PayPal announced today that it will begin piloting a few new upcoming updates to its service, some of which will leverage AI-driven personalization. The company is introducing a new “CashPass” cash-back offering called “Smart Receipts,” with personalized recommendations, enhanced checkout and guest experiences, Venmo enhancements for small businesses and a new offers platform for merchants.
The company announced that its app is getting a new “CashPass” feature that gives customers access to hundreds of personalized cash-back offers. If you come across an offer you like, all you need to do is click on it, shop at the brand, and then check out with PayPal. The company says CashPass uses AI to organize personalized offers for users based on their shopping behaviors. The app will surface new offers regularly, so customers are encouraged to check it often.
PayPal plans to launch CashPass in March with a handful of partners, including Best Buy, eBay, Priceline, Ticketmaster, Uber, Walmart and McDonald’s. Users will be able to stack the offers with other PayPal rewards, such as cash back from the PayPal Cashback Mastercard.
With PayPal’s new AI-powered “Smart Receipts” feature for customers and brands, when customers shop with PayPal, they will soon receive a receipt that will let them track the order and see predictions of what they may want to buy next from the brand. The receipts will leverage AI-powered suggestions that are based on shopper behavior data, combined with what PayPal can see across the web.
With Smart Receipts, brands will be able to include a personalized recommendation along with a cash-back reward offer on the receipt in order to increase their chances of re-engaging directly with customers.
The company is also launching a new “Fastlane” service that offers a one-click guest checkout experience that will allow users to make quick purchases on merchant websites that use PayPal’s platform. PayPal notes that standard guest checkout experiences are slow and require users to update their credit card information and shipping address. Customers will soon be able to save their information with Fastlane to check out in one tap. They won’t need to enter a username or password or update their personal information.
As for PayPal’s regular checkout experience, the company says it has accelerated it to improve latency to enable customers to check out faster. PayPal is also integrating its Passkey support directly into the redesigned checkout experience. Plus, the checkout experience will leverage AI to get “smarter and faster over time,” the company says.
In addition, PayPal announced that it’s introducing enhanced Venmo business profiles to help small businesses get discovered. Venmo launched business profiles back in 2021 to provide an easy way for businesses to accept payments, but PayPal says it’s aware that it can be hard to stand out on social media and get noticed, which is why it’s launching the next evolution of business profiles. The new profiles will add subscribe buttons, profile rankings and the ability to offer promotions to consumers.
For merchants, PayPal is building a personalized advanced offers platform that will offer them the ability to reach customers based on what they have actually bought across the internet. The platform will use AI to “organize and analyze data from nearly half a trillion dollars’ worth of merchant transactions globally,” PayPal says. The platform will also allow merchants to customize offers for customers. Customers who don’t want their data used to receive more relevant offers can opt out from having their data shared with merchants.
Image Credits: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg / Getty Images
In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level overview of Airbnb’s larger plans for AI, saying that it planned to accel at the “application layer” of AI, building one of the “most innovative AI interfaces ever created.”
Hyperbole aside, Chesky explained that Airbnb doesn’t see itself as an AI infrastructure company — meaning it’s not going to build its own large language models, but will rely on AI technologies from others, like OpenAI, Meta and Google. Instead, the company believes it can create a new interface for accessing modern AI models. That’s something the GamePlanner acquisition could help with.
“…Though the [AI] models are very powerful, the interface is really not an AI interface. It’s the same interface as the 2000s,” Chesky told investors on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “It’s a typical, classical web interface. So we feel like the models, in a sense, are probably underutilized,” he said. “Here’s another way of saying it. Take your phone and look at all the icons on your phone. Most of those apps have not fundamentally changed since the advent of generative AI. So what I think AI represents is the ultimate platform shift,” the CEO continued.
After the internet’s creation, the rise of mobile technology lifted Airbnb’s business, but AI is going to change things once again, Chesky believes. “[This] is also a shift in power. It’s a shift in behavior. And so I think this is a zero-zero ballgame,” he said.
Airbnb plans to leverage AI technology and particularly generative AI to provide a more personalized experience for its users, the exec told investors.
“Imagine an app that you feel like knows you — it’s like the ultimate concierge — an interface that is adaptive and evolving and changing in real-time, unlike no interface you’ve ever seen before. That would allow us to go from a single vertical company to a cross-vertical company,” Chesky added.
