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Holoride, the Audi-backed startup, is ready to take its in-vehicle virtual reality entertainment system into the mainstream.

The company unveiled Wednesday at CES 2023 in Las Vegas a device about the size of a smart speaker that can be retrofitted into any vehicle to make it VR ready. The product marks a turning point for a company that has been reliant on partnerships with automakers for its growth.

Today, Holoride’s in-car VR technology is only available in certain 2022 model year (and newer) Audi vehicles. This new product would greatly expand its market reach — if consumers opt to plop down the $799 for package.

The retrofit pack weighs less than a half a pound and mounts via a suction cup on a vehicle’s windshield. The hardware is equipped with a lithium-ion battery that lasts for 14 hours on one charge, and an included USB-C to USB-A cord that plugs into the vehicle. Up to two headsets can be connected to holoride retrofit simultaneously, allowing two passengers to enjoy holoride at the same time in the car.

The pack includes the retrofit hardware, HTC VIVE Flow headset, a one-year subscription to the holoride platform, and a safety strap. The holoride retrofit is also available as a standalone purchase for $199.

“The release of our holoride retrofit kicks off a new chapter in holoride’s journey. Our vision of delivering a manufacturer agnostic entry point into the ‘Motorverse’ has finally arrived,” Holoride CEO and co-founder Nils Wollny said in a statement. “Now, any vehicle can serve as your gateway into holoride’s adaptive virtual experiences where each new ride becomes the blueprint for your next immersive adventure.”

Holoride retrofit works similar to its existing technology. The product connects to a VR headset via Bluetooth. Holoride’s software taps into a vehicle’s movement and location data. The virtual reality content syncs with a vehicle’s movements in real time to prevent motion sickness.

The company also announced an update its VR catalog, which includes educational apps like Einstein Brain Trainer and titles such as Cloudbreakers: Leaving Haven, from Schell Games and the Russo Brothers-founded creative firm Superconductor. Holoride announced that subscribers will now have access to a new game, Pixel Ripped 1995: On the Road (PEGI7), from the studio ARVORE. The full lineup also includes a custom web browser and an Android mirroring feature for smartphone screens.

Holoride launches new device to bring VR entertainment to any vehicle by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

3D printing stalwart Formlabs today showed off a series of new solutions that enables its customers to dramatically increase their 3D printing output. The result is better large-scale manufacturing options, and a significant reduction in cost-per-part, given that machines don’t have to sit around waiting for operators to fill resin tanks or remove parts.

The Automation Ecosystem, as the company is calling it, made its debut at CES in Las Vegas today. We took a closer look.

The main evolution of the system is to increase printer utilization, so users can produce parts and prototypes around the clock. It’ll no doubt be a boon for its existing customers, including a large-scale adaptation in consumer products, prototyping, product design and dental applications. The Automation Ecosystem can be used to expand a Form 3+ or Form 3B+ 3D printer to a scalable fleet of 3D printers.

“The Formlabs Automation Ecosystem is a seamless solution for ramping up production with 3D printer fleets, staying true to the ease of use of all Formlabs products, so anyone can make anything. These solutions will enable companies such as dental labs, service bureaus, and internal job shops to ramp up production without increasing labor requirements, or expensive capital investment, making 3D printing for production more cost-effective,” said Formlabs Chief Product Officer Dávid Lakatos said. “Formlabs users have recently achieved a major milestone, with more than 100 million parts printed on our 3D printers, and by adding this ecosystem, Formlabs is increasing the capacity so users can deliver further 3D printing innovation.”

The company claims that the innovations launched today provide a three-time increase in productivity while saving up to 80% on labor, lowering cost per part by 30%, and reducing packaging waste up to 90%.

The full suite of products includes Form Auto, which includes automatic part removal. Once the part is removed, the next part can start printing. Fleet Control is an improvement in the company’s existing software suite – Dashboard and PreForm – to introduce queue management and optimizes workflows. Finally, the High Volume Resin System increases resin capacity by 500%, from the 1-liter cartridge the printers use today, to a five-liter tank, compatible with the Form 3+, Form 3B+. Form 3L and Form 3BL.

