Monthly Archives: September 2021

News: Amazon partners with AXS to install Amazon One palm readers at entertainment venues

• September 14, 2021
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Amazon’s biometric scanner for retail, the Amazon One palm reader, is expanding beyond the e-commerce giant’s own stores. The company announced today it has acquired its initial third-party customer with ticketing company AXS, which will implement the Amazon One system at Denver, Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre as an option for contactless entry for event-goers. This

Amazon’s biometric scanner for retail, the Amazon One palm reader, is expanding beyond the e-commerce giant’s own stores. The company announced today it has acquired its initial third-party customer with ticketing company AXS, which will implement the Amazon One system at Denver, Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre as an option for contactless entry for event-goers.

This is the first time the Amazon One system will be used outside an Amazon-owned retail store, and the first time it’s used for entry into an entertainment venue. Amazon says it expects AXS to roll out the system to more venues in the future, but didn’t offer any specifics as to which ones or when.

At Red Rocks, guests will be able to associate their AXS Mobile ID with Amazon One at dedicated stations before they enter the amphitheatre, or they can enroll at a second station once inside in order to use the reader at future AXS events. The enrollment process takes about a minute and customers can choose to enroll either one or both palms. Once set up, ticketholders can use a dedicated entry line for Amazon One users.

“We are proud to work with Amazon to continue shaping the future of ticketing through cutting-edge innovation,” said Bryan Perez, CEO of AXS, in a statement. “We are also excited to bring Amazon One to our clients and the industry at a time when there is a need for fast, convenient, and contactless ticketing solutions. At AXS, we are continually deploying new technologies to develop secure and smarter ticketing offerings that improve the fan experience before, during, and after events,” he added.

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon’s palm reader was first introduced amid the pandemic in September 2020, as a way for shoppers to pay at Amazon Go convenience stores using their palm. To use the system, customers would first insert their credit card then hover their palm over the device to associate their unique palm print with their payment mechanism. After setup, customers could enter the store just by holding their palm above the biometric scanner for a second or so. Amazon touted the system as a safer, “contactless” means of payment, as customers aren’t supposed to actually touch the reader. (Hopefully, that’s the case, considering the pandemic rages on.)

On the tech side, Amazon One uses computer vision technology to create the palm signatures, it said.

In the months that followed, Amazon expanded the biometric system to several more stores, including other Amazon Go convenience stores, Amazon Go Grocery stores, and its Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star stores. This April, it brought the system to select Whole Foods locations. To encourage more sign-ups, Amazon even introduced a $10 promotional credit to enroll your palm prints at its supported stores.

When palm prints are linked to Amazon accounts, the company is able to collect data from customers’ offline activity to target ads, offers, and recommendations over time. And the data remains with Amazon until a customer explicitly deletes it, or if the customer doesn’t use the feature for at least two years.

While the system offers an interesting take on contactless payments, Amazon’s track record in this area has raised privacy concerns. The company had in the past sold biometric facial recognition services to law enforcement in the U.S. Its facial recognition technology was the subject of a data privacy lawsuit. And it was found to be still storing Alexa voice data even after users deleted their audio files.

Amazon has responded by noting its palm print images are encrypted and sent to a secure area built for Amazon One in the cloud where Amazon creates the customers’ palm signatures. It also has noted it allows customers to unenroll from either a device or from its website, one.amazon.com once all transactions have been processed.

News: Toyota, Honda urge Congress to reject expanded tax incentive that would benefit Ford, GM, Stellantis

• September 14, 2021
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Toyota Motor and Honda are urging legislators to reject a bill that would expand tax incentives for union-made electric vehicles that are built in the United States. The proposal – which Toyota blasted as “blatantly biased” and “exorbitant” in a letter to Congress – would expand the federal tax incentives from $7,500 to as much

Toyota Motor and Honda are urging legislators to reject a bill that would expand tax incentives for union-made electric vehicles that are built in the United States.

The proposal – which Toyota blasted as “blatantly biased” and “exorbitant” in a letter to Congress – would expand the federal tax incentives from $7,500 to as much as $12,500 for union- and domestically manufactured cars. Vehicles with batteries manufactured in the U.S. would be eligible for an additional $500. If the legislation passes, vehicles from automakers like Toyota, Honda and Tesla would be excluded from the expanded credit, while the “Big Three” manufacturers in Detroit would all qualify.

