Wearables
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Focals by North review: The future is (almost) here
The concept of an IRL heads-up display has been a part of science fiction since basically the beginning. Big players have tried their hand at it with less than stellar results — most notably Google with Glass, and more recently Intel’s Vaunt. But North may have cracked the nut on smart glasses with Focals.
They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination — they’re slightly heavy and don’t feel quite as seamless as science fiction promised they would — but this may be the best pair of smart glasses yet.
Who
Focals were created by North, a Canadian company backed by Intel Capital, Spark Capital and the Amazon Alexa Fund with nearly $200 million in funding. Around the time Google Glass was released, founders Aaron Grant, Matthew Bailey and Stephen Lake were working on a smart arm band. They were disenchanted, as were many, with Glass and sought to make something better.
Their first priority? Make a great pair of glasses, then outfit them with technology. In order to do that, they had to allow for prescription lenses, which means the lenses of their product had to be curved. This throws a huge wrench in the idea of lens-projected notifications and content, so Focals created its own special projector.
The company also felt that the touchpad on the side of Google Glass was overly cumbersome, leading them to build the Focals Ring to let users navigate the menu.
What
The Focals are technically AR glasses, but they’re not focused on gaming or content consumption. The product is designed to move notifications from your phone to your sightline. It’s a bit like an Apple Watch for your face.
These notifications include the date and time, the weather, text notifications, email, Slack, Apple News alerts, Uber notifications, sports scores, turn-by-turn navigation and more. Users navigate this content using the Ring, outfitted with a nub of a joystick, which is meant to be worn on the index finger of your dominant hand.
Users can proactively seek information by clicking the joystick and scrolling, but the headset also serves up information in a push notification, including incoming messages and emails.
Importantly, North implemented a smart response system to keep users from having to pick up their phone each time they get a notification. The system gives users two options: choose from a list of smartly generated responses, or use speech-to-text through Focals’ built-in Alexa integration (the system is listening via built-in mic — but wearers have to opt-in during set up).
However, one of the great advantages for the Focals is also one of its weaknesses. The company chose to build a custom pair of glasses that could work with Rx lenses. That also means that the eyebox (the surface where you can see the projection) is smaller than other AR gadgets, which often use waveguides. In other words, your Focals have to be positioned pretty near perfectly to see the image. The company works hard to make sure that’s the case, fitting the glasses to your specific face. But glasses shift and move throughout the day, which means there’s plenty of re-adjusting in order to see the picture.
All that said, the Focals look surprisingly good. In fact, passersby would be hard-pressed to detect that they’re smart glasses in the first place. They aren’t comfortable enough to wear all day — the extra weight on the front means they get a bit uncomfortable after a few hours. But overall, these are pretty discreet as far as smart glasses go.
How
It’s a relatively time-consuming process to get your hands on a pair of Focals. Because the fit and size are so important to usability, users interested in purchasing a pair must go to one of North’s two stores (there’s one in Toronto, and one in Brooklyn, NY).
The visit to the store is by appointment. Upon arrival, store associates will take you into a booth where you’ll sit before 11 cameras that will 3D model your head, determining where your eyes and ears sit relative to the rest of your face. The cameras also try to understand your gaze.
From there, you get a demo with a standard (not fitted) pair of Focals, during which you learn how to align the Focals and use the Ring. It takes a few weeks for your custom-fit Focals to be ready to pick up, at which point you go through a final sizing with an optician.
It’s tedious, and will be difficult for the company to scale, but it’s part of what gives Focals an edge in quality. Luckily for folks outside of Toronto and NY, Focals is heading off on a pop-up tour. You can check out the tour dates and locations here.
Why
“Why?” is perhaps the toughest question to answer when it comes to the Focals. The goal, as outlined by the company, is to keep you connected to the digital world without taking you out of the real world. In short, stop looking down at your phone.
That said, Focals also take away the option. When your phone rings, or even when your Apple Watch buzzes, you have a choice to make: look down, or ignore. When you’re wearing the Focals, that decision is eliminated.
For this reason, I feel like this product is meant for early adopters and folks who enjoy being ultra-connected to the digital world. If you’re already addicted to the sweet chime of your phone, the Focals may very well keep you more connected to the real world, and potentially save your neck from some stiffness. But if you do well to live in the real world and don’t appreciate the constant flow of notifications to your phone, the Focals likely won’t help you maintain that separation.
