Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch (opens in a new window)
We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previous article, but what is it actually like in person?
“We launched a mobile application that will give you information about how big your ‘sound bubble’ is. If, for example, you’re sitting in an airplane, you don’t want the person next to you to hear what you’re saying,” says Gauthier Daridon, connectivity engineer at Skyted, in an interview with TechCrunch at CES in Las Vegas. “So our application will explain that you are ‘perceptible’ and ‘intelligible’ at certain distances.”
Daridon demonstrated the mask and talked in a normal voice. Through a set of headphones, I was able to hear him relatively clearly. Without the headphones, I could hear a slight mumbling — I was standing around three feet away — but I wasn’t able to discern the individual words. At a couple of steps away, the mumbling disappeared into the general hubbub of the noisy show floor.
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company was founded in 2021, currently has around 20 staff and raised $1 million of funding; about half from angels and other smaller investors, and the other half from the French government. This week, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign, which has, so far, sold just short of 300 masks for a total of around $64,000 worth of pledges.
Personally, I’m still a little puzzled for the use cases for this device, and I’m struggling to think of that many situations where you absolutely have to talk, where you can’t be overheard, and where wearing something like this would be socially acceptable. The team has some ideas:
“We’re looking at various customer segments; mostly businesses, open spaces, like offices where this would be huge. In places like call centers, this would be a huge business. We also looking at B2C, for use cases such as gaming,” explains Daridon. “Special Forces came to us because they wanted us to design a mask for them so that they can be completely quiet for events where voice cannot be emitted.”
So far, it seems to be a solution in search of a problem — but that’s one of the exciting things about cutting-edge tech: Occasionally, you have no idea where the opportunities lie, and you have to plod through a Kickstarter campaign to figure it out. I look forward to keeping an eye on the company and its products as it works toward shipping the first batch of products by the end of this year.
Image Credits: Haje Kamps (opens in a new window) / TechCrunch (opens in a new window)
We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previous article, but what is it actually like in person?
“We launched a mobile application that will give you information about how big your ‘sound bubble’ is. If, for example, you’re sitting in an airplane, you don’t want the person next to you to hear what you’re saying,” says Gauthier Daridon, connectivity engineer at Skyted, in an interview with TechCrunch at CES in Las Vegas. “So our application will explain that you are ‘perceptible’ and ‘intelligible’ at certain distances.”
Daridon demonstrated the mask and talked in a normal voice. Through a set of headphones, I was able to hear him relatively clearly. Without the headphones, I could hear a slight mumbling — I was standing around three feet away — but I wasn’t able to discern the individual words. At a couple of steps away, the mumbling disappeared into the general hubbub of the noisy show floor.
Gauthier Daridon holds up a prototype of the mask to his face. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company was founded in 2021, currently has around 20 staff and raised $1 million of funding; about half from angels and other smaller investors, and the other half from the French government. This week, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign, which has, so far, sold just short of 300 masks for a total of around $64,000 worth of pledges.
Personally, I’m still a little puzzled for the use cases for this device, and I’m struggling to think of that many situations where you absolutely have to talk, where you can’t be overheard, and where wearing something like this would be socially acceptable. The team has some ideas:
“We’re looking at various customer segments; mostly businesses, open spaces, like offices where this would be huge. In places like call centers, this would be a huge business. We also looking at B2C, for use cases such as gaming,” explains Daridon. “Special Forces came to us because they wanted us to design a mask for them so that they can be completely quiet for events where voice cannot be emitted.”
So far, it seems to be a solution in search of a problem — but that’s one of the exciting things about cutting-edge tech: Occasionally, you have no idea where the opportunities lie, and you have to plod through a Kickstarter campaign to figure it out. I look forward to keeping an eye on the company and its products as it works toward shipping the first batch of products by the end of this year.
California’s auto regulator, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), is investigating an incident that occurred on Tuesday, where a driverless Waymo car collided with a cyclist, according to a report by Reuters.
San Francisco cops said that the cyclist suffered non-fatal injuries, as per a report by SFGate. Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, said there was only one person in the car, who didn’t suffer injuries. They also informed the police after the incident.
The company said that the driverless car was at a stop at a four-way intersection as a large truck was driving in the opposite direction. The car then moved into the intersection and collided with the cyclist who was behind the truck.
“The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path. When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision,” the company said in a statement.
Waymo started offering its robotaxi services to vetted riders in San Francisco in August 2021. In September 2021, the company got a regulatory nod from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to start charging for these taxi services. However, it needed a go-ahead from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in August 2022 to start the paid service.