Whether or not Airbnb can deliver on these ambitions, of course, remains to be seen. Though Chesky paints a picture of an evolution of the Airbnb user interface, powered by AI, today’s AI systems are often still difficult to use and have a bad habit of returning false information through what are known as hallucinations. That is, the AI bot will simply make things up when it doesn’t know the answer. If the AI models don’t become more accurate under the hood, Airbnb’s plans for application layer improvements could also fall short.
The CEO said he wouldn’t detail specific AI products and services it plans to offer at this time, but the company will make more announcements later this year on the AI front. It has already tested some use cases for generative AI, including those where AI is used to write review summaries.
Airbnb acquired GamePlanner a few months ago, but it wasn’t clear exactly what the secretive startup did, beyond being tied to AI. Notably, GamePlanner was co-founded by AI pioneer Adam Cheyer, who co-founded Siri (which was sold to Apple), and Siamak Hodjat. In a statement released at the time of the acquisition, Airbnb suggested that the GamePlanner team would help to accelerate the company’s AI projects by integrating its tooling into the Airbnb platform.
Airbnb acquires secretive firm launched by Siri co-founder
Airbnb is making progress to get rid of those hated cleaning fees
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024. You already know what we’re expecting, so sit back, relax and stay tuned throughout the week as we bring you the products, announcements and startup news from MWC that you need to know.
So far, we’ve seen some big announcements from companies, including new Android features from Google, Lenovo’s new laptop concept and rollable phone concept and Xiaomi’s robotic dog. As MWC progresses, here’s how you can follow along with our team’s coverage.
After the show
Showee’s smart shower
Image Credits: Showee (opens in a new window)
Showers have never been more fun, or more accessible to people with disabilities than with Showee. The startup built a smart shower designed for people with disabilities who face challenges both physical and intellectual. It has a height-adjustable structure, and also includes a smart touchscreen that guides users through each step, from wetting and lathering to drying. Finally, a hands-free dryer! The video is also fun to watch.
Friday, March 1
Ultraleap is bringing haptic touch to cars and VR headsets
Image Credits: Brian Heater
If you don’t know what haptics are, you will by the end of this article. Brian Heater spoke with Ultraleap co-founder and CEO Tom Carter about adapting the technology for use in automotive and virtual reality. However, that’s not all the company can do with it.
Swayy helps you tell your friends where you will be
Swayy app. Image Credits: Swayy
Instagram now has the “Friend Map” feature; maybe you were yearning for a midday cup of joe and were hoping one of your friends could join you. Swayy wants to go one step further than just saying where you are at the moment and has an iPhone app that enables you to share where you plan to go in a couple of hours or even a month from now.
Thursday, February 29
Brain.ai and the future of smartphones
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Earlier this week, Brian Heater met with Brain.ai founder and CEO Jerry Yue and what resulted is a delightful chronicle of how generative AI might be foundational to the next generation of devices.
The AI and interface company’s operating system is likely to be seen in the United States in the device known as the T-Mobile REVVL (known as the “T Phone” in international markets like the EU), Brian writes. The precise model, release date and nature of the deal will be revealed “soon,” according to Yue.
“From a privacy and security perspective, we want to give a new level of control that people don’t have right now,” Yue said. “The computer’s understanding of you, now it’s aggregated into different apps. These AI models are black boxes — recommendation machines that exploit our attention. We believe in explainable AI. We will be explaining to you, each step of the way, why we are making a recommendation. You have more people owning the AI and not big tech black boxes.”
Wednesday, February 28
Liveliness wants to help you find a workout buddy
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
Liveliness is building a community app around shared sporting passions. The free app offers a chat function and the ability for users to set up events that other users can sign up to join. It also features a feed of (non-user) organized events geared toward learning and improving at different sports, such as running clubs, street yoga, calisthenics sessions and so on. These can include paid events, giving the startup a route to earning commissions. It also plans to monetizes through a premium version of the app, with additional features for subscribers.
Sweanty’s wearable patch for athletes
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
Sweanty (clever name) is the Spanish startup behind a stick-on patch for tracking athletes’ sweat to monitor salt loss and help them tailor their rehydration strategy. The system is designed to ensure athletes rehydrate with the correct amount of electrolytes (or isotonic drinks) after each training session. Analysis of the patch wearers’ “sweatprofile” is sent to a companion app where they access their tailored hydration plan.