Formlabs inches towards mass manufacturing with high-volume 3D printing solutions by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

DoorDash is launching a new ‘Package Pickup’ offering that lets users request a delivery person to pick up their prepaid package from their home and drop it off at a UPS, FedEx or USPS location. The company began piloting this feature in March 2022 as part of a small beta test, and is now officially rolling it out. For a fee of $5 for standard users or $3 for DashPass members, users can get up to five packages picked up and dropped off in the same order.

To get started, you need to select the Packages hub on the top of the DoorDash homepage and select the carrier that corresponds to the package you’re returning. Or, you can type “package” into your search bar. Then, you need to get your packages ready and attach a prepaid shipping label to them. If you have a shipping QR code, you can send the QR code directly to your delivery person in the DoorDash app. Your delivery person will send you a confirmation photo after dropping off your package at the designated store.

During the beta testing, DoorDash said it wanted to help users avoid the tedious task of taking a package to a post office in order to fulfill a return. The company noted that although returns are common, they can be time-consuming, which is why it wanted to create a way to simplify the return process by leveraging its current local logistics infrastructure. DoorDash also said delivery people on its app are always looking for new ways to earn through the platform and that this new feature will give them an additional option to do so.

DoorDash says it plans to continue to explore new ways to offer more convenience for its users, while giving its delivery people additional chances to earn money on its platform.

DoorDash isn’t the only delivery company that has worked to offer such a service. Back in 2015, Uber offered a“limited-time” optionfor customers to send return packages to post offices. The feature was called “Returns” and was powered by UberRush, whichshut downin 2018. Similarly, a former on-demand shipping startup called Shyp offered a service that picked up packages and delivered them to their destination. The companyended operationsin 2018 after struggling to find a scalable model beyond its launching point in San Francisco.

DoorDash will now return your packages for you by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The performance of a mobile app can impact how customers perceive a brand. According to a survey from Dimensional Research sponsored by HP, 53% of app users who responded said they’ve uninstalled a mobile app with issues like lag, while 37% said that they hold an app responsible for performance problems.

Given the pace of development, good performance isn’t always easy to maintain. Searching for an automatable solution, four siblings — David, Daniil, Anna and Maria Liberman — co-founded Product Science, a startup that develops performance management software for apps. Product Science’s platform analyzes app code to find flaws in the execution, aiming to minimize perceptible crashes, freezes and errors.

“Every couple of years, phones are at least 50% faster, and that’s what distorts our view since we don’t notice how much our apps degrade. But for long-tail users, their experience worsens significantly,” David and Daniil, who serve as Product Science’s co-CEOs, told TechCrunch via email. “At Product Science, our mission is to eliminate delays caused by software inefficiency for people worldwide.”

The Liberman siblings have long been close. In 2005, Daniil and David co-founded Sibilant Interactive, which developed massively multiplayer RPG games. After Sibilant closed up shop in 2008 due to illiquidity, David and Daniil — together with Anna and Maria — co-launched Concept Space, a vendor for motion capture and CGI animation software. The brothers moved to the U.S. a few years later to co-found the fintech startup Frank.Money and AR firm Kernel AR, which Snap acquired for an undisclosed amount in October 2016.

At Snap, the Liberman siblings — including Anna and Maria — oversaw an animation studio and worked on Snapchat’s 3D Bitmoji feature, which let users create full-body versions of their avatars. While at Snap, David and Daniil said that they were tasked with production operations as well, specifically solving performance issues with Snap’s app for Android.

That’s when they had the idea for Product Science. Together with Anna and Maria, David and Daniil launched the Libermans Company, a holding company in which each sibling has a 25% stake, and started Product Science as a venture under the holding company.

Through the Libermans Company, the siblings pledged to investors all the projects they might start through 2051, allowing them to fund Product Science at the pre-seed stage. The Libermans Company includes any debts and assets the siblings might gain as well as profits; investors get a proportional share of whatever wealth the siblings create, but don’t have say over how they allocate their time and effort.

“We realized that existing performance and observability tools were ineffective and decided to reinvent the application performance management industry,” David and Daniil said. “By replacing manual instrumentation and embedding right into the build processes, Product Science enables anyone to identify causes of app performance issues.”

Product Science — which has raised $18 million in seed funding to date from backers including Slow Ventures, Coatue, K5 Global, Mantis Ventures, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, Insight Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock and unnamed Snap VPs — analyzes pre-production code using AI. The company’s tools and plugins for integrated development environments show video recordings of apps next to performance traces, providing insights into what’s happening behind the screen.