In October, Waymo expanded its service areas in San Francisco to cater to tens of thousands of riders, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch at that time.
Autonomous taxi companies are already under scrutiny. Last year, Cruise had to recall its entire fleet of autonomous taxis after a robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian. Last month, the GM subsidiary’s internal report revealed that the Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are probing the company.
Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?
One possible answer can be teased out of a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.
On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social” podcast, he spoke to two leaders building the Threads experience, director of product management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for this space, and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the fediverse, leaving a destroyed ecosystem in its wake.
Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta has other open source efforts in the works, so “pulling the rug” on its fediverse work would come at a “very high cost” for the company, since it would be detrimental to Meta’s work trying to build trust with other open source communities.
For example, the company is releasing some of its work on large language models (LLMs) as open source products, like Llama.
In addition, she believes that Meta will be able to continue to build trust over time with those working in the fediverse by releasing features and hitting milestones, as it did recently with the launch of the new toggle that lets Threads users publish their posts to the wider fediverse, where they can be viewed on Mastodon and other apps.
But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: Why is Meta engaged with the fediverse to begin with?
Meta today has 3.24 billion people using its social apps daily, according to its Q1 2024 earnings. Does it really need a few million more?
Lambert answered this question indirectly by explaining the use case for Threads as a place to have public conversations in real time. She suggested that connecting to the fediverse would help users find a broader audience than those they could reach on Threads alone.
That’s only true to a point, however. While the fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant app in the space. Outside of Threads’ now 150 million monthly active users, the wider fediverse has just north of 10 million users. Mastodon, a top federated app, has fallen below 1 million monthly active users after Threads launched.
So if Threads joining the fediverse is not about significantly widening creators’ reach, then what is Meta’s aim?
The Meta employees’ remarks hinted at a broader reason behind Meta’s shift to the fediverse.
Bringing the creator economy to the open social web
Image Credits: Meta
Lambert suggests that, by joining the fediverse, creators on Threads have the opportunity to “own their audiences in ways that they aren’t able to own on other apps today.”
But this isn’t only about account portability; it’s also about creators and their revenue streams potentially leaving Meta’s walled garden. If creators wanted to leave Meta for other social apps where they had more direct relationships with fans, there are still few sizable options outside of TikTok and YouTube.
If those creators joined the fediverse — perhaps to get away from Meta’s hold on their livelihoods — Threads users would still benefit from their content. (Cue “Hotel California“).
Later in the podcast, Cottle expands on how this could play out at the protocol level, as well, if creators offered their followers the ability to pay for access to their content.
“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,” Cottle noted, speaking casually. Whether or not Meta would find a way to get a cut of those micropayments, of course, remains to be seen.
McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@[email protected]) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too.
He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.
“The servers aren’t free to run. And eventually, somebody needs to find a way to … sustain the costs of the business,” he pointed out. Could Meta be pondering a paid federated experience, like Medium launched?
Moderation services at the protocol level
The podcast yielded another possible answer as to what Meta may be working on in the space, with a suggestion that it could bring its moderation expertise to the ActivityPub protocol.
“A lot of the instruments that we have for people to feel safe and to feel like they’re able to personalize their experience are pretty blunt today. So, you can block users … you can do server-level blocking overall, which is a really big action, but you’re kind of missing some other tools in there that are a little bit more like proportional response,” explained Lambert.
Today, fediverse users can’t do things like filter their followers or replies for offensive content or behavior in the same way as they can on Instagram. “That would be great for us to develop as more of a standard at the protocol level,” she added. (Of note, Threads just launched the ability to filter out words, phrases, and emoji and added tools to mute notifications and controls for quote posts.)
Still, Lambert said that whatever work Meta does it wouldn’t expect everyone in the fediverse to adopt its own toolkit.
Image Credits: Automattic
“We’ve built our technology around a set of policies, and our policies are informed by a lot of different inputs from civil rights groups, policy stakeholders, and just the values of our company, generally. So we certainly wouldn’t want to presume that that is now the standard within the fediverse for how to do moderate, but making those tools more available so people have that option seems like a really compelling path from our perspective.”
Meta’s plan also sounds a lot like Bluesky’s idea around stackable moderation services, where third parties can offer moderation services on top of Bluesky either as independent projects from individuals or communities or even as paid subscription products.
Perhaps Meta, too, sees a future where its existing moderation capabilities become a subscription revenue product across the wider open social web.
Finally, Lambert described a fediverse user experience where you could follow the conversations taking place around a post across multiple servers more easily.
“I think that in combination with the tools that allow you to personalize that experience will … help people feel more safe and in control,” she said.