Qilimanjaro named winner of 4FYN pitch competition
Qilimanjaro wins the 4YFN pitch competition at Mobile World Congress 2024. Image Credits: Anna Heim
Qilimanjaro was chosen as the winner of the Four Years From Now (4YFN) pitch competition, which aims to find the “best startups” around the globe. The company, based in Spain, is a full-stack quantum computing company focused on high-quality qubit architectures and “coherent quantum annealers, which do not require quantum error correction and can be therefore faster-to-market.” It was awarded €20,000.
In this week’s competition, Qilimanjaro was among five finalists to emerge from hundreds of applications:
Bitsensing, based in South Korea, is developing radar technology that can detect if passengers are inside a car or not, without using cameras.Mica AI Medical, based in Israel, is training its operating system to spot and diagnose suspicious findings in mammograms early, particularly for women with dense breasts.Ocean Ecostructures, based in Spain, is developing a biodiversity regeneration program that it claims regenerates marine life and aims to mitigate the environmental effects of “gray oceans.”Whispp, based in the Netherlands, develops an “assistive voice tech and calling app” that converts whispered and vocal cord impaired speech into a person’s natural voice, in real time. Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of the company from January.
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
Eco-friendly thread . . . made from kombucha?
If the taste of kombucha isn’t your cup of tea, you might enjoy this use for it. While scouting out the Four Years From Now (4YFN) exhibition floor, Natasha Lomas spoke with Laura Freixas about her PhD research project that’s using a base of the fermented hipster tea to “upcycle” organic waste into filaments. Freixas and her peers at the Barcelona School of Design and Engineering are aiming to commercialize the bio-filament and are calling it Biocel. Step aside mycelium, kombucha is coming for ya.
Nothing Phone (2a)
Image Credits: Nothing
Update, March 5: The Nothing Phone (2a) is now officially official, just under a week after it made its limited debut at the company’s MWC after party. Nothing’s third phone is the first that goes directly after the mid-tier/budget space, with a starting price of $349. More here.
London phone company Nothing unveiled its Nothing Phone (2a), and true to form, is teasing out little bits of information rather than making a big splash as other tech companies do. While technically the company’s third phone, Brian Heater explains, “The ‘a’ bit, as you’ve likely gathered from previous handsets, implies a budget focus. In recent years, that’s mostly been a game of deciding which flagship features can sacrificed to reduce the price, while keeping is close to a premium feel as possible.” Much about the phone is similar to Nothing’s earlier devices, however what’s different is that the Phone (2a) is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro chip, a variant built specifically for the device.
Tuesday, February 27
HTC Vive became an enterprise business
Image Credits: HTC
HTC broke off into a mixed reality division about a decade ago. During that time, Vive’s headsets have gone from a mostly consumer play to more of an enterprise tool. Brian Heater sat down with Dan O’Brien, HTC’s Vive general manager, and John Dabill, the brand’s head of product operations, to discuss Vision Pro, Magic Leap, the metaverse and generative AI.
eQub digitizes peer-to-peer lending in Africa
Image Credits: eQub
Meet eQub, an Ethiopian startup and winner of the fintech pitch-off at 4YFN 2024, Mobile World Congress’ startup event. Nahom Michael, the company’s business development lead, explained that the company’s name is an Amharic word referring to a local form of peer-to-peer credit. An Equb is a group of people who join forces to save money, similar to a tanda, which is then distributed on a rotating basis. eQub is digitizing the experience, starting with an app, to target users among the growing number of Ethiopians who have bank accounts and mobile phones, but limited access to credit.
SynFlora is taking on acne
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
The skin is the largest organ that we have, and we don’t always treat it right. That’s where biotech startup SynFlora comes in with a new type of skin treatment technology. The company is initially focused on acne and is working on a way to deliver the treatment in a deeper way than topically applied creams and also to design and engineer a wider range of treatments by using biotech methods to harness bacteria to deliver targeted therapeutics.
Lizcore’s sport tracking system
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
Lizcore has done what Natasha Lomas thought was impossible: digitizing and improving the indoor climbing experience. With Lizcore’s progress tracking system, climbers don’t need to climb with their phone or wear a smartwatch. All they need is its lightweight NFC wearable, which the company calls the Lizy bracelet that pairs with the startup’s app.
Jolla’s “blackbox for your life”
Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
Jolla, a mobile OS maker, is designing a way for users to gain the superpower of advanced AI without having to let data-hungry third parties gobble their privacy. It is showcasing a device that is like a private cloud and AI router all rolled into one, making the user’s data accessible for running AI queries. It’s like having a personal server “reconfigured for the generative AI age,” Natasha Lomas writes.