There are also some minor issues with the Focals themselves. The Ring isn’t super comfortable, particularly when typing on a computer (something most of us spend hours each day doing). The Ring also seems like something that would be very easy to lose or break — this hasn’t happened to me yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. (For now, North is replacing broken Rings for free.)
With the Focals themselves, I’d like to be clear when I say that I was pleasantly surprised with the overall experience. The UI is pleasant to look at, and the little chime of a notification that whispers in your ear is most certainly addictive.
However, I found my eyes getting tired after more than an hour wearing the Focals. Using the Focals means that you’re constantly changing the focus of your eyes from close to far away, which can be tiring. Moreover, if the glasses shift a bit on your face, the text of the notification can become fuzzy, making the experience even more tiring.
Plus, the glasses are built to bend halfway through the arms, as opposed to where the arms meet the frames. This means you can’t hang the Focals off the front of your shirt, which is an admittedly minor gripe, but it bugged me throughout the review process.
Add to that the fact that Focals start at $600 and this product is really for technophiles. For now.
North is on the right track. The company is constantly developing new features that are released each week — they recently launched Google Fit support to check your steps, as well as language lessons to brush up on your French during your walk to work. And they’ve started with the right priorities in mind. The Focals are fine looking glasses, and in general, the tech works. Now it’s about refinement.
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A closer look at the best new iOS, macOS and watchOS features from WWDC
As expected, there was a lot at yesterday’s big WWDC keynote. In fact, you got the sense watching the whole thing unfold that Apple had to race through a number of its new features to cram everything into the two-hour-plus event.
For many, the new Mac Pro was the star of the show, but for Apple, the clear the focus was on software. The company is keenly aware as hardware sales slow that its future is all about software, services and content. This week at the show, we got a guided look through the best new features iOS, macOS and watchOS have to offer.
No surprise, iOS 13 brings the biggest changes of the bunch. Dark Mode is the highlight so to speak. The feature has the same selling points as it does on other operating systems — namely being easier on the eyes and the battery. With a touch in settings, users can turn set it as a constant or have it switch when the sun goes down.
The feature swaps in dark wallpapers and will work with all of Apple’s native apps. Third-party supports is coming as well and will be a part of its development platforms like Swift, going forward.
Apple Maps, a major underdog at launch, continues to get some key upgrades. Most notable is Lookaround — a competitor to Google’s longstanding Street View, which brings seamlessly stitched photographs to help users better navigate around. The feature was extremely smooth in our brief demo. It’s hard to say how it will behave on cellular networks out on the street, but the preview was certainly impressive.
Imaging is a key part of every iOS upgrade, and this one’s no different. Photo editing has been much improved, with more pro-style control over aspects like white balance, contrast, sharpening and noise reduction.
There are some handy dummy proof additions as well, like the ability to adjust saturation without impacting flesh tones. iOS’s editing tools are coming to video as well, this time out, with the ability to adjust settings and even rotate orientation. The photos app also gets a new dynamic view that groups images by occasions like birthdays, giving you another opportunity to mark the unwavering march of time.
This year’s show marked a big moment for iPad as well, as the tablet’s operating system broke free from iOS. For users, that primarily means more functionality on the larger screen, including the ability to to open up multiple windows of the same app for additional multitasking. That joins various other features like improved gesture based highlighting and cut and paste that help iPadOS behave more like a PC.
Far and away the most exciting addition here, however, is actually on the mac side. macOS Catalina brings Duet/Luna style second screen functionality to the tablet, letting it serve as an external monitor. The feature can be used wirelessly (over bluetooth) or tethered.
Our demo was the latter (WWDC is a busy place for wireless signals), but operated pretty flawlessly in spite of some complicated demands. With an iPad Pro, users can draw with the Apple Pencil. There’s also a handy Touch Bar-style menu tray at that populates the bottom of the iPad display.
A couple of watchOS additions are worth mentioning, as well. The most significant is native menstrual cycle tracking. The feature, which is also coming to iOS, gives users a way to keep track of another key aspect of health.
