by tyler | Mar 18, 2024 | Tech
LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network and pick up knowledge for professional purposes, and for recruitment — a business that now has more 1 billion users. Now, to boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that LinkedIn is working on a new games experience. It will be doing so by tapping into the same wave of puzzle-mania that helped simple games like Wordle find viral success and millions of players. Three early efforts are games called “Queens”, “Inference” and “Crossclimb.”
App researchers have started to find code that points to the work LinkedIn is doing. One of them, Nima Owji, said that one idea LinkedIn appears to be experimenting with involves player scores being organised by places of work, with companies getting “ranked” by those scores.
BREAKING: #LinkedIn is working on IN-APP GAMES!
There are going to be a few different games and companies will be ranked in the games based on the scores of their employees!
Pretty cool and fun, in my opinion! pic.twitter.com/hLITqc8aqw
— Nima Owji (@nima_owji) March 16, 2024
A spokesperson for LinkedIn has confirmed that it is working on gaming, but said there is as yet no launch date.
“We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” the spokesperson said in a message to TechCrunch. “Stay tuned for more!”
The spokesperson added that the images shared by the researcher on X are not the latest versions.
(Update: some updated pictures have now been supplied, which we’re embedding below.)
LinkedIn’s owner Microsoft is a gaming behemoth. Its games business — which includes Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax — brought in $7.1 billion in revenues last quarter , passing Windows revenues for the first time.
The LinkedIn spokesperson declined to say how and if Microsoft is involved in the gaming project at LinkedIn.
Games are regularly among the most popular apps for mobile phones and PCs — both in terms of revenues and engagement — and puzzle-based casual games has been one of the most popular categories in the space among mobile users. Non-gaming platforms have long tapped into these facts to boost their own traffic — arguably a trend that preceded the internet, if you think about the popularity of crosswords and other puzzles in newspapers and magazines.
The New York Times, which acquired the viral hit Wordle in 2022 , said at the end of last year that that millions of people continue to play the game, which is now part of a bigger platform of online puzzles and games developed by the newspaper.
Others that have doubled down on gaming have seen mixed results. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been a major driver of social gaming over the years. But in 2022 it shut down its standalone gaming app amid a decline in usage: it’s putting significantly more focus these days on mixed reality experiences and its Meta Quest business.
Over the years, LinkedIn has tried out a number of different new features over the years to boost how and how much people use its platform, with the strategy possibly best described as: “how can we take the most popular tools people are using right now and make them relevant to LinkedIn’s audience and focus on the world of work?”
Those have ranged from efforts in online education and professional development, through to a publishing and news operation, bringing in more video tools and courting creators and influencers .
by tyler | Mar 14, 2024 | Tech
Even though NFT sales volume is still down 88% from 2022 all-time highs (and down 38% year-to-date), Pallet Exchange is building a new type of NFT marketplace focused on user retention. And it’s doing it on a blockchain less known for NFT trading: Sei.
Co-founders Kelvin Wang and Davy Li have convinced investors that there’s still enough of a future in NFTs beyond silly social media profile pictures (PFPs) to have raised a $2.5 million in a private funding round with participation from Spartan Group, Symbolic Capital, Cypher Capital and angel investors from Coinbase, MoonPay and more, TechCrunch learned exclusively.
Wang and Li are probably best known for creating The Beacon , one of the most popular web3 games on Arbitrum, a layer-2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum. “That was the initial impetus, we saw the landscape of games and thought we could build a better game and had a vision of that,” Li said of why they next built an NFT marketplace.
They see strong promise in the future of NFTs due to human behavior. “The fundamental draw from a user to trade and flip is very human naturey,” Wang said. “We’ve seen that with collectibles, cars and toys.”
While building out The Beacon, they saw friction at the marketplace level with speed, transaction time and user experience, so they decided to build a marketplace that was faster and easier to use, Wang said.
In crypto, platforms are often hyper focused on all things financial.
“It’s cool if there’s a lot of financial innovations happening, but at the same time we saw there’s pain points from a user experience,” Li said. “It’s hard for novices to jump in and be hit with numbers and dashboards. Imagine throwing a beginner person who’s never touched stocks into the Bloomberg terminal. It’s like that.”
Still, making money is a key driver for crypto enthusiasts (and many fail, for what it’s worth).
And the Pallet founders say they recognize that in the bear market, such as the most recent one, when it’s far harder to make money, especially for a novice, new marketplaces like theirs will have a harder time retaining customers. “That’s the piece we wanted to experiment with and innovate on liquidity and retention mechanisms.”
So, even in instances where the “number doesn’t always go up,” the marketplace wants to make users feel like they’re progressing and doing meaningful, fun things with their NFT collections. It’s using social media tactics like in-app messaging that lets people interested in the same NFT collections engage with each other on its marketplace.
“Imagine the moment you purchase an NFT you’re added to a group chat with other holders and there’s a community aspect to it,” Li said. “We want to roll out certain clans where friends can collaborate and we’re trying to take a page out of the live operation games we see and [create] an enhanced system compared to pure points that a lot of marketplaces use” to gamify the NFT marketplace experience.
All in all, Pallet wants to be a “good trading experience for normies,” Wang said. “We want to create a platform that brings liquidity, and regular crypto people and regular users through gamification of social features.”
But when it comes to the largest blockchains in the NFT space, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Solana lead the pack with over $1.3 billion in sales volume during the last 30 days, according to CryptoSlam data . So why build a marketplace on a blockchain with less traction?
Well, Sei’s layer-1 blockchain is extremely fast at 12,500 transactions per second and has low gas fees, aka transaction costs. And the team thinks there’s opportunity in its less-chartered territory.
“We saw it as a parallel to early Solana days. We took a leveraged bet this is going to be the chain of the future because it allows for something Solana wasn’t able to do, tap into the EVM liquidity market in a natural way,” Wang said.
Plus the creators of the Sei blockchain are working on attracting the hoards of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based developers by creating a tech called The Parallel Stack — something that hopes to make Ethereum faster and less costly.
Sei’s EVM work has convinced Pallet that Sei’s overlords will “grow the pie here,” Wang says.
Betting on Sei, its social aspects and its friendly user interface has paid off so far. Pallet is one of the fastest growing NFT marketplaces by volume growth across all blockchains.
Pallet launched in September, and saw a “boom” in December, Wang said. That’s when Seiyans , an Sei-based NFT collection fueled by meme culture, capitulated the new blockchain and marketplace into the talk of the crypto world. Seiyans NFTs can be bought and sold on Pallet.
Today, it has about 99% of NFT market share on Sei and has done over $20 million in trading volume year to date, with over 2 million users visiting its platform this past year, and has 40,000 to 50,000 daily users, Wang said. Its revenue model includes taking a 2% fee on transactions, which brings its annual run rate to $2 million or more, Wang said. “It’s a great start for us.”
Over the past few weeks, Wang says there’s been a growing interest in art NFTs, collectables that aren’t throwbacks to the whole Bored Apes PFP phenom, although PFPs still have their fans as well. Down the line, Pallet plans to look into working with big partners in the art marketplace and create a separate marketplace for those creators. “We don’t want to put a one-of-one artist with a bunch of PFPs, we want to create unique experiences for both,” Wang said.
by tyler | Jan 9, 2024 | Tech
We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previous article , but what is it actually like in person?
“We launched a mobile application that will give you information about how big your ‘sound bubble’ is. If, for example, you’re sitting in an airplane, you don’t want the person next to you to hear what you’re saying,” says Gauthier Daridon, connectivity engineer at Skyted, in an interview with TechCrunch at CES in Las Vegas. “So our application will explain that you are ‘perceptible’ and ‘intelligible’ at certain distances.”
Daridon demonstrated the mask and talked in a normal voice. Through a set of headphones, I was able to hear him relatively clearly. Without the headphones, I could hear a slight mumbling — I was standing around three feet away — but I wasn’t able to discern the individual words. At a couple of steps away, the mumbling disappeared into the general hubbub of the noisy show floor.
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company was founded in 2021, currently has around 20 staff and raised $1 million of funding; about half from angels and other smaller investors, and the other half from the French government. This week, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign , which has, so far, sold just short of 300 masks for a total of around $64,000 worth of pledges.
Personally, I’m still a little puzzled for the use cases for this device, and I’m struggling to think of that many situations where you absolutely have to talk, where you can’t be overheard, and where wearing something like this would be socially acceptable. The team has some ideas:
“We’re looking at various customer segments; mostly businesses, open spaces, like offices where this would be huge. In places like call centers, this would be a huge business. We also looking at B2C, for use cases such as gaming,” explains Daridon. “Special Forces came to us because they wanted us to design a mask for them so that they can be completely quiet for events where voice cannot be emitted.”
So far, it seems to be a solution in search of a problem — but that’s one of the exciting things about cutting-edge tech: Occasionally, you have no idea where the opportunities lie, and you have to plod through a Kickstarter campaign to figure it out. I look forward to keeping an eye on the company and its products as it works toward shipping the first batch of products by the end of this year.
by tyler | Jan 9, 2024 | Tech
We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previous article , but what is it actually like in person?
“We launched a mobile application that will give you information about how big your ‘sound bubble’ is. If, for example, you’re sitting in an airplane, you don’t want the person next to you to hear what you’re saying,” says Gauthier Daridon, connectivity engineer at Skyted, in an interview with TechCrunch at CES in Las Vegas. “So our application will explain that you are ‘perceptible’ and ‘intelligible’ at certain distances.”
Daridon demonstrated the mask and talked in a normal voice. Through a set of headphones, I was able to hear him relatively clearly. Without the headphones, I could hear a slight mumbling – I was standing around 3 feet away – but I wasn’t able to discern the individual words. At a couple of steps away, the mumbling disappeared into the general hubbub of the noisy show floor.
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image credit : TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image credit : TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company was founded in 2021, currently has around 20 staff, and raised $1 million of funding; about half from angels and other smaller investors, and the other half from the French government. This week, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign , which has, so far, sold just short of 300 masks for a total of around $64k worth of pledges.
Personally, I’m still a little puzzled for the use cases for this device, and I’m struggling to think of that many situations where you absolutely have to talk, where you can’t be overheard, and where wearing something like this would be socially acceptable. The team has some ideas:
“We’re looking at various customer segments; mostly businesses, open spaces, like offices where this would be a huge. In places like call centers, this would be a huge business. We also looking at B2C, for use cases such as gaming,” explains Daridon. “Special Forces came to us because they wanted us to design a mask for them so that they don’t they can be completely quiet for events where voice cannot be emitted.”
So far, it seems to be a solution in search of a problem – but that’s one of the exciting things about cutting-edge tech: occasionally, you have no idea where the opportunities lie, and you have to plod through a Kickstarter campaign to figure it out. I look forward to keeping an eye on the company and its products as it works towards shipping the first batch of products by the end of this year.
by tyler | Nov 27, 2023 | Tech
ByteDance’s gaming ambition has been an expensive, short-lived pursuit.
In late 2021, the TikTok parent’s plans for video games came into the spotlight after it became one of the firm’s six core business units , posing a new threat to incumbents such as Tencent and NetEase and rising star MiHoYo. Nonetheless, after two years of tepid performance, the gaming department, called Nuverse, is significantly scaling back its operations in a move that has surprised many employees.
“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to center on long-term strategic growth areas. Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business,” a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.
This round of mass layoffs started on Monday and many members of Nuverse are still anxiously awaiting a verdict on their future, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. It’s unclear how many employees will be affected by the restructuring eventually, but Nuverse had quickly grown to around 3,000 people in 2021 and has largely remained that size over the past few years, according to Chinese tech news outlet LatePost .
ByteDance has also spent heavily on acquisitions, including a $4 billion purchase of a promising Shanghai-studio studio called Moonton. Reuters reported earlier this month that the firm is looking to divest the studio and has met with a Saudi Arabia-based firm for discussion.
Reuters first broke the news about the layoffs on Monday morning, reporting that ByteDance would soon announce the “winding down of its Nuverse gaming brand and full retreat from mainstream video games,” citing sources. But ByteDance’s comment suggests that portions of the team will be retained.
ByteDance’s debacle in video games — and its virtual reality endeavor Pico — casts doubt over the universal applicability of its data-driven, A/B testing strategy that has catapulted TikTok to global dominance. Through its short video apps, ByteDance has amassed an unparalleled wealth of consumer insights. The success of video games, however, demands a much longer, more patient creative process and is arguably less predictable than the instant gratification delivered by dopamine-fused video clips. Both of its rivals Tencent and NetEase have been pouring more resources into games with longer development cycles.
Without a breakthrough title or commercial success after two years, Nuverse’s positioning as one of ByteDance’s key revenue drivers is likely under close examination by the firm’s management team. ByteDance remains one of the rare Chinese internet giants that have not gone public, partly due to its entanglement in rising U.S.-China tensions.
The mass layoffs at Nuverse add more bad news to the Chinese internet industry which is reeling from a widespread regulatory crackdown in recent years, leading to dampened businesses and slashed workforces. The video gaming sector in particular was hit hard by a hiatus in license approvals , and even though the process has resumed, the space’s recovery has been limited by macroeconomic challenges .
ByteDance’s Oculus challenger Pico lays off hundreds, halts aggressive expansion