Displace wireless television
Image Credits: Displace MiniTV
Mike Butcher caught up with Displace founder and CEO Balaji Krishna, who discussed the company’s 55-inch Display Flex product. It’s a “wireless” $3,000 4K OLED TV that sticks to walls without a traditional mounting. It was launched in January at CES. Krishna says more versions of the screen, and new features, are coming. One we can talk now about is a “Display Mini” that will be a smaller 27-inch TV and designed for a kitchen or bathroom space. Krishna also hinted at future feature based on an “AI-powered shopping engine” letting consumers purchase products from ads, and a contactless payment reader.
Motorola’s rollable concept phone
Image Credits:
What’s the maximum size of a device that you will wear on your wrist? If “bigger is better” is your go-to answer, Lenovo has something for you. The company has designed what it’s calling a “rollable concept phone” for Motorola that folds around your wrist. Key word being “concept,” because there is no proof this could become a product. Regardless, it’s fun to see.
Android smartwatch users can now have their own version of Doublepoint’s WowMouse gesture-touch control app. Pinch away!
Microsoft’s AI Access Principles
Image Credits: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto / Getty Images
Brad Smith, the president and vice chair of Microsoft, announced a framework today called “AI Access Principles,” which is an 11-point plan that Smith said will “govern how we will operate our AI datacenter infrastructure and other important AI assets around the world.” Although the implication here is that Microsoft is open to dialogue and conversation with stakeholders, ironically, Smith delivered the news in a keynote speech, with no scope for follow-up questions.
Xiaomi’s first electric car
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Xiaomi EV’s first product — the highly anticipated Xiaomi SU7 — is light on details. We do know that it is a “full-size high-performance eco-technology sedan” with plans to arrive in China at some point next year. In addition to design, Xiaomi has developed the five core EV technologies: E-Motor, CTB Integrated Battery, Xiaomi Die Casting, Xiaomi Pilot Autonomous Driving, and Smart Cabin. And, as mentioned before, it will have the “HyperOS” operating system.
Samsung’s first smart ring
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but if you’re a girl who can’t sleep, Samsung’s new Galaxy Ring may become your new favorite. Some of the features include on-board sensors to measure heart rate, movement and breathing to create a cross section of the wearer’s health and sleep patterns. Questions around pricing and battery life remain unanswered for now.
Extended battery life for OnePlus
Image Credits: OnePlus
OnePlus’ upcoming Watch 2 is promising a jaw-dropping 100 hours “in full Smart Mode.” This claim comes after the company spent three years on its battery technology. Brian Heater spoke with Tuomas Lampén, OnePlus Europe’s head of strategy, about why the company took that long and how it was able to squeeze 100 hours out of the new watch.
Last week, Brian reported that “battery is precisely the sort of thing OnePlus needs to lean into,” given that its first-generation product had only about 25 hours of battery life. And that was with the GPS turned off.
Xiaomi’s CyberDog
Image Credits: Brian Heater
After years of reporting on Xiaomi’s CyberDog, Brian Heater was finally able to see the robotic dog up close at MWC. He got to see the little dog’s dressage shuffle and do a little dance, which he wrote reminded him “of a scaled down version of Boston Dynamics’ familiar robot.” Since Brian’s story in 2021, Xiaomi has made some changes to its dog, including a more realistic version of a head to replace the previous flatter one. CyberDog 2 can currently be purchased online for $3,000 — that’s nearly double the $1,600 price point of its predecessor.
Lenovo’s laptop concept
Image Credits: Brian Heater
If you’ve always wanted to look at the back of your desk while working, Lenovo’s new transparent laptop will certainly give you that joy. That is, if it ever makes it to production. It looks like your standard laptop with a few exceptions — the screen has a transparent pane, and it and the keyboard part remind us of an augmented reality experience, meaning the graphics are overlaid on whatever is behind it. For now, Lenovo enjoys showing off its creativity.
Google brings AI to new features
Today, Google rolled out AI into more of its services, including a new set of features for phones, cars and wearables. These are using Gemini to craft messages, AI-generated captions for images, summarizing texts through AI for Android Auto, along with access to passes on Wear OS. In addition, Google Messages will get a feature that lets you access Gemini in the app. The feature is currently in beta and only supports English. The mobile giant is also launching some accessibility-related features as well. One is the Lookout app, which helps visually impaired people with things like food labels and documents and will now generate AI-powered captions for images that have missing or inaccurate captions or alt text.