Other additions to the wearable operating system include a native app for audiobooks and a noise app that uses the watch’s built in mics to alert wearers of loud sounds that can lead to hearing loss.
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Qualcomm wants your phone to drive your next VR and AR headsets
Qualcomm wants to create a new device category, XR viewer headsets, that combine the compute power of its current Snapdragon 855 platform with the speed of 5G on a smartphone to provide you with mobile VR and AR experiences — or ‘Extended Reality,’ as Qualcomm likes to call it — with six degrees of freedom tracking. The company announced this new initiative at MWC in Barcelona and noted that it expects OEMs like Pico to launch devices later this year.
The idea here is that the headsets will be tethered to a smartphone via a USB-C connection that drives high-res displays, with a lot of the content being streamed over — ideally – a 5G connection.
The headsets are an extension of the company’s previous XR work which mostly focused on using a phone’s camera’s and displays to power AR experiences. The company did start an accelerator program for head mounted displays (HMD), the aptly named HMD accelerator program, back in 2017. In many ways, today’s announcement is an extension of this work.
“Our HMD Accelerator Program has been a critical catalyst for ecosystem partners ranging from component suppliers and ODMs, to bring quality standalone XR headsets to consumers,” said Hugo Swart, senior director, Product Management, Qualcomm. “Building upon the momentum of this program, we will extend this to XR viewers and compatible smartphones, starting with smartphones enabled by the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform.”
Qualcomm has signed up a number of platform and software partners like Arvizio, NetEase-AR, Iconic Engine, NextVR, SenseTime and Wikitude, as well as manufacturers like Acer and Asus.
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TrueFacet, which sells pre-owned, authenticated watches and jewelry, is raising a $10 million round of funding
The secondary luxury goods market has been growing wildly in recent years, with more shoppers opting to both sell their lightly used luxury goods like clothing and jewelry for cold, hard cash, as well as buying the pre-owned, authenticated luxury goods of others.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the trend is The RealReal, a nearly eight-year-old shopping destination for the growing population of people who might not be willing or able to purchase a new Hermes Birkin bag but are willing to buy one in like-new condition for considerably less. The idea — which seems to be working — is to create a virtuous cycle, wherein the bag’s original purchaser receives the bulk of that re-sale price, then uses the money to buy another new handbag (or a used one) that can be resold at a later point in time.
Another beneficiary of the trend: TrueFacet, a five-year-old, New York-based marketplace that claims to have more than 40,000 watches and 55,000 pieces of pre-owned authenticated watches and jewelry for sale at its site, and that has more recently begun offering pre-owned timepieces directly through brands like Fendi Timepieces, Raymond Weil and Roberto Coin that now partner with TrueFacet to carry their pre-owned timepieces with a manufacture warranty.
Apparently, shoppers are buying what they’re collectively selling. The company, which had previously raised $14.7 million in funding from investors, looks to be closing in on another $10 million round, judging by freshly filed SEC paperwork that shows it has so far raised $7 million in funding and is targeting $9.8 million altogether.
TrueFacet’s backers include Founders Co-op, Freestyle Capital and Maveron, led by partner Jason Stoffer, who also happens to sit on the board of Dolls Kill, an edgy clothing marketplace that we wrote about on Monday.
TrueFacet has some tough competition in the space, including Crown & Caliber, a six-year-old, Atlanta, Ga.-based company that has never announced outside funding, and 15-year-old, Germany-based Chrono24, which has raised €21 million over the years. Both sell timepieces alone, however.
It also competes directly with The RealReal, which has raised nearly $300 million from investors and sells clothing and high-end home decor, as well as jewelry and watches. (The company doesn’t break out publicly which of these categories outpace the others in terms of sales.)
Interestingly, like The RealReal, which now operates permanent offline stores in both New York and L.A., TrueFacet is also crossing the chasm into the offline world, though it’s taking baby steps toward that end.
Specifically, earlier this month, it announced a partnership with Stephen Silver Fine Jewelry, which sells timepieces to many monied Bay Area VCs and other Silicon Valley bigs at stores in Redwood City and Menlo Park, Calif. For the time being at least, the jeweler will also sell pieces from TrueFacet’s collection.
