Category: Tech news

The world’s forests are ablaze, under threat from illegal logging and disappearing due to the less dramatic environmental degradation wrought by drought and other signs of climate change.

It’s part of the negative feedback loop that seems to be accelerating climate change as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, but one startup company is trying to facilitate reforestation by supporting carbon offsets that specifically target the world’s flora.

Pachama has raised $4.1 million to create a marketplace where companies can support carbon offset projects. The company is backed by some big names in tech investment, like former Uber executive Ryan Graves, through his private investment firm, Saltwater, and Chris Sacca, a prominent early investor in Uber, through his Lowercase Capital firm.

Founded by Diego Saez-Gil, a serial entrepreneur whose last company was a startup selling a “smart-suitcase,” Pachama is aiming to bring reforestation projects to the carbon markets whose impacts can be independently verified by the company’s monitoring software to ensure their ability to offset emissions.

“We were making a smart connected suitcase which got banned,” says Saez-Gil. “After that I decided to take some time off and I was quite burnt out. I wanted to do some soul searching and tried to decide what I wanted to put my efforts [into].” 

He traveled to South America and did a trip through the Amazon rain forest in Peru. It was there that Saez-Gil saw the effects of deforestation in an area that represents a huge carbon dioxide offset for the planet.

“There are about 1 billion hectares on the planet that could be reforested,” says Saez-Gil.

That opportunity — to contribute to the perpetuation of independently validated carbon markets around the world — is what convinced investors like Paul Graham, Justin Kan, Daniel Kan, Gustaf Alströmer, Peter Reinhardt, Jason Jacobs and Chris Sacca from Lowercase Capital, as well as funds such as Social+Capital, Global Founders Capital and Atomico, to contribute to the company’s $4.1 million funding.

It’s a pretty big consortium to finance what amounts to a small capital commitment (given the size of the funds under management that these investors have at their disposal), but investors are right to be a little wary.

Carbon markets are driven by policy, and policymakers have been reluctant to draft legislation that would put a high enough price on carbon emissions to make those markets viable.

“Pachama’s carbon credit marketplace is launching at a pivotal moment when awareness of the climate crisis is reaching an all-time high, and businesses are increasingly looking to become carbon neutral,” said Ryan Graves, Pachama’s lead investor and new director said in a statement. “What attracted me to Pachama was the company’s use of technology to bring trust to an industry that desperately needs it, and gives the verifiable results to the purchasers of carbon credits.”

Awareness doesn’t equal political action, however, and Pachama needs the political will of both governments and consumers to move the needle on creating viable carbon trading markets.

Pachama’s business becomes profitable only when the price of carbon moves beyond $15 per ton of carbon dioxide (or similar emissions) offset. Currently, there are only two markets in the world where that threshold has been reached — the California market and Europe, according to Saez-Gil.

For Pachama’s founder, forest preservation and reforestation projects can have outsized benefits. “There are only 500 forest projects that are certified today… we need tens of thousands,” says Saez-Gil. “There are one billion hectares on the planet available for reforestation without competing with agriculture.”

The restoration of native forests can contribute to replenishing global biodiversity, and captures more carbon than cultivating forests for industrial use, but both are better than destruction to grow row crops or support animal husbandry, Saez-Gil says.  

Pachama sources projects that are approved by existing certification bodies, but offers its customers monitoring and management services through access to satellite imagery and sensors that provide information on emissions and carbon capture on reforested land.

It’s a potential solution to the problem of deforestation that’s plaguing countries like Brazil. “The government in Brazil, they want to generate income for the country,” says Saez-Gil. If carbon markets paid as much as ranching, it would reduce the need for animal husbandry and plantation farming in Brazil, Indonesia or places like Peru. 

Today, most investments in reforestation projects are done through middlemen, which increases opacity and the chance that projects are being double-counted or sold, according to Saez-Gil. Pachama has a person who is contacting forest project developers so that they can list the projects independently. Then the company verifies the offsets with satellite imaging systems.