“The current [bill] draft makes the objective of accelerating the deployment of electrified vehicles secondary by discriminating against American autoworkers based on their choice not to unionize,” Toyota said in a letter to lawmakers. “This is unfair, it is wrong, and we ask you to reject this blatantly biased proposal.”

The automaker further said that the bill favors the wealthy – people that may not need public funds to purchase an electric vehicle. There is a means testing provision in the bill, that would limit access to the credit to individuals making an adjusted income of up to $400,000, or households that make up to $800,000. Whether to set an income cap – and what that income cap should be – has been a major point of contention between Congressional Democrats and Republicans.

The bill also received criticism from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said on Twitter that it was “written by Ford/UAW lobbyists, as they make their electric car in Mexico. Not obvious how this serves American taxpayers.”

This is written by Ford/UAW lobbyists, as they make their electric car in Mexico. Not obvious how this serves American taxpayers. https://t.co/FUUXARHlby

— Name (@elonmusk) September 12, 2021

This would be the first such increase to the up to $7,500 tax credit for EVs since it was put into effect over a decade ago. The bill would also do away with a stipulation that exempts vehicles made by OEMs that have sold over 200,000 EVs from the credit, meaning that General Motor and Tesla cars would once again be eligible.

The bill did receive praise from GM, Ford Motor and Stellantis, three major automakers with workforces represented by the United Auto Workers union. The UAW also supports the proposal.

It’s being considered Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee. The expanded credit just one part of a massive $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that’s currently being debated by Congress and that includes a whole slew of socially progressive proposals meant to target education, healthcare, and climate change.

News: Live from Apple’s virtual 2021 iPhone event

• September 14, 2021
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It’s that time of year again. Summer is winding down, the leaves are starting to change color and Apple’s getting ready to drop a brand new iPhone on the world. Today’s big event arrives less than a year after the last big iPhone event, as Apple seems to be back on schedule, after some early

It’s that time of year again. Summer is winding down, the leaves are starting to change color and Apple’s getting ready to drop a brand new iPhone on the world. Today’s big event arrives less than a year after the last big iPhone event, as Apple seems to be back on schedule, after some early pandemic supply chain issues.

I wrote a handy roundup of all the things we expect to see live on video from Cupertino, based on a slew of rumors and leaks. The big news today is almost certainly the arrival of the iPhone 13. We’re also expecting the new Apple Watch Series 7 to drop, as well as some other key hardware additions, potentially including new AirPods and additional Apple Silicon Mac models.

Matthew and Darrell are going to be heading up the liveblog team, kicking off at 10AM PT/1PM ET today. Check out the video stream here and stay put on this very page to get the up to the minute news as it arrives.

News: 1047 Games raises $100M on the runaway success of its debut title, Splitgate

• September 14, 2021
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When you’re hot, you’re hot. And 1047 Games is making the most of the heat generated by Splitgate, its first game and a now a breakout success. After working on a shoestring for years, the team has since May raised three rounds, the latest for a massive $100M. Co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx credited a

When you’re hot, you’re hot. And 1047 Games is making the most of the heat generated by Splitgate, its first game and a now a breakout success. After working on a shoestring for years, the team has since May raised three rounds, the latest for a massive $100M.

Co-founder and CEO Ian Proulx credited a dedicated community and, as he described it, “taking a Silicon Valley approach to running a game business.”

At the time 1047 Games was founded, about 5 years ago, free to play (f2p) PC games were a niche genre. While games like World of Tanks and Warframe were seeing success, and of course many mobile games relying on in-app-purchases, Fortnite had yet to show the industry that f2p could be so ludicrously profitable.

“5 years ago it was very hit driven: you spend years developing a product, put all this money into hyping the launch, and then hope it’s a success,” Proulx explained. “Our process was, there’s no way we can take that risk — if we spent our entire budget and got it wrong, we’re out of business. So we thought, let’s do a soft launch, put it out there and see what happens, learn, listen, look at the data. Why would I spend money marketing a product that I have no idea about whether it will be a success? If we wanted to spend money, and we didn’t have a lot, I’d rather spend it on a product that has great metrics and KPIs.”