Also at MWC, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis spoke on a panel with Wired’s Steven Levy to talk about Google being able to “unpause” the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people. The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks,” he said. Natasha Lomas reports that “Google suspended the Gemini capability last week after users pointed out the tool was producing historically incongruous images, such as depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers as a diverse group of people, rather than only white men.”
A desktop lamp to improve your mood
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Seaborough, a Dutch company, showcased small devices designed to replace large light therapy lamps that mimic the sun’s impact on the production of serotonin in the brain. One sits next to the computer and the other clips above display, looking a lot like an external webcam. Both plug into the USB port for power. You’ll have to wait a bit, though, as the lamp is still in proof-of-concept mode.
Infinix wants to put the back of your phone to work
Image Credits: Brian Heater
The Infinix E-Color Shift improves upon the e-ink screen work started by YotaPhone years ago. What’s new here is the addition of color and what Brian Heater describes as “a fun aesthetic addition to the part of your device that is nearly always covered by a case, your hand or otherwise facedown on a table.”
Apple isn’t yet ready to unveil its broader AI strategy — it’s saving that for its Worldwide Developer Conference in June — but the tech giant did make sure to mention AI technologies across its device lineup at its iPad event on Tuesday. The company touted a new iPad Air as “an incredibly powerful device for AI;” its AI-powered features like visual lookup, subject lift and live text capture, among others; and, of course, its upgraded M4 chip, which features a neural engine that’s “dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads.”
For instance, the iPad Air’s update, which now includes the M2 with a faster CPU, GPU and neural engine, was described as offering “powerful machine learning features,” like visual lookup, which can identify objects in photos; an AI-powered tool that can lift out a photo’s subject; and live text capture, which can copy, share, look up and translate text within the camera frame.
When Apple didn’t have its own AI tech to point to, it referenced third parties. While talking about the iPad Air, for example, Apple gave a shout-out to Pixelmator’s Photomator, which uses AI models trained on over 20 million professional images to improve photos with a single click.
Meanwhile, the iPad Pro jumped from being powered by the M2 to the new M4, the latest generation of Apple silicone, with a new CPU, next-gen GPU and next-generation ML accelerators that Apple claims will deliver up to 50% faster performance than the M2. Of course, the company also played up the chip’s neural engine, or NPU, which is “dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads.”
“Now while the chip industry is just starting to add NPUs to some of their processors, we’ve been including our industry-leading neural engine in our chip for years,” said John Ternus, Apple SVP, Hardware Engineering, during the event.
Consumers, however, are waiting to see what sort of use cases are in store for these hardware advances — and that’s something Apple didn’t yet go into detail about, despite having the opportunity to tease an iPadOS release with new AI features or other developer-focused announcements.
Instead, Apple ran through iPadOS’ existing features, like multitasking view Stage Manager and a display mode for creatives, dubbed Reference Mode.
Still, the company hinted that improved AI capabilities would soon be in the hands of iPadOS app developers, noting that the operating system software offers advanced frameworks, like CoreML, and that developers would be able to tap into its neural engine to deliver “powerful AI features right on device.”
In other apps, like Logic Pro, Apple added new AI-powered session players like a bass and keyboard player who can join a performance alongside the drummer already available. These AI-driven backing band members can also respond to feedback provided in the app, Apple said. The company mentioned, too, a machine learning-backed Logic Pro plug-in, ChromaGlow, for adding warmth to tracks.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple made note of how AI could solve problems in areas like photography, like when trying to scan documents using a device’s camera.
“We’ve all had the experience of trying to scan a document in certain lighting conditions where it’s hard to avoid casting a shadow,” Ternus said. “The new Pro solves this problem. It uses AI to automatically detect documents like forms and receipts. If shadows are in the way it instantly takes multiple photos with the new adaptive flash. The frames are stitched together and the result is a dramatically better scan.”
Though none of the mentions of AI stood out as being over-the-top breakthroughs, they suggested that Apple’s style would be to note AI improvements as it related to upgrading the consumer experience of using its devices. You can check out the full video of the event here:
We expect to hear a lot more about Apple’s AI plans at WWDC, where the company may even announce an AI-powered Siri or partnership with an AI provider like Google or OpenAI, rumors suggest.
While AI references were sprinkled throughout, Tuesday’s event mainly focused on the new hardware itself, including a new iPad Air with an M2 chip and first-ever 13-inch size; a new iPad Pro with completely new M4 chip and stacked OLED screens for higher-fidelity display; a Pro version of the Apple Pencil featuring new sensors; and a new version of the Magic Keyboard.