The company currently has 23 forest projects — three in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Peru and projects in the U.S. in California, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine .

Saez-Gil has high hopes for the future of carbon markets based on demand coming, in part, from new regulations like those imposed on the airline industry.

“Airlines will have to offset part of their emissions as part of CORSIA,”  says Saez-gil. That’s an offset of 160 million tons of emission per year. “There is all this demand coming for different offsets for different  markets that will make the price go up.”

Space attracts a lot of attention as an area of frontier tech investment and entrepreneurship, but there’s another vast expanse that could actually be more addressable by the innovation economy — Earth’s oceans.

Seafaring startups aren’t attracting quite as much attention as their spacefaring cousins, but 2019 still saw a flurry of activity in this sector and 2020 could be an even big year for everything aquatic.

Sounding the depths of data collection

One big similarity between space tech and seafaring opportunities is that data collection represents a significant percent of the potential market. Data collection in and around Earth’s oceans has increased dramatically in recent years thanks to the availability, efficacy and cost of sensor technologies — in 2017, it was estimated that as much ocean data had been gathered in the past two years as in all of human history. But relatively speaking, that barely scratches the surface.

Ocean observation has largely been driven by scientific and research goals, which means there’s bound to be a pretty hard cap on available funding. But ocean data has value in all kinds of private’s sector pursuits, including the potential for autonomous commercial cargo transportation (more on that later), as well as predicting weather and climate conditions that impact shipping routes, agriculture and more.

Various methods exist for collecting data about Earth’s oceans, including space-based satellite observation. Startups like Terradepth, Saildrone and Promare have all proposed various autonomous seafaring data collection vehicle designs that could leverage robotics to bring ocean observation at scale closer to home. These firms are using technology that’s been made affordable for startup budgets through miniaturization and efficiency gains evolved through the progress of the smartphone and other computing industries.

This past year, Xprize awarded millions in prize money to teams that competed in the Ocean Discovery competition for autonomous ocean floor mapping, which is resulting in spin-out ventures that have a head start on success.

As in space, data collection and observation can take many forms, so we can expect to see many industry-specific approaches emerge to capitalize on what are surprisingly large market opportunities, even for seemingly narrow types of data. Continued efforts to refine and improve robotics technologies like sensing and vision should drive even more growth in autonomous ocean observation in 2020.

Autonomous logistics

Oceanfaring drones aren’t just about data collection, however; a huge portion of the global logistics market still relies on giant cargo vessels. The drive to automate container ships is nothing new, but it’s reaching a point where we’re actually starting to see autonomous cargo vehicles embark, including this Chinese cargo ship that set out from Guangdong at the end of this year and a ship called the Yara Birkeland has begun trials out of Rotterdam and expects to be operating fully autonomously by 2022.

A few years ago, covering browsers got boring.

Chrome had clearly won the desktop, the great JavaScript speed wars were over and Mozilla seemed more interested in building a mobile operating system than its browser. Microsoft tried its best to rescue Internet Explorer/Edge from being the punchline of nerdy jokes, but its efforts essentially failed.

Meanwhile, Opera had shuttered the development of its own rendering engine and redesigned its browser with less functionality, alienating many of its biggest fans. On mobile, plenty of niche players tried to break the Chrome/Safari duopoly, but while they did have some innovative ideas, nothing ever stuck.

But over the course of the last year or so, things changed. The main catalyst for this, I would argue, is that the major browser vendors — and we can argue about Google’s role here — realized that their products were at the forefront of a new online privacy movement. It’s the browser, after all, that allows marketers to set cookies and fingerprint your machine to track you across the web.

Add to that Microsoft’s move to the Chromium engine, which is finally giving Microsoft a seat at the browser table again, plus the success of upstarts like Brave and Vivaldi, and you’ve got the right mix of competitive pressure and customer interest for innovation to come back into what was a stagnant field only a few years ago.

