reality. Carta laid off 16% of its employees during the height of the pandemic; last month, according to a conversation posted to the anonymous professional network Blind, Ward told employees that another layoff was in the works.

Carta has raised $1.1 billion altogether from investors, according to Crunchbase. It announced its eighth and most recent round of funding in August 2021: a $500 million Series G that was led by Silver Lake and valued the company at $7.4 billion.

In addition to Silver Lake, some of its biggest backers include Spark Capital, Social Capital, Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Pictured above: Carta cofounder and CEO Henry Ward; he incubated the company, originally called eShares, with serial entrepreneur and longtime investor Manu Kumar.

Carta, previously sued for gender discrimination, is now suing its former CTO by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

There are some mega-trends playing out across developed-world workforces that startups are picking up on. There’s the digitisation of healthcare, the ‘platforming’ of employee services, and the macro effects of older employees, combined with the cost of living crisis for new parents.

Founded in London in 2018, Peppy offer services around menopause, fertility, pregnancy and early parenthood to a corporate customer base, which then offers it for free to employees. The twist is that those services are largely individualised, with personal video consultations and the like.

Peppy was partly lucky and part prescient: the massive digitisation that occurred during the COVID-19 Pandemic threw employee services like this online, by necessity.

Employees using Peppy can access experts via a mobile app, with instant messaging, group chat, video consultations, live events, articles, videos and programs, as well as join communities.

Back in 2021 we covered how it had raised a $10M Series A led round by Felix Capital.

It’s now secured funding to expand in the US, with a $45m Series B led by AlbionVC. The round was joined by Kathaka, MTech Capital, Simplyhealth and Sony Innovation Fund. Previous investors Felix Capital, Hambro Perks, Outward VC and Seedcamp also participated.

Peppy started out addressing the oft-ignored issue of menopause support as an employee benefit. This was a fairly untapped area, which led it to gaining a lot of growth quite quickly (the global menopause market reached a valuation of $15.4bn, and is expected to continue growing at five percent annually through 2030, according to some estimates). In the US, around 6,000 women reach menopause every day.
Peppy now supports endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), conditions that each affect roughly one in 10 women in the US.

Dr Mridula Pore, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Peppy, said in a statement: “We’re on a mission to become a household name across the world and our Series B funding is just the start. We already dominate Europe’s employer-funded gender-based healthcare market.”

Peppy clients now include Accenture, Adobe, Canada Life, Disney, and Marsh McLennan.

Peppy secures a $45M Series B to expand its B2B2C health services platform to the US by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Virgin Orbit’s much-hyped launch from Cornwall, U.K. on Monday ended in failure, with the company announcing that the mission experienced an “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit.

The “Start Me Up” mission attracted much attention; not only was it the company’s sixth launch, it was also billed as the first-ever space flight from the United Kingdom and the first-ever orbital launch attempt from the new Spaceport Cornwall, in southeast England. (Other U.K.-based rocket companies, like Orbex and Skyrora, are racing to be the first to conduct a vertical rocket launch from U.K. soil.)

But the anomaly may prove to be a very costly mistake for the company, which has been on shaky financial ground since going public in 2021. The first miscalculation occurred shortly after the company completed its merger with special purpose acquisition company NextGen Acquisition Corp. II at the end of 2021. Virgin Orbit only garnered $228 million in gross proceeds from the merger, falling far short of the projected $483 million the company projected it would receive from the transaction.

That shortfall was followed by dwindling cash reserves. In the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report, it said that as of September 30 it had $71 million cash on hand. The company then received a $25 million injection from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and $20 million from Virgin Investments Ltd. But even with these additional funds, it’s unclear if the company has enough financial runway without needing to seek additional capital.

The company’s previous financial projections have also raised eyebrows. While it’s not unusual for earnings presentations to contain fanciful forecasts, some of those issued by Virgin Orbit have stretched even the most ambitious imaginations. In 2021, the company estimated it would hit $2.1 billion in revenue by 2026. Given that each LauncherOne costs on average of around $12 million, that would mean the vehicle would need to fly a whopping 175 times per year. Keep in mind that SpaceX, far and away the world’s leading launch provider, just hit a record 61 annual launches last year. Virgin Orbit was essentially saying that it would be three times as successful, measured by launch cadence, than SpaceX in just five years.

This is not to say that Virgin Orbit has not had its successes. Indeed, out of the six launch attempts so far, four have been successful. That’s not a rate at which to scoff. But as is becoming more and more clear, at some point, all launch companies have to start making revenue. Otherwise it’s just burned cash, and not much to show for it.

Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

AR/VR/MX took center stage at CES 2023. Automotive trends got a lot of love, as well, as did robotics and the metaverse. Heck, even pee-related gadgets had their moment to shine last week in Vegas. Another trend, however, was ever-present, if decidedly more understanded.

The last few years have been a roller coaster for the smart home. After years of hype, the cracks have begun to show for some of the major players in the space. The most prominent example of late is Amazon’s Echo division. While no doubt being set up as something of a loss leader, few expected a $5 billion a year revenue loss at this late stage.

In addition to the standard tech hype cycle, the smart home has also been cursed by a lack of interoperability. One of the technology’s most hopeful promises is an easy set up. Forget all of those expensive, time-consuming setups that require someone with contracting and electrical know-how — just plug it in, connect the app and you’re off to the races.

But in consumer electronics, the best laid plans and all that. It’s still a relatively young category, with several pain points, but at least one was seemingly easily avoided. If you’ve followed consumer tech with any frequency, you know one thing for sure: Competitors will rarely give an inch. It’s an approach that — in the past — has led to antitrust and other regulatory scrutiny. In recent years, this has manifested itself as app stores and walled gardens.

For the smart home, it’s meant a dearth of interoperability. If you’ve attempted to buy a smart home product, you’re almost certainly familiar with the limitations. Heck, there’s a decent chance you purchased a product and had to return it after finding out the hard way that it didn’t work with HomeKit, Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings or any manner of other ecosystems.

This is the promise of Matter. Announced at the tail end of 2019, the home automation standard is the purview of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). The group was founded by Amazon, Apple, Google, Comcast and the Zigbee Alliance. It operates similarly to organizations like the Bluetooth Special Interest Group and WiFi Alliance. The company list has expanded greatly, but each member gets the same single vote, from Apple, Amazon and Google on down to the smallest startup.

“Manufacturers all agree to send the same commands and all agree to do the same thing when they’ve received those commands,” Jon Harros, the CSA’s director of Certification and Testing Programs, told us in an interview at last week’s CES. “It wouldn’t matter whether the command came from one manufacturer or the other. If you’re receiving it, it will always work in the same way.”

The obvious question in all of this is: Why now? Or, more explicitly, why did this take so long? For starters, the obvious issue alluded to above that most of these big companies would really rather not work with their competitors if they can avoid it. As such, getting everyone on the same page about something like this is a bit of a cat herding scenario.

“Technically, there are a lot of different steps,” says Harros. “Number two, it was also we had to reach a level of maturity within the market and with those global players that everyone understood and recognized that having these walled gardens and having these fractured networks was actually limiting the AOT (automation of things), and that it was time to resolve that issue.”

Effectively, the big players recognized that there was less value in cutting out the competition by demanding manufacturers comply to a single ecosystem than there was in suddenly opening their own offering up to practically every third-party device manufacture by way of a group effort. It’s a remarkable bit of collaboration in an era of closed ecosystems and app stores.

“The IoT started reaching a point where it became obvious to have that reality of the billions of sensors and connected devices that we all know is possible,” says Harros. “They all have a major slice of the pie. They’re all doing very well, but the size of the pie could grow orders of magnitude. You’re now not talking about shipping millions of products, you’re talking about shipping billions.”

More than 2,000 engineers pulled from different member companies were put to work creating a software protocol that would offer cross platform functionality, and provide the sort of product security consumers demand from their smart products in 2023. The initial fruits of that work began rolling out toward the end of last year. Plenty more are still on the way.