David and Daniil say one company, Saturn, used Product Science’s platform to reduce their app’s start time from 4 seconds to 0.7 seconds. “Engineers can see the video recording of their app synchronized with the profiler data recorded on any mobile device [using Product Science’s tools],” the brothers added. “[They can] scrub through a video recording and dive into the code executed behind the scenes.”

Product Science counts Fortune 500 companies across sectors like social media, travel, e-commerce and banking as customers, although David and Daniil wouldn’t disclose how many customers the startup has at present. Annual recurring revenue stands north of $3 million, according to David and Daniil, while Product Science — which was recently valued at $200 million, a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch — aims to grow from 40 employees to roughly 100 by the end of the year.

“We realize that the industry will slow down and want to make sure we are more flexible with our enterprise offerings and can rapidly grow the AI vision of the product,” David and Daniil said. “Product Science will use the money to fuel its growth: we equally distribute raised capital between attracting new customers, getting key hires and refining our proprietary AI algorithm.”

One of those refinements will come in the form of a new capability that suggests optimizations while engineers write code in their IDE of choice. The long-term vision is to train Product Science’s AI to automatically fix underperforming app code, David and Daniil said.

That continued differentiation will likely be the key to Product Science’s success. There’s plenty of rivals in the app performance monitoring space, after all, including platforms like Groundcover, ServiceNow (through its acquisition of Lightstep), Instabug, Sentry, Embrace and even Cisco.

The market for app performance monitoring was worth over $5.9 billion in 2021, byone estimate.

“There is both an opportunity and a challenge in the current environment,” David and Daniil added. “The challenge is that most software-as-a-service startups are experiencing longer sales cycles and enterprise is actively reducing their spending; the opportunity for Product Science is that since users are also reducing their spending, the tool is becoming more and more of a must-have for business-to-consumer companies since you can now solve your performance issues pre-production and retain customers and reduce churn significantly.”

Product Science, which develops mobile app performance monitoring tools, lands $18M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Roku today is expanding its product line to include a range of smart TVs that are the first ever to be both designed and built by Roku itself. The RokuSelect andRoku Plus Series TVs will be Roku-branded HD and 4K TVs available across 11 models, ranging from 24” to 75” in size, and made to work well with Roku’s growing line of audio products, like its Roku TV Wireless Soundbar, as well as other Roku accessories, like its Voice Remote.

All of Roku’s new HD TVs will include the Roku Voice Remote, while the Plus models will come with the higher-end Roku Voice Remote Pro. All models will support popular features like “Find My Remote” and Private Listening.

The TVs, like those from Roku’s partners, will run the Roku OS — the company’s own smart TV operating system that provides access to ad-supported movies and shows through The Roku Channel, live content through the Live TV Channel Guide, a curated selection of free in-season movies and shows through its “Featured Free” collection, voice search, and the ability to add on various streaming channels, both free and subscription-based.

The company says its new Roku Select and Plus Series TVs will be available in the U.S. beginning spring of 2023 with retail prices that range from $119 to $999 for the lineup of 24” – 75” models.

The company will also make an OLED TV reference design available to its Roku TV partners, to supplement the 11 reference designs that have already gone into production, including those for 2K, 4K, and 8K TVs.

The new product announcements come on the heels of Roku’s third-quarter earnings, which worried investors despite topping Wall Street estimates with revenue of $761.4 million, up 12% year over year, and a net loss of 88 cents per share, below the $1.28 expected. The company was then projecting a weak Q4 — typically a top quarter — with expectations of total net revenue of around $800 million or a decline of 7.5% year over year, Variety reported at the time. Roku said the decline was related to “macroeconomic headwinds” and advertisers’ tightened budgets.

New Roku-branded TVs could, in theory, help to boost device sales as consumers could opt for the company’s own brand other others, while also allowing Roku to generate revenue from its own hardware.

“Our goal is to continue to create an even better TV experience for everyone,” said Mustafa Ozgen, Roku’s President of Devices. “These Roku-branded TVs will not only complement the current lineup of partner-branded Roku TV models, but also allow us to enable future smart TV innovations,” Ozgen added.

Roku unveils its first-ever TVs designed and built by the company by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch