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Shenzhen-based home robotics company UBTECH announced this week that it has closed a massive $820 million Series C. The round, led by Tencent and a whole slew of other investors, follows a $100 million Series B and $20 million Series C.

The bipedal robotics maker certainly isn’t a household name here in the States — though the company’s taken a few baby steps over here, including a walking Stormtrooper robot released alongside The Last Jedi. It also debuted a “robotic butler” with a tablet face back at CES in January that seemed more proof of concept than shipping product — though UBTECH has promised a broad 2019 release date.

CEO James Zhou has promised the company will use this huge backing to accelerate its vision of bringing robots into the home.

“As technology evolves to include more voice and touch capabilities, people need new devices that communicate and interact more naturally and intuitively at home, at school and at work,” he said in a release tied to the announcement. “While trends in robots and robotics are developing, no company has yet stepped forward with the resources, vision and products ecosystem to transform robot fantasy and fiction into robot reality. UBTECH is bringing this reality to life by expanding the possibilities for innovation.”

The company says the funding will go into R&D, hires and expanding its global footprint. UBTECH is one of a number of companies pushing home robotics beyond the Roomba, including a rumored upcoming device from Amazon. The technology has been a tough nut to crack in the preceding decades, but an $820 million investment certainly couldn’t hurt. 

Source: Tech Crunch

There will be no “Vine 2” — at least for now. Trying to take on the giant social networks without external funding proved too tall a task for six-second video app Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann. “I’ve made the very difficult decision of postponing the V2 project for an indefinite amount of time. There are several reasons for this, including a bit of ‘sequelitis’, but I’d like to explain the biggest one, which is due to financial and legal hurdles,” Hofmann wrote on the community forums he set up for V2.

Announced in late December out of his frustration regarding how Twitter neglected and eventually shut down Vine, Hofmann had since built a creative tool startup called Byte, and is still leading a virtual reality company called Interspace, but was trying to run V2 as a self-funded personal project on the side. The plan was to launch in 2018 with an app that let you record or upload 2 to 6-second looping videos and much stronger anti-harassment safety features.

But without millions in outside investment, it was an insurmountable task to develop the app, host the videos and grow the audience. While Hofmann didn’t specify, it seems Twitter wasn’t happy about him using the name V2 and an almost identical logo. “The interest has been extremely encouraging, but it has also created some roadblocks . . . The attention has also raised an issue that we might not have faced otherwise: legal fees have been overwhelming,” Hofmann wrote. We’ve asked him and Twitter if Twitter was suing or threatening legal action against Hofmann or V2.

While there’s still no ubiquitous way to share super-short videos, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube are no paltry competitors. So now, Hofmann says, “We take a step back. The code and ideas still exist, but until everything else comes together, we can’t move forward. Again, this is indefinite, which means that it could take a long time. But it’s necessary.”

You can read Hofmann’s full announcement here:

Source: Tech Crunch

A report from the New York City Comptroller’s office asserts that New York residents are paying hundreds of millions in extra rent linked to the effects of Airbnb . Naturally, the company bitterly rejects these findings.

The report, which you can read here, is fairly straightforward. It looks at hundreds of neighborhoods and their various demographics and characteristics, along with how much their rents rose over the last ten years or so. It finds that when controlling for other variables, Airbnb contributes to a part of the rise on its own:

We find that as the share of units listed on Airbnb goes up by one percentage point, rental rates in the neighborhood go up by 1.58 percent, after controlling for neighborhood level demographic and economic changes. The result is statistically significant at the 1-percent level.

By the researchers’ calculations, the total cost of these increases across the city amounted to about $616 million. That came from running their numbers with Airbnb rentals set to zero instead of the actual tens of thousands of listings and seeing what rents would be in that alternative universe.

The amounts of rent increases and the number of Airbnb listings are tightly and reliably correlated, the Comptroller’s office explained. They were careful to control for other factors, for instance a neighborhood becoming trendy or new housing changing the supply. The hypothesis is that Airbnb listings, contrary to the company’s assertions, do in face reduce housing supply, which has a knock-on effect on rent in remaining rentals.

The increases, the report and its accompanying press release say, are concentrated in midtown and lower Manhattan, where 20 percent of the rent increases were attributed to Airbnb effects. The effect was much weaker in the outer boroughs, as you might expect, where density is lower and fewer listings are available.

Airbnb, of course, calls it a pack of lies and takes the opportunity to pontificate a bit (which, to be fair,  Comptroller Stringer did too):

Unfortunately, this report is wrong on the facts, falsely asserting that middle class New Yorkers who share their space are responsible for the rising cost of housing in New York… Pandering to the powerful by attacking middle class families won’t do a thing to make New York more affordable. It’s time to stop the scapegoating and work with us on a solution.

Its criticisms are a mix of reasonable objections and straw men. It rightly points out, for instance, that Airbnb hosts are most frequently just renting out a room a few nights a month for some extra income, which logically should improve affordability, not harm it. Then there’s the idea that Airbnb units tend to pop up in fashionable areas, which are inherently more likely to see rents increase.

Some of Airbnb’s gripes are less reasonable, however.

“The notion that less than 1 percent of housing stock — much of which is only occasionally shared with short-term renters — is the sole source of New York’s housing affordability challenge is simply not credible,” the company writes. That’s true — which is probably why the report say anything like that.

“We never blamed the whole increase in housing costs on one factor – we quite clearly said that Airbnb was just one factor and explained that it’s 9.2% of the increase,” wrote Tyrone Stevens, the Comptroller’s press secretary, in an email to TechCrunch.

Airbnb also criticizes using 2009 as the starting year for its data, saying the financial crisis changed the whole housing market. Then it cites a report showing that a one bedroom in Williamsburg cost the same in 2018 as it did in 2011.

“We picked 2009 as our base year because that was the year prior to Airbnb’s presence in NYC, and it made sense to measure the full impact of the rise of Airbnb. But the choice of base year is utterly irrelevant to measuring the contribution of Airbnb to rent increases,” Stevens wrote. “And randomly picking an industry report on 1-bedroom apartments in one neighborhood over a different time period doesn’t refute a citywide analysis.”

The fact that rents are leveling out lately doesn’t hold much water, either — arguably that might have occurred sooner but for Airbnb’s alleged contribution to their increases in the first place.

Ultimately the difference comes down to whether or not Airbnb effectively removes housing from the market. The company swears up and down that isn’t the case, and cites user numbers to support that position. The city says there’s little other possible explanation for the close correlation between listings in certain neighborhoods and the specific rent increases it sees in them.

Both, however, seem to agree that the lack of regulation puts everyone at risk. Hopefully that common ground will lead to a fruitful collaboration on new rules in the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

Get ready to shop the ‘Gram. Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit card as part of a profile, set up a security pin, then start buying things without ever leaving Instagram. Not having to leave for a separate website and enter payment information any time you want to purchase something could make Instagram a much bigger player in commerce.

TechCrunch reader Genady Okrain first tipped us off to the payment feature. When we asked Instagram, a spokesperson confirmed that native payments for booking appointments like at restaurants or salons is now live for a limited set of partners.

One of the first equipped is dinner reservation app Resy. Some of its clients’ Instagram Pages now offer this native payment for booking. And in the future, Instagram says you can expect direct payments for things like movie tickets through the app. Instagram initially announced in March 2017 that “we’ll roll out the ability to book a service with a business directly from their profile later this year,” but never mentioned native payments.

We’ve confirmed that the payment settings are now visible; some, but not all, users in the U.S. have it while at least some in the U.K. don’t. A tap through to the terms of service reveals that Instagram Payments are backed by Facebook’s Payments rules.

With its polished pictures and plethora of brands, shopping through Instagram could prove popular and give businesses a big new reason to advertise on the app. If they can get higher conversion rates because people don’t quit in the middle of checkout as the fill in their payment info, brands might prefer to push people to buy via Instagram.

Facebook started dabbling in native commerce around 2013, and eventually started rolling out peer-to-peer payments through Messenger. But native payment for shopping is still in closed beta in the chat app. It’s unclear if peer-to-peer payments might come to Instagram, but having a way to add a credit or debit card on file is a critical building block to that feature.

It’s possible that the payments option will work with Instagram’s “Shoppable Tags,” which first started testing in 2016 to let you see which products were in a post and tap through to buy them on the brand’s site. Since then, Instagram has partnered with storefront platforms BigCommerce and Shopify to get their clients hooked up, and expanded the feature to more countries in March. For now, though, none of Instagram’s previous shopping feature partners like Warby Parker or Kate Spade let you checkout within Instagram, and still send you to their site.

But the whole point of Instagram not allowing links in captions is to keep you in a smooth, uninterrupted browsing flow. Getting booted out to the web to buy something broke that. Instagram Payments could make impulse buys much quicker, enticing more businesses to get on board. Even if Instagram takes no cut of the revenue, brands are likely to boost ad spend to get their shoppable posts seen by more people if the native payments mean more of them actually complete a purchase.

Instagram isn’t the only one who sees this potential. Snapchat started testing its own native payments and checkout feature in February.

Source: Tech Crunch

One of the bigger pieces of product news at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week was the announcement that Facebook will soon turn on a new dating feature.

It has also quietly made a hire that points to its growing interest in developing more specific uses of its data, although not for the dating feature specifically. Dr Steve Carter, a data scientist who helped design and build the psychometric and relationship models that became the basis of eHarmony — the dating site where he was a founding member and worked for nearly 20 years — is working at the social network, out of its offices in Los Angeles.

But Facebook has confirmed to us that Carter is not working on the new dating service, and the company declined to say what he is doing.

His LinkedIn profile notes that he joined Facebook in August 2017. Back in January, there was a brief mention of Carter doing work for Facebook, but at the time it was not known that he’d actually left eHarmony months before that. It seems that he’s only recently updated his profile with that information, coinciding with Facebook now finally making its dating intentions public.

Carter’s profile on LinkedIn describes him as a data science manager, “helping Facebook get even better at making meaningful and beneficial connections between people and communities.”

His expertise lies squarely in building matchmaking algorithms. Before this, he held a number of roles at eHarmony, starting as a research analyst on the founding team in 1999, before eHarmony had even launched, working his way up to chief scientist at the company, which has had backing from the likes of Sequoia and TCV in its history.

In that time, he also picked up four patents in online social matchmaking, including one for employment matching. Those patents are all owned by eHarmony.

Facebook, which is still feeling the heat from controversies that have arisen around some of its more scaled-up services like programmatic advertising and viral political content, has shifted its focus to communities, and also exploring more direct and discreet ways that its social graph can be leveraged. Dating is one of the more obvious applications of that concept.

“One in three marriages in the US start online,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his presentation F8 this week. “[But] today we haven’t even built any features to help people find partners,” he said. “There are 200 million people on Facebook who list themselves as single, so clearly there is something to do here. And if we’re focused on helping people build meaningful relationships then this is perhaps the most meaningful one of all.”

There hasn’t been too much written about how eHarmony’s algorithm works, but in a lecture in May 2017 (two months before officially leaving eHarmony), Carter opened up about it to describe it a little.

It turns out that while there may be a lot of questions that get asked of a user’s preferences, ultimately eHarmony threw out everything except for the most extreme likes or dislikes in order to avoid creating what Carter refers to as “a universe of one.” 

This is an interesting idea when you apply it to Facebook, and you can see what the attraction might be for a data scientist in wanting to use the platform to build a dating service. (That’s to say nothing of the fact that Facebook sort of started as a dating site of sorts, where people prominently displayed their relationship statuses on their profile pages, popularizing “it’s complicated” as the short story for all of love’s actual complications.)

As we noted yesterday, when Facebook launches its service, it wants to make it as noninvasive as possible.

You get the option to create a dating profile. And that profile won’t be visible to your friends; only to others who have also opted in, and only if they fit your criteria and match your profile, and only if they are not already your friends and connections on the network.

Applying Carter’s concept of matching data between users on eHarmony, Facebook already has a huge trove of information about you, based on what you post and like and share. Facebook can therefore make its dating profile questions — and its need to rely on them — less heavy. (That format could also provide a good contrast to other sites like Tinder, which require you to swipe across many profiles to create shortlists of people who might match with you.)

In hiring Carter, Facebook has picked up someone who has worked on relationships beyond those you forge through dating.

Last year, his former employer eHarmony divested a business that Carter had developed called Elevated Careers, which was acquired by a startup called Candidate.Guru.

Elevated Careers sounds a lot like a dating service, except with ’employer’ and ’employee’ replacing the two people looking for love, which reminds you just how similar the mechanics can be for any matching service (something Facebook must also realise).

It lets an employer assess a potential employee’s compatibility by matching up attributes of the candidate’s personality and values to those of his/her potential manager, as well as to the hiring organization’s culture. It also has algorithms that tell you how well a candidate’s skills and background are suited to a particular job. Given Facebook’s interest and work in recruitment and job finding, it will be interesting to see how and if that product also gets developed.

Along with Steve Carter, we’ve been trying to figure out whether Facebook has been hiring other people to build a relationships team that it could task with building out dating and other products. It turns out that there is definitely some crossover of employees who have worked at various dating sites over the last several years, who are now at Facebook — but most likely, this is mostly a product of the general churn that you get in the tech world, where people are often jumping from one job to another.

But a few other hires stand out. Just this month, Facebook happened to hire Badoo’s head of mobile engineering, who appears to be based out of London. This sales director for “e-commerce and dating” started his new role in January 2018, working out of Paris (so I guess there is already some early considering for how to build this as a business too). There are two recent hires from Tinder, one in Los Angeles and one in Menlo Park. And the former data lead from Hinge also joined in the last six months, also based in Los Angeles, and now working in “scaled marketing.”

Story updated with Facebook comment, and to confirm he is not working on the new dating feature

Source: Tech Crunch

In Spotify’s first ever earnings report, the streaming music came up short, pulling in $1.36 billion revenue That’s compared to $1.4 billion in revenue and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.34. Spotify hit 170 million monthly active users, up 6.9 percent from 159 million in Q4 2017, and 75 million paid subscribers, up 5.6 percent from 71 million.

Spotify is hoping to boost paid subscriber numbers by first luring more users to its free ad-supported service. Last month it unveiled a revamped free tier that lets users listen to songs on-demand on particular Spotify-controlled playlists instead of only being able to play in shuffle mode. The idea is that once users get a taste of on-demand listening, they’ll pay to upgrade so they can listen to whatever they want across the whole catalog.

That strategy could not only boost subscriber numbers, but also give Spotify more leverage over the record labels. More than 30 percent of all Spotify listening now happens on its owned playlists. That gives it the power to choose what will become a hit, and in turn means record labels need to play nice. This could help Spotify secure more exclusive content and a better bargaining position in royalty negotiations.

Source: Tech Crunch

Although the “pivot to video” has been notoriously challenging for most publishers, they can’t exactly give up on video. In fact, BuzzFeed has been ramping up production with a new editing tool called Vidder.

Vidder was created Senior Product Designer Elaine Dunlop and Senior Software Engineer Joseph Bergen. Dunlop recalled talking to Bergen more than a year ago and pointing out that while BuzzFeed is known for building its own publishing tools, “there wasn’t really the same opinionated software solution” for creating videos.

So they decided to build a video editing product that could be used by anyone, not just experienced producers and editors. Duynlop said the initial goal was to “demystify video production.”

“We basically started out with this hypothesis that if we gave a very simple tool to these editors who are constantly creating very funny, interesting things, they would really be able to fly,” Bergen added.

Fast forward to 2018 and BuzzFeed says Vidder is being used by 40 or 50 team members to create 200 videos each month, with 800 videos created in all since October. Almost none of BuzzFeed’s Vidder users are full-time video producers, and most of them had little to no experience with professional video editing software.

For example, Kayla Yandoli was a member of BuzzFeed’s social team (she’s since transferred to the video) when she created this compilation of “shady” insults from The Golden Girls last fall. With 1.1 million shares, it was one of Vidder’s early success stories, and Yandoli estimated that it only took her only an hour and a half to edit.

We moved even faster when the Vidder team demonstrated the product for me last week. We started with a basic template, then customized it by uploading one or two video clips, typing in captions and subtitles, adding emojis, and we had a perfectly serviceable video ready to go in just a few minutes.

The experience had very little in common with the hours I’ve fiddling with timelines on FinalCut. It also benefits from being entirely web-based, with no software download needed.

The key to Vidder is simplicity. As Product Manager Chris Johanesen put it, “We’re not trying to recreate Adobe Premiere.” There are teams at BuzzFeed creating more in-depth, highly produced videos, and Vidder isn’t built for them. Instead, it might be used by an editor like Yandoli who wants to quickly translate a regular BuzzFeed post into a video for Facebook or Instagram.

“There was a really big boom with Facebook videos around pop culture, animals, babies and stuff,” Yandoli recalled. “People on my team were interested in creating videos, but everyone couldn’t download Premiere. We were yearning to just find an accessible tool so that we could create things for our social platforms.”

And while you might think that Vidder has become less relevant with recent Facebook algorithm changes, Johanesen said the tool allows BuzzFeed to continue experimenting.

“Ever since the big Facebook algorithm changes that happened, our social strategy is less about longer videos and more about making things that will engage communities and conversations,” Johanesen said. “Vidder has helped teams move a little bit faster than might have been possible with other tools. I don’t know that we’ve cracked it, but it’s helping us make progress.”

BuzzFeed is also using Vidder to adapt videos for different platforms, like creating a shorter video for Instagram or compiling several short videos into a longer cut for YouTube. The tool is also being used by international teams who might quickly create a localized version when they see that a BuzzFeed U.S. video is doing well. In fact, BuzzFeed says one international editor was able to “clone” eight Vidder videos in an hour.

Usage is spreading beyond social media teams, with the sales team potentially using it to create “BuzzCuts” for advertisers.  And of course Johanesen and his team are going to continue working on the product — for example, they have plans connect it to a library of licensed content.

Source: Tech Crunch

For the last couple of years the hardware upgrades that VR headsets have been getting have been pretty stale; there might be a resolution bump or the addition of eye-tracking or new controllers, but most of the advances have seemed to be on the software side. Facebook is focusing on some more fundamental display issues in their latest internal VR headset prototype, which they showed off at day 2 of F8.

Oculus “Half Dome” will focus on allowing users to see more of their environment at once inside the headset, while also making some sophisticated changes that will allow them to shift focus between objects.

The prototype will bring the field-of-view from 100 degrees to 140 degrees, allowing users to see more of the visual world in their periphery. What’s even more impressive is that Facebook has achieved this without creating an even bulkier design — the prototype maintains the size of the existing Rift headset thanks to their “continued advances in lenses.” It seems that there are some fundamental display issues the company is aiming to tackle before it shifts the focus to making the headset smaller. 

In terms of depth-of-field, existing headsets don’t give users multiple focal lengths. What that means is that if someone gives you something to read or another object you need to see clearly, they stick the focus around two meters from the user. This was one of the major issues that Magic Leap was claiming they had solved with their display technology, though it’s unclear what of their research is actually making it into the end product.

Oculus says they have been able to achieve variable focus in one of their newest prototypes by physically moving the screens inside the headset to accommodate the different depths of field. It works similarly to the auto-focus function in cameras, but won’t cause any noise or vibrations for users, the company says.

Oculus has talked about a lot of advances toward displays like this on the research side, but this shows how close to the real-deal they are with a headset that integrates the technology without increasing the bulk of current Oculus hardware. While Oculus has devoted much of its public attention on prototypes to standalone headsets, “Half Dome” showcases some big changes that will move the dial on the highest-end VR headset displays.

Source: Tech Crunch