“We’ve already had one train arrive at the station as Matter 1.0,” says Harros. “We wanted to make sure we launched on time, with all of the features and primary device types everyone wanted, straight out of the block. Before the train arrived, other trains set off behind it. There are members of the alliance that have been working on things like white goods [appliances], cameras and smart vacuums. They’re already on the way to the train station. They just haven’t arrived yet.”

One of the beauties about the implantation of a software layer is that many existing products will be backward compatible with the standard through an over the air update. Newer products, meanwhile, will carry the Matter logo, which the alliance is hoping will become as ubiquitous as the Bluetooth and WiFi logos. For older products, you’ll be able to check them against the CSA’s online database.

The organization is employing third-party laboratories to put devices through similar testing practices as the ones the FCC has in place.

We absolutely believe that — in a very short matter of time — everyone will recognize the Matter logo, so when a consumer goes to an electronics store or your local home hardware store, they’re just going to look for that logo. You know that if it has that logo, it will interoperate with something else.

Why the Matter logo was everywhere at CES 2023 by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Investment giant Fidelity announced today that it has acquired Shoobx, a venture-backed fintech startup, for an undisclosed amount.

Jason Furtado and Stephan Richter founded Boston-based Shoobx in 2013, according to Crunchbase. The pair went on to raise a known $10 million in funding for the company with investors such as Austin-based Scout Ventures and Steve Papa. Atlas Ventures is also a backer, according to the Wall Street Journal. All 40 of Shoobx’s employees will join Fidelity.

Shoobx is a provider of automated equity management operations and financing software to private companies “at all growth stages,” up to and including an initial public offering. Services it offers include helping companies send offer letters, grant equity to new employees, manage their cap tables and get a 409A valuation report, among other things.

On its website, Shoobx notes that it has been called “Carta on steroids” because its “capabilities rocket past what Carta can provide.” Meanwhile, Carta Crunchbase data indicates that Carta has raised $1.1 billion to date, including a massive $500 million round raised in August 2021, led by Silver Lake. At that time, the company was valued around $7.4 billion, per the same data source. So while we don’t know how much Shoobx was worth at the time of this acquisition, it’s safe to say that its valuation is likely less than that of Carta’s based on how much it has raised over time.

For its part, Fidelity said its purchase of Shoobx is a sign of its commitment to the private market “and will help to satisfy an increasing demand Fidelity sees from private companies to support them as they scale and grow.” The last time Fidelity acquired another company was in 2015, when it acquired wealth planning software company eMoney Advisor, according to a company spokesperson.

Shoobx will be folded into Fidelity’s Stock Plan Services business, which provides equity compensation plan recordkeeping and administration services to nearly 700 companies with 2.5 million plan participants, totaling over $250 billion in plan value. Stock Plan Services is part of Fidelity’s Workplace Investing division, one of the country’s leading workplace benefits providers.

According to Shoobx’s website, the two companies were partners prior to this announcement.

Fidelity makes first acquisition in 7 years, snapping up fintech Shoobx by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Here’s something that seems all but a guarantee: The way we purchase expensive electronics is going to change. Years after the U.S. began moving away from the carrier-based model of phone purchases, it seems as though we’re heading toward another sort of subscription model in the form of hardware as a service.

Even with that in mind, this is a strange one — though Nothing has made breaking from orthodoxy a central tenet of its existence since day one.

As we’ve known for some time, the Phone (1) wasn’t destined for the U.S. market — at least not through any traditional means. Today, however, the London-based firm announced it is available through a far less traditional route. “The United States represents a high potential market for Nothing and so the company is seeking to better understand users’ needs,” the company said in a note sent to TechCrunch.

The “Nothing OS 1.5 Beta” is a $299 program designed to help the company get a better grip on the world’s third-largest smartphone market — one that’s been notoriously difficult to crack. The price includes a Nothing phone that’s yours to keep, even after the program runs its course at the end of June.

Nothing notes:

Please note, the Phone (1)’s distributed are for testing purposes. Whilst these are final models, devices may not work with all US carriers. Since this is a Beta version of the software, users may experience some limitations. Please read the below FAQs before continuing.

Interested parties can sign up for the program starting today and save themselves ~$173 off the retail price. A little nothing for something, if you will.

Want the Nothing phone in the US? Be a beta by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch