by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
Ding, ding, ding! Dinner is served. Fresh out of the cold tin can.
Petlibro , a pet tech startup that designs automatic food and water dispensers for cats, launched its first refrigerated smart feeder on Thursday. The company’s new “Polar Wet Food Feeder” aims to solve a widely known problem among pet owners: how to keep their cat’s wet food fresh while they’re away.
While dry cat food can stay out for longer, scientists have theorized that cats favor wet food because it’s similar to their natural diets. Also, some pet parents stray from dry kibble due to the high carbohydrates. Leaving wet food out while out of town, however, can lead to bacterial growth and spoilage. Owners can now ditch the ice packs and be assured that their pampered cats are being given fresh food that won’t make them sick.
“The value of incorporating wet food into a cat’s diet cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes to weight management, digestion, urinary tract health and more,” Christie Long, chief medical officer at Modern Animal, said in a statement. “What Petlibro has developed in Polar makes a world of difference for cats and pet parents alike.”
Image Credits: Petlibro
Image Credits: Petlibro
Polar has three compartments and can hold up to 22.2 ounces of food (7.4 oz per portion), allowing owners to be away for up to 72 hours without the need for a pet sitter. Using semiconductor cool technology, the device keeps the food nice and cool (30-50°F). Additionally, the bowl trays are BPA-free plastic and dishwasher safe.
The accompanying mobile app allows owners to control the Wi-Fi-enabled smart feeder via iOS and Android devices. They can customize their pet’s feeding schedule and be notified when the cat starts eating, thanks to motion detection technology. It should also be noted that if a user’s Wi-Fi ever goes out while they’re out of town, the app will notify them that the device is offline. If there’s a power outage, Polar will keep the food cold for 12 hours.
During a week of testing, we found that the app was reliable and never missed a feeding time. The device isn’t too loud, only emitting a low humming noise that can be easily ignored while sleeping at night. One drawback is the three compartments, which could be a problem for owners who feed their pets more than twice per day. Similar products we found on Indiegogo — Catsomat and Happy Llama Tech — have double the number of compartments.
Polar costs $129.99 and is available for purchase on petlibro.com and Amazon .
Image Credits: Petlibro
Image Credits: Petlibro
The first time-controlled feeding device for pets dates back to the 1940s, and an automatic feeder for horses was invented in 1997. Decades later, it’s about time modern tech companies came up with advanced refrigerated devices for cats.
With a large portion of cat owners buying wet food, Petlibro’s new product addresses a growing market . The wet pet food industry reached approximately $35 billion in 2023 (cat food makes up 61% of the total market). According to Petlibro’s own data, customers highly requested an automated refrigerated feeder. Out of over 900 survey participants, 56% of cat parents said the biggest downside of using wet food is maintaining freshness.
“When we look into the pet tech industry, there’s not much innovation happening,” Petlibro founder and CEO York Wu told TechCrunch. “We spent a couple of years refining the concept [of Polar], developing the product with tests to make sure it was safe … I think this is a game changer for the way people are feeding their pets.”
Since selling its first product in late 2022, Petlibro has sold over 3 million devices. The company sold more than 1 million units in 2023 alone.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
On April 24, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance doesn’t sell the app.
The bill requires ByteDance to secure a deal within nine months, with a 90-day extension available to close it. After this deadline, the U.S. will bar app stores from listing the app.
TikTok will challenge this decision in courts with a long legal battle ahead of us. But many countries worldwide have already banned the app, and ByteDance hasn’t had a chance to revive it. These moves impacted ByteDance’s operations in those countries, creators, as well as startups related to the creator economy.
Here’s how those bans are playing out in other markets.
Members of the Working Journalist of India (WJI) hold placards urging citizens to remove Chinese apps and stop using Chinese products during a demonstration against the Chinese newspaper Global Times, in New Delhi on June 30, 2020. Image Credits: Photo by PRAKASH SINGH/AFP via Getty Images
Members of the Working Journalist of India (WJI) hold placards urging citizens to remove Chinese apps and stop using Chinese products during a demonstration against the Chinese newspaper Global Times, in New Delhi on June 30, 2020. Image Credits: Photo by PRAKASH SINGH/AFP via Getty Images
Multiple reports have captured the impact of the TikTok ban on creators who were reliant on the short video platform for reach and even money-making. Many small businesses also use TikTok to promote their brands in different ways.
In many ways, India banning TikTok was a pivotal moment as Instagram rushed to release Reels in India to replace the platform. Meta (then Facebook) launched Reels in the U.S. a few months later . YouTube also followed suit by introducing Shorts in India .
However, TikTok’s ban also gave rise to many local short video apps. Twitter and Google-backed local social network ShareChat released Moj ; Verse Innovation (parent company of news aggregator DailyHunt) launched Josh ; Times Internet launched MX Takatak and eventually merged it with Moj in 2022 ; ad company InMobi released Roposo with other rivals like Mitron, Chingari and Trell also trying to capture the market.
Developers in Nepal also launched a TikTok rival called Ramailo in November 2023 , but its lifespan was short-lived.
Because of multiple apps, creators have had to invest in putting their content on multiple platforms . Critically, these platforms might not be putting short videos front and center like TikTok, and their recommendation algorithm might also differ, causing creators to lose their audience. A similar impact could occur in the U.S., as creators scramble to find a new platform or platforms for their work — even if only to hedge against the possibility that TikTok’s influence wanes under the threat of a ban.
In the aftermath of India banning TikTok, ByteDance had to scale back its operations. Earlier this year, the company’s music streaming service, Resso, was also shut down in India after the government asked app stores to pull the app .
Aside from the impact on creators, digital rights activists have also made arguments that banning platforms like TikTok curtails free speech . Some of these angles might play out in the U.S., too, as the government and ByteDance will indulge in legal battles.
Last year, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said that India set an “incredibly important precedent” by banning TikTok in 2020 . Carr mentioned at that time that the U.S. needs to follow India’s lead to remove nefarious apps.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
Paystand has acquired spend management software startup Teampay to create what the companies describe as a “no-fee B2B digital payment and spend powerhouse.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Teampay has raised $65 million since it was founded in 2016.
The combined company services over 1 million businesses running on a commercial blockchain to more than 1 million participants. It processed more than $10 billion in transactions to date, which it touts is nearly 2% of annual U.S. business-to-business payments.
“Teampay represents this new class of fintech companies,” Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond told TechCrunch exclusively. “They have products for CFOs to really change how they can digitize all of their workflow. It’s what I’d call a next-gen experience for the users and is a good fit for our customers going through this really big modernization process.”
Paystand will continue to run the Teampay brand, mainly because it is well-known, he said.
Almond believes businesses fintech should learn from consumer finance apps. In the B2B world, the process for sending and receiving funds is complex, slow and riddled with fees. But consumers can send and receive money to each other via Venmo or CashApp. Those are the kinds of features he wants Paystand to offer.
Teampay is the blockchain-enabled B2B payments provider’s second acquisition in two years. It purchased payment platform Yaydoo in 2022. At the time, Paystand ’s valuation was north of $1 billion. Paystand brought in $98 million in venture capital since being founded in 2014. Teampay is not on the blockchain, however, now Paystand can bring that functionality to both the accounts receivable and accounts payable sides.
“We think it’s a trend of consumerization of the enterprise,” Almonds said. “Now we can offer both sides to 1 million businesses.”
Despite fintech being a hot industry in recent years, the banking industry overall has an aging payment rails problem . This causes higher fees, more intermediaries and delays. Almond is a long-time proponent of using a decentralized financial infrastructure to solve the payment rails problem. Paystand uses the Ethereum blockchain as the engine for its Paystand Bank Network, which enables business-to-business payments with zero fees.
“Blockchain is the new cloud,” he said. “I know blockchain, bitcoin and decentralized finance networks have their share of problems, but they represent a fundamental shift away from the same central banking system that’s been in place since the 1930s.”
“A lot of people think blockchain or decentralized finance is not ready yet,” he added. “What we’re really proving is if you create real value for businesses and finance teams, people will use it.”
Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
RevenueCat, a top subscription management platform for apps that monetize via in-app purchases, is now flush with new capital as it expands to the web. The company has closed on a $12 million Series C led by Adjacent, following the launch of a new product, RevenueCat Billing, that allows web app developers to integrate subscription purchases into any website. Later, it will also support Roku.
The timing of the product’s launch is notable, as it arrives amid the implementation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation, which is forcing Apple to open the iPhone and the App Store to new competition. As a result, Apple initially blocked iPhone web apps (Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) in the EU, likely fearing developers would abandon its App Store, before reversing that decision under regulatory pressure.
For RevenueCat , however, the changes ahead for iOS — not to mention Apple’s refusal to cut its default 15%-30% commission rate — mean there are now more developers looking to the web to monetize their apps.
“It could be for progressive web apps or any kind of customer that wants to take payments outside of the App Store,” said RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting of the new web billing product. “It’s going to play within all the new [DMA] rules … it’s going to be a pretty significant product expansion for us.”
The company says it moved in this direction because of the inbound interest from developers. Even if they didn’t have a web app, many developers wanted to shift their customers to the web to pay.
Apple reverses decision about blocking web apps on iPhones in the EU
Though Stripe already enables this functionality, what developers were lacking was a system that’s specifically designed for consumer subscription apps. Now, even if developers are processing payments through Stripe or others, they’re getting their data and insights in the same format and within the same dashboard where they already manage their in-app purchase data. This makes it easier for them to focus on how their subscription apps are monetizing overall, regardless of where the payment comes from, web or mobile.
Though Apple has historically not allowed app developers to steer customers to the web from inside their iOS apps, it has permitted steering from other channels, like the developer’s website or emails to customers. The EU’s DMA rules should also permit developers to steer customers to the web from inside their mobile apps, too.
With RevenueCat Billing, essentially a web SDK, developers can accept subscription payments from any website. It joins other recent product releases like Paywall, Targeting and Experiments, which are all designed to help developers grow their revenue. RevenueCat powers subscriptions in over 30,000 apps and handles over $2 billion in subscriptions annually, it says.
The new Series C from Adjacent (led by Nico Wittenborn, a Series A investor, now board member) totals $12 million. Other investors include Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Volo Ventures and SaaStr Fund. Ahead of this round, RevenueCat had raised $56 million, bringing its total raise to more than $68 million.
In addition to fueling its new products, the fundraise will help RevenueCat expand to new markets, including Japan and South Korea.
“Our main competitor is ‘cobbling together monetization technology yourself’,” said RevenueCat CTO and co-founder Miguel Carranza in a statement about the fundraise and expansions. “In the U.S., we’ve done a good job at educating developers, product people, marketers, and CEOs on the challenges of building in-house. In many other regions, it’s unfortunately still the default for businesses to sink valuable resources into something that provides zero differentiation or value for that business’s end users. We’re investing in those regions by expanding our support for languages and local currencies later this year, deepening our relationships with local technology partners and agencies, as well as hiring in-market where possible.”
Image Credits: RevenueCat
Image Credits: RevenueCat
RevenueCat is not yet a profitable company, but Eiting says that profitability is always on the horizon. The company still has the money it raised in 2021 and now has over $40 million in the bank in addition to around $20 million in ARR. It has also halved its burn rate since last summer.
“There’s so much stuff we can build by deploying capital and doing it on a profitable basis would just slow us down right now. So while there’s access to capital, which isn’t always the case … the best thing for our customers and investors is to take more capital and deploy it faster,” Eiting told TechCrunch.
“RevenueCat is too important to too many apps to risk the company driving towards a financial cliff. This may be counter to the prevailing narrative of how venture-backed companies should be built, but our investors are aligned with us and know that Miguel and I are leading the company to maximize the value for developers. Investors make more money when developers make more money,” the CEO said in a blog post . “To that end, we’re still aiming to take the company public in this decade.”
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, doesn’t have the best reputation among creatives.
The Firefly image-generation model in particular has been derided as underwhelming and flawed compared to Midjourney , OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 , and other rivals, with a tendency to distort limbs and landscapes and miss the nuances in prompts. But Adobe is trying to right the ship with its third-generation model, Firefly Image 3, releasing this week during the company’s Max London conference.
The model, now available in Photoshop (beta) and Adobe’s Firefly web app, produces more “realistic” imagery than its predecessors ( Image 1 and Image 2 ), thanks to an ability to understand longer, more complex prompts and scenes as well as improved lighting and text-generation capabilities. It should more accurately render things like typography, iconography, raster images and line art, says Adobe, and is “significantly” more adept at depicting dense crowds and people with “detailed features” and “a variety of moods and expressions.”
For what it’s worth, in my brief unscientific testing, Image 3 does appear to be a step up from Image 2.
I wasn’t able to try Image 3 myself. But Adobe PR sent a few outputs and prompts from the model, and I managed to run those same prompts through Image 2 on the web to get samples to compare the Image 3 outputs with. (Keep in mind that the Image 3 outputs could’ve been cherry-picked.)
Notice the lighting in this headshot from Image 3 compared to the one below it, from Image 2:
From Image 3. Prompt: “Studio portrait of young woman.” Image Credits: Adobe
From Image 3. Prompt: “Studio portrait of young woman.” Image Credits: Adobe
Same prompt as above, from Image 2. Image Credits: Adobe
Same prompt as above, from Image 2. Image Credits: Adobe
The Image 3 output looks more detailed and lifelike to my eyes, with shadowing and contrast that’s largely absent from the Image 2 sample.
Here’s a set of images showing Image 3’s scene understanding at play:
From Image 3. Prompt: “An artist in her studio sitting at desk looking pensive with tons of paintings and ethereal.” Image Credits: Adobe
From Image 3. Prompt: “An artist in her studio sitting at desk looking pensive with tons of paintings and ethereal.” Image Credits: Adobe
“An artist in his studio sitting at desk looking pensive with tons of paintings and ethereal.” From Image 2. Image Credits: Adobe
“An artist in his studio sitting at desk looking pensive with tons of paintings and ethereal.” From Image 2. Image Credits: Adobe
Note the Image 2 sample is fairly basic compared to the output from Image 3 in terms of the level of detail — and overall expressiveness. There’s wonkiness going on with the subject in the Image 3 sample’s shirt (around the waist area), but the pose is more complex than the subject’s from Image 2. (And Image 2’s clothes are also a bit off.)
Some of Image 3’s improvements can no doubt be traced to a larger and more diverse training dataset.
Like Image 2 and Image 1, Image 3 is trained on uploads to Adobe Stock, Adobe’s royalty-free media library, along with licensed and public domain content for which the copyright has expired. Adobe Stock grows all the time, and consequently so, too, does the available training dataset.
In an effort to ward off lawsuits and position itself as a more “ethical” alternative to generative AI vendors who train on images indiscriminately (e.g., OpenAI, Midjourney), Adobe has a program to pay Adobe Stock contributors to the training dataset. (We’ll note that the terms of the program are rather opaque , though.) Controversially, Adobe also trains Firefly models on AI-generated images, which some consider a form of data laundering.
Recent Bloomberg reporting revealed AI-generated images in Adobe Stock aren’t excluded from Firefly image-generating models’ training data, a troubling prospect considering those images might contain regurgitated copyrighted material . Adobe has defended the practice, claiming that AI-generated images make up only a small portion of its training data and go through a moderation process to ensure they don’t depict trademarks or recognizable characters or reference artists’ names.
Of course, neither diverse, more “ethically” sourced training data nor content filters and other safeguards guarantee a perfectly flaw-free experience — see users generating people flipping the bird with Image 2. The real test of Image 3 will come once the community gets its hands on it.
Image 3 powers several new features in Photoshop beyond enhanced text-to-image.
A new “style engine” in Image 3, along with a new auto-stylization toggle, allows the model to generate a wider array of colors, backgrounds and subject poses. They feed into Reference Image, an option that lets users condition the model on an image whose colors or tone they want their future generated content to align with.
Three new generative tools — Generate Background, Generate Similar and Enhance Detail — leverage Image 3 to perform precision edits on images. The (self-descriptive) Generate Background replaces a background with a generated one that blends into the existing image, while Generate Similar offers variations on a selected portion of a photo (e.g., a person or an object). As for Enhance Detail, it “fine-tunes” images to improve sharpness and clarity.
If these features sound familiar, that’s because they’ve been in beta in the Firefly web app for at least a month (and Midjourney for much longer than that). This marks their Photoshop debut — in beta.
Speaking of the web app, Adobe isn’t neglecting this alternate route to its AI tools.
To coincide with the release of Image 3, the Firefly web app is getting Structure Reference and Style Reference, which Adobe’s pitching as new ways to “advance creative control.” (Both were announced in March, but they’re now becoming widely available.) With Structure Reference, users can generate new images that match the “structure” of a reference image — say, a head-on view of a race car. Style Reference is essentially style transfer by another name, preserving the content of an image (e.g., elephants in the African safari) while mimicking the style (e.g., pencil sketch) of a target image.
Here’s Structure Reference in action:
Original image. Image Credits: Adobe
Original image. Image Credits: Adobe
Transformed with Structure Reference. Image Credits: Adobe
Transformed with Structure Reference. Image Credits: Adobe
And Style Reference:
Original image. Image Credits: Adobe
Original image. Image Credits: Adobe
Transformed with Style Reference. Image Credits: Adobe
Transformed with Style Reference. Image Credits: Adobe
I asked Adobe if, with all the upgrades, Firefly image-generation pricing would change. Currently, the cheapest Firefly premium plan is $4.99 per month — undercutting competition like Midjourney ($10 per month) and OpenAI (which gates DALL-E 3 behind a $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus subscription).
Adobe said that its current tiers will remain in place for now, along with its generative credit system . It also said that its indemnity policy, which states Adobe will pay copyright claims related to works generated in Firefly, won’t be changing either, nor will its approach to watermarking AI-generated content. Content Credentials — metadata to identify AI-generated media — will continue to be automatically attached to all Firefly image generations on the web and in Photoshop, whether generated from scratch or partially edited using generative features.
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
Dating apps are not following great privacy practices and are collecting more data than ever in order to woo Gen Z users, a new study by Mozilla pointed out . Researchers reviewed dating apps in terms of privacy in 2021 . In the latest report, they noted that dating apps have become more data-hungry and intrusive.
The organization studied 25 apps and labeled 22 of them ” Privacy Not Included” — the lowest grade in Mozilla’s parlance. Mozilla only gave Queer-owned and operated Lex a positive review, with Harmony and Happn getting a passable rating.
Mozilla said 80% of the apps may share or sell your personal data for advertising purposes. The report noted that apps like Bumble have murky privacy clauses that might sell your data to advertisers.
“We use services that help improve marketing campaigns . . . Under certain privacy laws, this may be considered selling or sharing your personal information with our marketing partners,” an in-app popup says, as noted by Mozilla.
The report noted that the majority of apps, including Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match, Plenty of Fish, BLK and BlackPeopleMeet, had precise geolocation from users. Apps like Hinge collect location data in the background when the app is not in use.
“The collection of your geolocation may occur in the background even when you aren’t using the services if the permission you gave us expressly permits such collection. If you decline permission for us to collect your precise geolocation, we will not collect it, and our services that rely on precise geolocation may not be available to you,” Hinge’s policy states.
Dating apps claim that they collect a significant amount of data to find better matches for users. However, if that data ends up with data brokers, there are grave consequences. Last year, The Washington Post reported that a U.S.-based Catholic group bought data from Grindr to monitor some members.
Notably, Grindr — which got one of the lowest ratings under Mozilla’s review — has had a record of lapses in privacy and security practices .
“If dating apps think people are going to keep handing over their most intimate data – basically, everything but their mother’s maiden name – without finding love, they’re underestimating their users. Their predatory privacy practices are a dealbreaker,” Zoë MacDonald, researcher and one of the authors of the report, said in a statement.
As per data from analytics firm data.ai, dating app downloads are slowing down . Separately, data from Pew Research published last year suggests that only three in 10 adults have ever used a dating site or an app — a figure that has stayed the same since 2019. Last month, The New York Times published a report noting that dating app giants Match Group and Bumble have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021.
Companies are now looking toward new ways to engage potential daters, including experimenting with AI-powered features. Match Group already said during its Q3 2024 earnings this year that it plans to leverage AI. In March, Platformer reported that Grindr plans to introduce an AI chatbot that could engage in sexually explicit language.
Mozilla said that apps already use AI to match algorithms. With the onset of generative AI, researchers are not confident that dating apps will have enough protections for user privacy.
Mozilla privacy researcher Misha Rykov said that, as dating apps collect more data, they have a duty to protect that data from being exploited.
“To forge stronger matches users have to write compelling profiles, fill out numerous interest and personality surveys and charm matches, share pictures and videos — the whole experience is heavily dependent on how much information people share. By this virtue, dating apps must protect this data from exploitation,” he noted.
Earlier this year, Mozilla also evaluated a bunch of AI bots that could act as a romantic partner and found some serious concerns about security and data sharing practices of these bots.