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Rothy’s just landed $35 million from Goldman Sachs to sell more of its popular ballet flats
Rothy’s, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes a variety of colorful flats for women, has some more walking-around money today. According to Bloomberg, the company just closed on $35 million in funding from Goldman Sachs’ asset management unit.
The round brings the young company’s total funding to $42 million, including an early $5 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and $2 million in convertible notes, including from Finn Capital Partners, M13 and Grace Beauty Capital.
Goldman’s interest in the company isn’t surprising. Rothy’s doesn’t disclose how many pairs of shoes it has sold, but the company tells Bloomberg that it expects to see slightly more than $140 million in revenue this year, and, as the outlet surmises from some back-of-the-napkin math, that equates to roughly 1.4 million pairs of shoes sold.
Judging by its enthusiastic consumer base — it has 161,000 Instagram followers, for example — many of those are likely women who own multiple pairs, too.
What they love about the shoes, seemingly: their style, in large part. On this front, it helps that some fashion icons have gravitated toward the shoes, including actress-turned-Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, who has been photographed in Rothy’s.
The company is also selling eco-conscious comfort by making the shoes out of recycled materials that include water bottles. Because of their constitution, they are also machine washable, yet another selling point.
Yet where Rothy’s has really shined is in marketing, including spending hugely on Facebook and to a lesser extent, Instagram and other social media platforms. Indeed, the company has been recognized repeatedly (including by us) for its shoes’ seeming ubiquity online. Though these platforms have grown more crowded in the short time since Rothy’s launched, it spent big on marketing from the outset — it flooded the zone, so to speak — and that campaign has seemingly paid off for the startup.
Today, the company, which runs its own 100,000-square-foot factory in China and employs roughly 500 people — including 50 people in the Bay Area — is selling four types of shoes, including its two best-known silhouettes — a $125 rounded flat shoe and a $145 pointed flat — along with loafers and, more newly, sneakers that are reminiscent of Van’s iconic shoes.
Somewhat ironically, one of the biggest threats to Rothy’s ongoing rise — other than fickle shoppers — is companies that are beginning to copy Rothy’s designs, reports Bloomberg.
The company says, for instance, that it is currently suing at least one outfit, a Virginia-based company, for selling a shoe that looks to Rothy’s alarmingly like one of its own productions.
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Farfetch bets on sneakers with $250M Stadium Goods acquisition
The lines between streetwear and luxury fashion have blurred in recent years, especially as excitement around sneaker brands like Yeezy and Off-White has soared.
A marriage between a luxury fashion marketplace and a sneaker and streetwear reseller seems like a natural way to wrap up M&A in 2018. With that said, Farfetch has acquired New York-based Stadium Goods, opting to pay $250 million for the sneaker startup in a combination of cash and Farfetch stock. Headquartered in London, Farfetch went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September, pricing its shares at $20 apiece and raising $885 million in the process.
What’s more impressive is Stadium Goods’ journey to exit. The company, which sells new and deadstock products online and in a brick-and-mortar store in New York’s Soho neighborhood, was founded in 2015 by John McPheters and Jed Stiller and had only raised $4.6 million in venture capital funding from Forerunner Ventures, The Chernin Group and Mark Cuban, who is an advisor to the startup.
“There was a time not that long ago when you couldn’t wear sneakers and streetwear to nightclubs and restaurants,” McPheters, Stadium Goods’ chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “But adoption of the stuff we are selling has continued to grow at a very large clip.”
The sale to Farfetch not only provides a major boost to the sneaker tech ecosystem, which is surprisingly much larger than those who aren’t familiar with it might have guessed, but it’s yet another successful e-commerce exit for Kirsten Green, the founding partner of Forerunner Ventures, who’s also backed Dollar Shave Club and Bonobos — direct-to-consumer retailers that sold for $1 billion and $310 million, respectively.
Stadium Goods founders John McPheters (left) and Jed Stiller
Farfetch boarded the sneaker and streetwear hype train a while ago when it incorporated brands like Nike’s Jordan, pairs of which sell for more than $1,000 on the site. The company doubled down on sneakers earlier this year when it began integrating Stadium Goods products. After noticing high-demand, Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves tells TechCrunch, they began acquisition talks with the startup. Stadium Goods will remain independent as part of the deal, with McPheters and Stiller staying on to lead the brand forward. The company’s portfolio of shoes and apparel will be fully available on Farfetch’s e-commerce platform in the coming months.