Threads launches custom mute filters, teases controls for quote posts
Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions. The company said during its first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday that it plans to use M&A “opportunistically” to help it better prioritize inorganic growth.
Unlike its competitor, Match, which historically snatched up popular dating app brands left and right, Bumble hasn’t been very active in pursuing growth via M&A. Its first acquisition was that of the French dating app, Fruitz, in February 2022, followed by an app for couples, Official, in 2023 for $10 million. Neither of them has become the next Tinder, to put it kindly.
Now, Bumble says it will look to acquire other businesses that align with its growth goals. Specifically, CFO Anu Subramanian said on the call that the company, now under new leadership (CEO Lidiane Jones joined Bumble from Slack late last year), would set an “even higher bar” for what M&A looks like at Bumble and the goals it has for investing in acquisitions that drive inorganic growth.
In a follow-up, Jones said Bumble would consider the “value add” of the technology an acquisition would bring just as much as its business. In other words, it may acquire a smaller app if it’s doing something particularly innovative that Bumble could utilize in its apps or invest in. She didn’t give any indication that the company was looking at certain geographies, market segments or use cases, however.
“There’s certainly a lot of interesting technology companies across the industry that we’re constantly looking at, but we immediately look at if it actually aligns and accelerates with our long-term mission here,” Jones said. That seemingly sets a broad stage for potential candidates.
Bumble reported a strong first quarter, handily beating analysts’ average expectations for both profit and revenue. The company reported net profit of 19 cents per share and revenue of $267.8 million in the quarter. Analysts had estimated profit of 7 cents per share, and revenue of $265.5 million.
The company also touted last week’s revamp of its flagship dating app, which now lets women pick from pre-written questions that their matches can respond to instead of having to message matches on their own. In addition, Bumble spoke again of its broader plans for BFF, which it envisions as a way to help Gen Z users find friends.
Jones also touched on the company’s plans to use generative AI, noting that the technology could help in areas like profile creation, understanding customer intent, aiding trust and safety, improving matches and more.
“…our job, as we look at generative AI, is to build a premium dating service level of experience, where we are really taking a closer approach to supporting you in your entire dating journey,” Jones added. “So, even as we get more signals for our customers once they go on a date, we can again automatically augment their profile creation without them having to go back,” she said.
This is not a joke: According to a job listing, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign needs someone to manage memes. The “Partner Manager, Content and Meme Pages” hire will “initiate and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages.” The job pays up to $85,000.
Yes, it’s absurd to be a professional meme manager. But in this age, digital organizing is just as valuable as canvassing IRL at a farmers market. If a candidate is trying to meet voters where they are, then they need to be online, where going viral can mean connecting with millions of people. That’s why Biden’s campaign has a TikTok account, even though the president signed a bill that could effectively ban the app.
Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch
“I do think that we can and should infuse relevant, trendy and fun moments into how we are communicating, especially on digital platforms,” Annie Wu Henry, a creator and digital communications strategist, told TechCrunch in February. “But while we’re doing that, we need to continue to be strategic and intentional and mindful, even if it’s a meme.”
Even before making this hire, the Biden campaign has already relied on memes to appeal to voters. The Dark Brandon meme, which stems from alt-right conspiracy theories about the president, has been so ubiquitous on Biden’s campaign accounts that it feels stale. But the people seem to love it: Last August, Dark Brandon merch accounted for 54% of the campaign store’s total revenue, according to Axios.
Former president Donald Trump has also embraced memes as he campaigns for his return to the White House. When Trump’s mugshot predictably went viral, his campaign immediately started selling T-shirts, mugs and beer koozies with the image, accompanied by text that says “Never Surrender.”
Biden is far from the first candidate to notice that what happens online can sway an election. For as long as social media has existed, it’s been a valuable tool for political organizers, but the pandemic accelerated campaigns’ embrace of digital tactics. When Ed Markey (D-MA) ran for reelection to the Senate in 2020, Gen Z posters around the country concocted “the Markeyverse,” an organic online movement to make sure a climate-friendly senator kept his seat. Meanwhile, the anonymous online personality Organizer Memes has been hosting meme trainings for political organizations such as the South Carolina Young Democrats. In these trainings, participants collaboratively make memes, discuss what makes a good meme, and learn how to use existing meme templates to react in real time to breaking political news.
Given the Biden administration’s potential to ban TikTok, young people may see through the campaign’s attempt to woo them with memes. But if nothing else, embracing social media is proof that a campaign is at least trying to engage a younger demographic.
Gen Z is losing its political voice on social media