If you’re not familiar with it, Splitgate is a multiplayer online competitive shooter with a lot of DNA from the old-school arena shooters like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Halo. Those games are frenetic enough, but Splitgate adds the ability to bend space with portals, like the eponymous Portal, adding a truly ridiculous amount of mobility to the action.

Image Credits: 1047 Games

Proulx said investors shut the door on him repeatedly because they didn’t see Splitgate competing in any of the popular genres, battle royales and hero shooters, for instance. But he felt confident that this update to a familiar formula would be a success partly because the demand was there, just sleeping. “People grew up playing these games, and the reason [the market] is dead is not because they stopped loving them,” he said. “No one has moved the needle because there hasn’t been a lot of innovation, and there hasn’t been something that’s accessible to the masses. Quake Arena is great, but it’s extremely difficult. No 12-year-old Fortnite kid is gonna play it. We really do fill this void.”

While gameplay-wise Splitgate is most obviously similar to classic shooters, Proulx said a better comparison would be Rocket League, another huge success story in gaming that took a great concept and provided it as cheaply as possible, making money off cosmetic items and other totally optional perks.

“You can just have fun, turn your brain off and play, but there’s this limitless skill ceiling,” he explained.

It didn’t spring fully-formed from 1047 in 2019, though. The team put out the gaming equivalent of a minimum viable product. “It was fun, and the basics were there,” he said, “but we learned there’s way more to running a business and free-to-play than just having a fun game.”

The danger for any game is simply that people stop playing, so the team focused on retention and on listening to feedback from the community to make Splitgate a “forever game” that can go years with “seasons,” new features and maps, and so on.

The original MVP release saw some traction, around 600,000 downloads in its first month, but the big multi-platform relaunch — still as an “open beta” — this summer made a huge splash, pulling in more than 10 million in July.

Suddenly the tables had turned and 1047 was holding, as Proulx put it, “lightning in a bottle.”

“Our first round six months ago was extremely difficult. We talked to every investors on the planet and they all said no,” he recalled. But the hard work paid off: “We got lucky and ended up with the perfect partners — I can’t stress enough how supportive our investors have been.”

The next round ( with Human Capital, just as Splitgate was taking off, went from phonecall to funding over a weekend. This third round, with 1047 picking and choosing, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from “Insight Partners, Anthos Capital, and earlier seed round investors Galaxy Interactive, VGames, Human Capital, Lakestar, DraperDragon, and Draper University” (from the press release).

One wonders what a team of fewer than ten people could possibly do with $100M ($116M if you count the two previous rounds). But the bet investors are making is not that 1047 is going to suddenly make Assassin’s Creed, but rather that they think ten million (and rising) people playing a unique game is potentially a huge opportunity — if the developers have the chance to follow through. This post-hype period is the valley of death for many games, the developers starved for cash after streamers and curious casuals move on. But the funding means that, for 1047, it’s license to hire like mad and double down.

“The scope of what we can do is now through the roof,” said Proulx. “There’s so much we couldn’t think about because we were a tiny team with a tiny budget, but now everything is on the table. We’re focusing on the long term — I look at the game as being 25 percent done. We don’t need to be Fortnite tomorrow, but now it really is about building the next Riot Games, the next big games business.”

In the meantime, Splitgate itself is still on the road to 1.0 and Proulx says the team can now truly focus on making it the game they and the community have been shaping it to be for years. He noted that many players have stuck by the team for years and helped make the game what it is, and that their input is just as important now.

“We read everything, we’re listening — keep the feedback coming. We’re still operating like the indie team that had to stay close with our community. We’re still in that mindset,” Proulx said, “but now we just have a ridiculous amount of money.”

News: Grammarly SDK beta lets developers embed automated text editing in any web app

• September 14, 2021
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Grammarly, the popular auto editing tool, announced the release of Grammarly for Developers today. The company is starting this effort with the Text Editor SDK (software development kit), which enables programmers to embed Grammarly text editing functionality into any web application. Rob Brazier, head of product and platform at Grammarly, says that the beta release

Grammarly, the popular auto editing tool, announced the release of Grammarly for Developers today. The company is starting this effort with the Text Editor SDK (software development kit), which enables programmers to embed Grammarly text editing functionality into any web application.

Rob Brazier, head of product and platform at Grammarly, says that the beta release of this SDK gives developers access to the full power of Grammarly automated editing with a couple of lines of code.”Literally in just a couple lines of HTML, [developers] can add Grammarly’s assistance to their application, and they get a native Grammarly experiences available to all of their users without the users needing to install or register Grammarly,” Brazier told me.

Underneath the hood, these developers are getting access to highly sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) technology without requiring any artificial intelligence understanding or experience whatsoever. Instead, developers can take advantage of the work that Grammarly has already done.

While users of the target application don’t need to be Grammarly customers (and that is in fact the idea), if they do happen to be, they can log into their Grammarly accounts and access all of the functionality that comes with that. “If their users have a Grammarly subscription, those users can link their Grammarly accounts into the developer’s application. They can sign in with Grammarly and unlock the additional features of their particular subscriptions [directly] in that application,” he said.

Brazier said that because this is a starting point, the company wanted to keep it basic, get feedback on the beta and then add additional capabilities in the future. “We wanted to start with the simplest possible way of giving access to this capability to the greatest number of users. So that’s why we started with a pretty simple product. I think it’ll evolve over time and grow in sophistication, but it is really just a couple lines of code and you’re up and running,” he said.

This is the company’s first dip into the developer tool space, allowing programmers to access Grammarly functionality and embed it in their applications. This is not unlike the approach Zoom took last year when it released an SDK to tap into video services (although Zoom is much further along on this developer tool journey). As companies like Grammarly and Zoom grow in popularity, it seems the next logical step is to expose the strengths of the platform, in this case text editing, to let developers take advantage of it. In fact, Salesforce was the first to implement this idea in 2007 when it launched Force.com.

This approach also will potentially provide another source of revenue for Grammarly beyond the subscription versions of the product, although Brazier says it’s too early to say what shape that will take. Regardless, today’s announcement is just the first step in a broader strategy to expose different parts of the platform to developers and enable them to take advantage of all the work Grammarly’s engineers put into the platform. Interested developers can apply to be part of the beta program.

News: Going after social commerce for sportspeople, Millions gets $10M

• September 14, 2021
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Millions.co, a social commerce platform geared towards professional and semi-professional athletes wanting help to monetize their fanbase by selling merch and/or on-demand video, has grabbed $10 million in funding led by Boston-based Volition Capital. The round is being loosely pegged as a Series A as the seasoned team behind Millions self-funded the first wave of

Millions.co, a social commerce platform geared towards professional and semi-professional athletes wanting help to monetize their fanbase by selling merch and/or on-demand video, has grabbed $10 million in funding led by Boston-based Volition Capital.

The round is being loosely pegged as a Series A as the seasoned team behind Millions self-funded the first wave of development to get the platform launched.

The founding team includes CEO Matt Whitteker, a boxing gym owner who co-founded the supply chain data management unicorn Assent Compliance and NoNotes.com; CMO Brandon Austin, co-founder of Go-Fish Cam; and, in advisor roles, Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA 11 and CanvasPop; Scott Whitteker (Fight For The Cure) and Bruce Buffer (a veteran sports announcer).

Millions‘ launched its fan engagement social commerce platform in April — with an initial three products for pro/semi-pro athletes to pitch at their followers: Namely custom merchandize (including a free design service); ask-me-anything personalized videos; and a pay-per-view streaming offering that lets fans pay to tune into a live stream of their favorite sportsperson.

The startup’s initial plan had been to build just an ecommerce and merchandising platform but, having built that component, Salamunovic says the team decided to bundle in video products — such as personalized videos and “‘democratiszing’ pay-per-view (PPV). 

“Our biggest advantage and differentiator is that we are strictly focused on the sports world and fan engagement,” he tells TechCrunch. “The obvious indirect competitors are Twitch (heavily focused on e-sports/gaming), Patreon (focused on creators), Represent.com (focused on merch drops for ‘influencers’), and even Onlyfans (we know who they focus on) but we’re laser focused on the multi-billion dollar sports market.”

“Cameo has a very similar product to our video ‘Ask Me Anything’ platform — but we don’t focus on birthday shout outs we focus on allowing fans to ask their favorite athletes questions around their training, their success, predictions (we’ve seen a lot of gamblers use our platform to get tips) and less on things like Shoutouts,” he adds. “We love Cameo, but we’re really different and focused on sports.”

“Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook are all great social media platforms that allow athletes to engage and interact with their fans but it’s not a great place to monetize your audience,” Salamunovic also argues. “We help athletes create a brand, build a merch line, sell video content (Personalized videos and watch parties all on a single platform). We’re not trying to replace any of these platforms, we’re complementing them by allowing the athletes to provide a single link and landing page for deeper interaction and monetization. The fans seem to love it too.”

At this stage, Millions only has around 300 athlete profiles live but says it has “thousands” who’ve registered interest across a variety of sports categories.

Its first focus — including for partnerships with agencies and sports leagues — has been on “combat sports and gyms”. But the platform has a long list of sports types in the search filter — from lacrosse to water polo to baseball or gymnastics — so the ambition is to go after a very broad funnel of pro/semi sportspeople. 

And for every Michael Jordan or Cristiano Ronaldo — aka, those top tier athletes who can command hundreds of millions in sponsorship fees by inking partnerships with top brands to promote their products and who you certainly won’t find selling hats on Millions — there are scores of athletes who aren’t able to cut such sweet deals and who will have far more modest fanbases.

It’s that broad field of players and performers who Millions hopes will flock to its platform — and take up its dedicated offer of social commerce tools and tech to engage with and monetize their followers.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Sean Cantwell, managing partner at Volition Capital, suggested: “Athletes are always looking for ways to connect on a deeper level with fans, generate additional revenue streams and build their personal brands and Millions offers all of this on a single platform. We think that Millions is the future of fan engagement.”

To help grease the funnel of sportspeople it needs to drive eyeballs to its platform, Millions is offering athletes a “signing bonus” when they join and start selling — with a variety of tiers of bonus (of up to $5k) per sportsperson.

“We initially wanted to stay hyper-focused on combat sports and not try to ‘boil the ocean’. Now we’re releasing new athletes profiles daily and introducing new sports like football, volleyball, golf and more,” notes Salamunovic. “Really, this platform is designed for any athlete who wants to reach their fans and create new monetization channels without having to put a ton of effort into things like page design, technology, design or logistics… we take care of all that so they can focus on engaging with their fans and most importantly on their sport and training.” 

“We’re looking to build the most important sports tech company in history,” he adds. “We’re going to be the Etsy (21B market cap) of sports. That’s an ambitious statement but it’s true. 98% of athletes NEED our product/platform.”

Chasing that scale is why Millions is raising now. And while the early focus has been on North America — where about 90% of the onboarded sportspeople hail from currently — it reckons there’s “huge growth potential” in Europe and Asia so is very much gunning to build a global business.

It says it’ll be splashing Series A cash on growing its product engineering team and recruiting to expand its team generally, as well as spending on marketing to get the word out to athletes and get more signed up to build their own brands and sell direct to fans. 

“I believe a powerful thing we’re doing, past just the product offering, is enabling athletes to have a team,” adds Austin. “With Millions, athletes get a marketing team, a personal account manager, and a design team that they can use to build their brand and product line, and to promote to, and further build, their fan base. We allow the athlete to focus on training, playing/fighting, and winning while we help take care of everything else, and coach them on how to brand and market themselves.” 

Millions’ business model is to take a 20% cut of all sales athletes make via the platform — with the split remaining the same for merchandise or video sales.

For the former, Millions is using a global network of print-on-demand suppliers to do the fulfilment.

While products the platform can customize for athletes to sell as their own brand merch include t-shirts, caps and hoodies.

News: Sonos’ second-gen Beam soundbar supports Dolby Atmos

• September 14, 2021
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Today, the Sonos Beam is getting a major upgrade. The new, second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $449 and will be available on October 5th, and includes Dolby Atmos support.

Sonos has sold home theater products for a long time, but the company has made the living room even more of a priority in recent years. It started with the Sonos Beam, a smaller and more affordable version of the flagship Playbar soundbar. And 2020’s new flagship, the Sonos Arc, was the company’s first soundbar capable of Dolby Atmos playback.

Today, the Beam is getting a major upgrade. The new, second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $449 and will be available on October 5th. That’s $50 more than before, in line with the other price increases Sonos announced last week. The good news is that the new Beam is more capable than its predecessor in a number of ways. We’ll have to review it before we can really say if it’s worth the extra $50, but there are a number of notable new features here.

The new Beam looks nearly identical to its predecessor, aside from a new perforated polycarbonate grille instead of the cloth front found on the original. It also has the same speaker components inside: a center tweeter, four woofers, and three passive bass radiators. What’s different is that the new processor inside the Beam is 40 percent faster, which opens up a lot of new audio formats.

Sonos

Most notably, the gen-two Beam supports Dolby Atmos, for movies, TV and music (the latter in a limited fashion, for now). Scott Fink, a product manager at Sonos who worked on the new Beam, says that the horsepower from the new CPU let the company increase the speaker arrays — not the specific speaker components, but, as Fink explains, “the set of software that coordinates the playback and interaction of all the speakers together in the soundbar.” The new Beam has five arrays, up from the three in the older model, and Fink said that the extras are dedicated to surround sound and height info.

All told, the Beam supports the same home theater audio formats as the Arc(including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, Multichannel PCM and more), which costs twice as much as the Beam. In addition to the increased processing power, the new Beam has HDMI eARC to facilitate these new formats. Sonos says the speaker should have improved dialog clarity thanks to the additional audio processing power, something that should make the currently-available speech enhancement feature work better than before.

The hardware also supports additional music formats, as well. The Beam (as well as the Arc) will soon support the Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos formats from Amazon Music. Some Sonos speakers have worked with a handful of HD music services for a while now, but this is the first time that a 3D music format will work with the company’s products. I asked if there were any plans to support Dolby Atmos on Apple Music, and unsurprisingly the company wasn’t willing to say yet. But, there shouldn’t be any technical reason, it’s just a matter of Sonos and Apple working together to get more Apple Music formats supported.

Sonos

As with other Sonos products, the new Beam connects to the company’s other speakers for multi-room playback; you can also use other Sonos speakers as surrounds. You can tune the speaker to your room to improve the sound using Trueplay, assuming you have an iOS device. The Beam also has far-field microphones so it can receive voice commands through either Alexa or the Google Assistant, but that’s not required (there’s a mic mute button right on top of the Beam, too). Like some other recent Sonos speakers, the new Beam has NFC to make setup even easier — playing your phone running the Sonos app near it will automatically connect it to your WiFi network.

Based on what Sonos has said so far, the new Beam is probably not a crucial upgrade for most, unless you’ve been itching to get Dolby Atmos into your setup without spending a ton of money. But given that the Beam is already the best-selling compact soundbar (according to NPD data), these upgrades should help it keep its lead over the competition — even with that $50 price hike.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Xiaomi launches its own smart glasses, of course

• September 14, 2021
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Xiaomi is challenging Facebook in the wearables arena by launching its own smart glasses. The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages, notifications and more.

Xiaomi is challenging Facebook in the wearables arena by launching its own smart glasses. The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages and notifications, making calls, providing navigation and translating text right in real time in front of your eyes. Like Facebook, Xiaomi is also putting emphasis on the device’s lightness despite its features. At 51 grams, though, it’s a bit heavier than the social network’s Ray-Ban Stories. In addition, the glasses also has an indicator light that shows when the 5-megapixel camera is in use.

Xiaomi’s Smart Glasses are powered by a quad-core ARM processor and run on Android. They also use MicroLED imaging technology, which is known for having a higher brightness and longer lifespan than OLED. The company says the technology has a simpler structure that enabled it to create a compact display with individual pixels sized at 4μm. You won’t be able to view the images you take in color, though — Xiaomi says it opted to use a monochrome display solution “to allow sufficient light to pass through complicated optical structures.”

The company explains:

“The grating structure etched onto the inner surface of the lens allows light to be refracted in a unique way, directing it safely into the human eye. The refraction process involves bouncing light beams countless times, allowing the human eye to see a complete image, and greatly increasing usability while wearing. All this is done inside a single lens, instead of using complicated multiples lens systems, mirrors, or half mirrors as some other products do.”

Its smart glasses won’t be just a second screen for your phone, according to Xiaomi. It’s independently capable of many things, such as selecting the most important notifications to show you, including smart home alarms and messages from important contacts. The device’s navigation capability can display maps and directions in front of your eyes. It can also show you the number of whoever’s currently calling your phone, and you can take the call using the smart glasses’ built in mic and speakers.

That mic will be able to pick up speech, as well, which Xiaomi’s proprietary translating algorithm can translate in real time. The glasses’ translation feature also works’ on written text and text on photos captures through its camera. Unfortunately, the company has yet to announce a price or a launch date for the glasses, but we’ll keep you updated when it does.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Here’s what your BNPL startup could be worth

• September 14, 2021
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What would you pay for $1 of BNPL GMV?

It’s a two-Exchange Tuesday, everyone. First up, we’re talking fintech valuations. Next up, we’re digging into Atlanta.

Last week’s news that PayPal intends to buy Japanese startup Paidy marked the second major acquisition of a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company this year. PayPal’s news followed an even larger deal by Square for the Australian BNPL company Afterpay.

The multibillion-dollar exits provided hard market proof that what BNPL startups are building has value beyond simple operating results; major fintech platforms are willing to shell out large sums for their revenues and possible strategic value.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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Because both deals happened in 2021, they provide two data points for the value of BNPL companies operating at scale. And because both Square and PayPal provided some information to their investors concerning their transactions, we have a little bit of comparative work to do.

Let’s do a little math and figure out how much PayPal and Square investors are paying for transaction volume across both platforms. Then, we’ll peek at what Affirm is worth along similar lines. We’ll wrap with a look at Klarna’s numbers to see if there’s anything we can dig up there.

Our goal is to find out what sort of price floor or ceiling the Paidy and Afterpay deals imply, if other players in their space are matching that figure, and why. This will be fun!

What would you pay for $1 of BNPL GMV?

Square’s Afterpay deal is worth some $29 billion, a huge sum. It isn’t hard to see why the U.S. consumer- and business-focused fintech is willing to write so large a check — Afterpay does volume.

News: EverAfter closes $13M to help companies ride off into the sunset with their customers

• September 14, 2021
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EverAfter’s customer-facing tool streamlines onboarding and retention and enables B2B clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

EverAfter secured $13 million in seed funding to continue developing its no-code customer-facing tool that streamlines onboarding and retention and enables business-to-business clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2020 by Noa Danon and Tal Shemesh. CEO Danon, who comes from a project management background, said they saw a disconnect between the user and product experience.

The company’s name, EverAfter, comes from the concept that in SaaS companies, someone has to be in charge of the “EverAfter,” with customers, even as the relationship changes, Danon told TechCrunch.

Via its no-code platform, customer success teams are able to build a website in weeks using drop-and-drag widgets like training materials, timelines, task management and meeting summaries, and then configure what each user sees. Then there is a snippet of code that is embedded into the product.

EverAfter also integrates with existing customer relationship management, project management and service ticket tools, while also updating Salesforce and HubSpot directly through an interface.

“It’s like the customer owns a piece of real estate inside the product,” Danon said.

TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures co-led the round and were joined by angel investors Benny Shneider, Zohar Gilon and Amit Gilon.

Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures, said he is seeing best-in-breed companies try to solve customer churn or improve the relationship process on their own and failing, which speaks to the complexity of the problem.

Startups in this space are coming online and raising money, but with EverAfter, they are differentiating themselves by not only putting a dashboard on their product, but launching with the capabilities to manage thousands of customers using the product, he added.

“I’ve been tracking the customer success space over the past few years, and it is a growing field with the least sophisticated tools,” Oron said. “During COVID, companies realized it was easier to retain customers rather than get new ones. We are all used to more self-service and wanting to get the answer ourselves, and customers are the same. Companies also started to be more at ease in letting customers develop things on their own and leave R&D departments to do other things.”

Clients include Taboola, AppsFlyer and Verbit, with Verbit reporting its company’s customer success managers save 10 hours a week managing ongoing customer communication by using EverAfter, Danon added. This comes as CallMiner reports that unplanned customer churn costs companies $35.3 billion in the U.S. alone.

EverAfter offers both customer success and partner management software and clients can choose a high-touch service or kits and templates for self-service.

The new funding will enable the company to focus on integration and expansion into additional use cases. Since being founded, EverAfter has grown to 20 employees and 30 customers. The founders also want to utilize the data they are collecting on what works and doesn’t work for each customer.

“There are so many interesting things that happen between companies and customers, from onboarding to business reviews, and we are going to expand on those,” Danon said. “We want to be the first thing companies put inside their product to figure out the relationship between customers and customer success teams and managers.”