“Luxury streetwear is a significant part of our business,” Neves said. “For many years now, we have had the largest collection of Off-White, for example, on the internet … What we did not have was the resale, secondary market. It was clear this was an interesting opportunity.”
Together, Farfetch and Stadium Goods will focus on international growth. McPheters tells TechCrunch Stadium Goods already had a significant international base of customers, but a partnership with Farfetch gives them the tools to go places they’ve never been.
“In my mind, we are only just beginning,” McPheters said. “As more and more customers get comfortable with purchasing aftermarket items, we are going to continue to grow.”
The global athletic footwear industry is expected to be worth $95 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, sneaker resale is a $1 billion market and growing, fueled by a cohort of startups making it easier than ever for sneakerheads to locate rare shoes online and have them delivered to their doorsteps. That includes Stadium Goods, Flight Club, GOAT and StockX.
All four of these resellers, which ensure authentication of their products, are backed by VCs. Flight Club merged with GOAT earlier this year and together the pair raised a $60 million Series C. Before that, GOAT had brought in $30 million for its secondary market for collectible shoes from Accel, Upfront Ventures, Matrix Partners and more. StockX, for its part, has raised just over $50 million from Mark Wahlberg, Scooter Braun, Wale, Eminem, SV Angel and others.
According to Crunchbase data, VCs have funneled more than $200 million into sneaker startups in the past two years. Now, given the size of Stadium Goods’ exit, investment in the space will likely pick up significantly as other VCs hope to land an exit multiple that substantial.
Whether the reselling market will continue to expand is in question. Some have called it a bubble poised to burst, claiming it’s at its “height in popularity.” Why? Because corporate shoe brands like Nike and Adidas are keenly aware of the secondary market for their products and how they, too, can profit from it. If they decide to increase the supply of particular shoe models hot on the secondary market, they can radically disrupt the reseller economy. McPheters, however, says this doesn’t concern him.
“Brands need to strangle the demand to keep driving excitement in the space,” McPheters said. “They count on that hype to really move the needle.”
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TC Sessions: AR/VR surveys an industry in transition
Industry vets and students alike crammed into UCLA’s historic Royce Hall last week for TC Sessions: AR/VR, our one-day event on the fast-moving (and hype-plagued) industry and the people in it. Disney, Snap, Oculus and more stopped by to chat and show off their latest; if you didn’t happen to be in LA that day, read on and find out what we learned — and follow the links to watch the interviews and panels yourself.
To kick off the day we had Jon Snoddy from Walt Disney Imagineering. As you can imagine, this is a company deeply invested in “experiences.” But he warned that VR and AR storytelling isn’t ready for prime time: “I don’t feel like we’re there yet. We know it’s extraordinary, we know it’s really interesting, but it’s not yet speaking to us deeply the way it will.”
Next came Snap’s Eitan Pilipski. Snapchat wants to leave augmented reality creativity up to the creators rather than prescribing what they should build. AR headsets people want to wear in real life might take years to arrive, but nevertheless Snap confirmed that it’s prototyping new AI-powered face filters and VR experiences in the meantime.
I was onstage next with a collection of startups which, while very different from each other, collectively embody a willingness to pursue alternative display methods — holography and projection — as businesses. Ashley Crowder from VNTANA and Shawn Frayne from Looking Glass explained how they essentially built the technology they saw demand for: holographic display tech that makes 3D visualization simple and real. And Lightform’s Brett Jones talked about embracing and extending the real world and creating shared experiences rather than isolated ones.
Frayne’s holographic desktop display was there in the lobby, I should add, and very impressive it was. People were crowding three or four deep to try to understand how the giant block of acrylic could hold 3D characters and landscapes.
Maureen Fan from BaoBab Studios touched on the importance of conserving cash for entertainment-focused virtual reality companies. Previewing her new film, Crow, Fan noted that new modes of storytelling need to be explored for the medium, such as the creative merging of gaming and cinematic experiences.
Up next was a large panel of investors: Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Jacob Mullins (Shasta Ventures), Catherine Ulrich (FirstMark Capital) and Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia). The consensus of this lively discussion was that (as Fan noted earlier) this is a time for startups to go lean. Competition has been thinned out by companies burning VC cash and a bootstrapped, efficient company stands out from the crowd.
Oculus is getting serious about non-gaming experiences in virtual reality. In our chat with Oculus Executive Producer Yelena Rachitsky, we heard more details about how the company is looking to new hardware to deepen the interactions users can have in VR and that new hardware like the Oculus Quest will allow users to go far beyond the capabilities of 360-degree VR video.
Of course if Oculus is around, its parent company can’t be far away. Facebook’s Ficus Kirkpatrick believes it must build exemplary “lighthouse” AR experiences to guide independent developers toward use cases they could enhance. Beyond creative expression, AR is progressing slowly because no one wants to hold a phone in the air for too long. But that’s also why Facebook is already investing in efforts to build its own AR headset.
Matt Miesnieks, from 6d.ai, announced the opening of his company’s augmented reality development platform to the public and made a case of the creation of an open mapping platform and toolkit for opening augmented reality to collaborative experiences and the masses.
Augmented reality headsets like Magic Leap and HoloLens tend to hog the spotlight, but phones are where most people will have their first taste. Parham Aarabi (ModiFace), Kirin Sinha (Illumix) and Allison Wood (Camera IQ) agreed that mainstreaming the tech is about three to five years away, with a successful standalone device like a headset somewhere beyond that. They also agreed that while there are countless tech demos and novelties, there’s still no killer app for AR.
Derek Belch (STRIVR), Clorama Dorvilias (DebiasVR) and Morgan Mercer (Vantage Point) took on the potential of VR in commercial and industrial applications. They concluded that making consumer technology enterprise-grade remains one of the most significant adoptions to virtual reality applications in business. (Companies like StarVR are specifically targeting businesses, but it remains to be seen whether that play will succeed.)
With Facebook running the VR show, how are small VR startups making a dent in social? The CEOs of TheWaveVR, Mindshow and SVRF all say that part of the key is finding the best ways for users to interact and making experiences that bring people together in different ways.
After a break, we were treated to a live demo of the VR versus boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory, by developer Survios co-founders Alex Silkin and James Iliff. They then joined me for a discussion of the difficulties and possibilities of social and multiplayer VR, both in how they can create intimate experiences and how developers can inoculate against isolation or abuse in the player base.
Early-stage investments are key to the success of any emerging industry, and the VR space is seeing a slowdown in that area. Peter Rojas of Betaworks and Greg Castle from Anorak offered more details on their investment strategies and how they see success in the AR space coming along as the tech industry’s biggest companies continue to pump money into the technologies.
UCLA contributed a moderator with Anderson’s Jay Tucker, who talked with Mariana Acuna (Opaque Studios) and Guy Primus (Virtual Reality Company) about how storytelling in VR may be in very early days, but that this period of exploration and experimentation is something to be encouraged and experienced. Movies didn’t begin with Netflix and Marvel — they started with picture palaces and one-reel silent shorts. VR is following the same path.
And what would an AR/VR conference be without the creators of the most popular AR game ever created? Niantic already has some big plans as it expands its success beyond Pokémon GO. The company, which is deep in development of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is building out a developer platform based on their cutting-edge AR technologies. In our chat, AR research head Ross Finman talks about privacy in the upcoming AR age and just how much of a challenger Apple is to them in the space.
That wrapped the show; you can see more images (perhaps of yourself) at our Flickr page. Thanks to our sponsors, our generous hosts at UCLA, the motivated and interesting speakers and most of all the attendees. See you again soon!
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Spire Health Tags are now on Apple’s shelves
Spire’s Health Tags, the dark and tiny devices you stick on your clothes to gather all sorts of health data from your steps, heartbeat and stress levels is now available at your local Apple Store.
The company started out with a breath tracking device to detect when you are feeling tense and help calm you down. But four years in and its now all about the wearable “tags” you stick on items of clothing like your pants or sports bra.
Yes, yes, there are lots of gadgets out there to gather similar information — the Apple Watch will now even detect if you have a fall or if something is wrong with your heart — but the Spire health tag is nothing like a Fitbit or Apple Watch, according to the company. For one, there’s zero need to charge the device. One tag’s battery will last a year and a half before dying out. They’re also machine washable. You just pick a few outfits and stick a tag on each of them.
Of course a few other startups out there are working on making smart, washable, data-gathering clothes. Enflux makes the clothing and then sews in the motion sensor to tell you if you are lifting correctly. Vitali is a “smart” bra with a built-in sensor to detect stress. Then there’s OmSignal, which makes body-hugging workout clothes that gather “medical-grade biometric data to achieve optimal health.” But these tiny health tags are different in that they allow you to choose the clothes you want to adhere the monitor to.
Like Spire’s first product, the Stone, which earned more than $8 million in sales, according to the company, the tags will also pick up on times of stress and help calm you down through a series of breaths and focus on the app.
“Continuous health data will revolutionize health and wellness globally, but early incarnations have been hampered by poor user experiences and a focus on the hardware over the outcomes that the hardware can create,” Spire’s founder Jonathan Palley said. “By making the device ‘disappear’, we believe Health Tag is the first product to unlock the potential.”
Spire’s Health Tags will be sold in Apple Stores as a three-pack for $130, six-pack for $230 and an eight-pack for $300, with additional pack sizes available on the company’s website.
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Kegel trainer startup Elvie is launching a smaller, smarter, hands-free breast pump
Elvie, a London-based startup known best for its connected Kegel trainer, is jumping into the breast pump business with a new $480 hands-free system you can slip into your bra.
Even with all the innovation in baby gear, breast pumps have mostly sucked (pun intended) for new moms for the past half a century. My first experience with a pump required me to stay near a wall socket and hunch over for a good 20 to 30 minutes for fear the milk collected might spill all over the place (which it did anyway, frequently). It was awful!
Next I tried the Willow Pump, an egg-shaped, connected pump meant to liberate women everywhere with its small and mobile design. It received glowing reviews, though my experience with it was less than stellar.
The proprietary bags were hard to fit in the device, filled up with air, cost 50 cents each (on top of the $500 pump that insurance did not cover), wasted many a golden drop of precious milk in the transfer and I had to reconfigure placement several times before it would start working. So I’ve been tentatively excited about the announcement of Elvie’s new cordless (and silent??) double breast pump.
Displayed: a single Elvie pump with accompanying app
Elvie tells TechCrunch its aim all along has been to make health tech for women and that it has been working on this pump for the past three years.
The Elvie Pump is a cordless, hands-free, closed-system, rechargeable electric pump designed by former Dyson engineers. It can hold up to 5 oz. from each breast in a single use.
It’s most obvious and direct competition is the Willow pump, another “wearable” pump moms can put right in their bra and walk around in, hands-free. However, unlike the Willow, Elvie’s pump does not need proprietary bags. You just pump right into the device and the pump’s smartphone app will tell you when each side is full.
It’s also half the size and weight of a Willow and saves every precious drop it can by pumping right into the attached bottle so you just pump and feed (no more donut-shaped bags you have to cut open and awkwardly pour into a bottle).
On top of that, Elvie claims this pump is silent. No more loud suction noise off and on while trying to pump in a quiet room in the office or elsewhere. It’s small, easy to carry around and you can wear it under your clothes without it making a peep! While the Willow pump claims to be quiet — and it is, compared to other systems — you can still very much hear it while you are pumping.
Elvie’s connected breast pump app
All of these features sound fantastic to this new (and currently pumping) mom. I remember in the early days of my baby’s life wanting to go places but feeling stuck. I was chained to not just all the baby gear, hormonal shifts and worries about my newborn but to the pump and feed schedule itself, which made it next to impossible to leave the house for the first few months.
My baby was one of those “gourmet eaters” who just nursed and nursed all day. There were days I couldn’t leave the bed! Having a silent, no mess, hands-free device that fit right in my bra would have made a world of difference.
However, I mentioned the word “tentatively” above, as I have not had a chance to do a hands-on review of Elvie’s pump. The Willow pump also seemed to hold a lot of promise early on, yet left me disappointed.
To be fair, the company’s customer service team was top-notch and did try to address my concerns. I even went through two “coaching” sessions, but in the end it seemed the blame was put on me for not getting their device to work correctly. That’s a bad user experience if you are blaming others for your design flaws, especially new and struggling moms.
Both companies are founded by women and make products for women — and it’s about time. But it seems as if Elvie has taken note of the good and bad in their competitors and had time to improve upon it — and that’s what has me excited.
As my fellow TechCrunch writer Natasha put it in her initial review of Elvie as a company, “It’s not hyperbole to say Elvie is a new breed of connected device. It’s indicative of the lack of smart technology specifically — and intelligently — addressing women.”
So why the pump? “We recognized the opportunity [in the market] was smarter tech for women,” founder and CEO Tania Boler told TechCrunch on her company’s move into the breast pump space. “Our aim is to transform the way women think and feel about themselves by providing the tools to address the issues that matter most to them, and Elvie Pump does just that.”
The Elvie Pump comes in three sizes and shapes to fit the majority of breasts and, in case you want to check your latch or pump volume, also has transparent nipple shields with markings to help guide the nipple to the right spot.
The app connects to each device via Bluetooth and tracks your production, detects let down, will pause when full and is equipped to pump in seven different modes.
The pump retails for $480 and is currently available in the U.K. However, those in the U.S. will have to wait until closer to the end of the year to get their hands on one. According to the company, it will be available on Elvie.com and Amazon.com, as well in select physical retail stores nationally later this year, pending FDA approval.
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Snapchat adds new styles as Spectacles V2s get used 40% more than V1
Snapchat isn’t revealing sales numbers of version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but at least they’re not getting left in a drawer as much as the V1s. The company tells me V2 owners are capturing 40 percent more Snaps than people with V1s.
And today, Snapchat is launching two new black-rimmed hipster styles of Spectacles V2 — a Wayfarer-esque Nico model and a glamorous big-lensed Veronica model. Both come with a slimmer semi-soft black carrying case instead of the chunky old triangular yellow one, and are polarized for the first time. They look a lot more like normal sunglasses, compared to the jokey, bubbly V1s, so they could appeal to a more mature and fashionable audience. They go on sale today for $199 in the US and Europe and will be sold in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom later this year, while the old styles remain $149.
The new Spectacles styles (from left): Veronica and Nico
Spectacles V2 original style (left) and V1 (right)
Snap is also trying to get users to actually post what they capture, so it’s planning an automatically curated Highlight Story feature that will help you turn your best Specs content into great things to share. That could address the problem common amongst GoPro users of shooting a ton of cool footage but never editing it for display.
The problem is that V1 were pretty exceedingly unpopular, and those that did buy them. Snap only shipped 220,000 pairs and reportedly had hundreds of thousands more gathering dust in a warehouse. It took a $40 million write-off and its hardware “camera company” strategy was called into question. Business Insider reported that less than 50 percent of buyers kept using them after a month and a “sizeable” percentage stopped after just a week.
The new styles come with a slimmer semi-soft carry case
That means the bar was pretty low from which to score a 40 percent increase in usage, especially given the V2s take photos, work underwater, come in a slimmer charging case, and lack the V1s’ bright yellow ring around the camera lens that announces you’re wearing a mini computer on your face. Snap was smart to finally let you export in non-circular formats which are useful for sharing beyond Snapchat, and let you automatically save Snaps to your camera roll and not just its app’s Memories feature.
I’ve certainly been using my V2s much more than the V1s since they’re more discrete and versatile. And I haven’t encountered as much fear or anxiety from people worried about being filmed as privacy norms around technology continue to relax.
But even with the improved hardware, new styles, and upcoming features, Spectacles V2 don’t look like they’re moving the needle for Snapchat. After shrinking in user count last quarter, Snap’s share price has fallen to just a few cents above its all-time low. Given most of its users are cash-strapped teens who aren’t going to buy Spectacles even if they’re cool, the company needs to focus on how to make its app for everyone more useful and differentiated after the invasion of Instagram’s copy-cats of its Stories and ephemeral messaging.
Whether that means securing tentpole premium video content for Discover, redesigning Stories to ditch the interstitials for better lean-back viewing, or developing augmented reality games, Snap can’t stay the course. Despite its hardware ambitions, it’s fundamentally a software company. It has to figure out what makes that software special.
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