Let’s talk about privacy first. With browsers being the first line of defense, it’s maybe surprising that we didn’t see Mozilla and others push for more built-in tracking protections before.

In 2019, the Chrome team introduced handling cookies in the browser and a few months ago, it launched a broader initiative to completely rethink cookies and online privacy for its users — and by extension, Google’s advertising ecosystem. This move centers around differential privacy and a ‘privacy budget’ that would allow advertisers to get enough information about you to group you into a larger cohort without providing so much information that you would love your anonymity.

At the time, Google said this was a multi-year effort that was meant to help publishers retain their advertising revenue (vs their users completely blocking cookies).

A physicist dilates on the delights of nature’s intricate geometry.

From data-destroying wipers to industrial control system hacking, Iran has a potent arsenal of cyberattacks at its disposal.

Pitch the wrong reporter or publication, and your story won’t see the light of day.

Before you start seeking press, you’ll need to look for reporters who have reach, respect and expertise when you choose who to talk to. You’ll also need to be prepared to accept the truth about your business, even if it hurts. It’s critical that you find a writer who’s a good fit for the business you’re building and the audience you’re seeking.

If you don’t use a strategic approach when reaching out to journalists, you’ll get few responses, fewer meetings, and articles that either misrepresent you, shortchange you, or blow up in your face. The goal isn’t just to secure positive coverage, because no one will believe it; startups are tough. There are challenges and setbacks and scary looming questions. But an honest article from a respected voice with a big enough audience can legitimize a business as it tries to turn vision into impact.

Here we’ll discuss how to find the publication and reporter who understands you and can tell the story that aligns with your objectives. In part one of this series, we detailed why you should (or shouldn’t) want press coverage and how to know what’s newsworthy enough to pitch.

In future ExtraCrunch posts, I’ll explore how to hire PR help, formulate a pitch, deliver it to reporters, prepare for interviews and conduct an announcement. If you have more questions or ideas for ExtraCrunch posts, feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or elsewhere.

Why should you believe me? I’m editor-at-large for TechCrunch, where I’ve written 4,000 articles about early-stage startups and tech giants. For 10 years, I’ve reviewed startup pitches via email and Twitter, at demo days for accelerators like Y Combinator and on stage as a judge of startup competitions. From warm introductions to cold calls, I’ve seen what gets reporters’ attention and why stories become enduring narratives supporting companies as they grow.

Deciding which publications to target

Which publications do you currently read and respect?

Starting here ensures that you’re approaching PR from a place of knowledge with personal context rather than going by what someone else tells you. But you also have to consider which publications appeal in that way to your target demographic. For example, if you’re aiming to reach teens, parents, or Chief Information Officers, you’ll have very different target publications.

If you appeal to a niche audience aligned with a specific publication, you can definitely score some leads and installs, priming the pump so when users hear about you again, they already have a positive association for your brand. You can score SEO to help your get discovered when people search for keywords related to your business, but if you’re looking for user growth or SEO, be sure to work with a publication that links to the websites and apps they write about, as many don’t. But if you’re hoping for ‘the servers are on fire we’ve got so much traffic’ attention, you need to first build network effects and viral loops directly into your product.

Once you identify a realistic objective for gaining press coverage, you can figure out which reporters and outlets will best help you achieve your goals.

Typically, you’ll aim to work with more prestigious publications and writers first, as they can inspire other outlets to write up follow-on coverage. It rarely works the other way around, since top publishers want to be seen as first to a story and forging trends rather than following them with late coverage. These outlets often have greater reach in terms of home page traffic, social following, SEO and shareability.

The exception to this strategy: if there’s a specific writer at a less-prestigious publisher who’s renowned as the expert in your space whose word has more weight, or if that publication better aligns with your overall goals. For example, you might want to work with a transportation expert like Kirsten Korosec if you’re an electric car company, or a publication focused on startups like TechCrunch if you’re trying to stoke fundraising. If you’re a more general mainstream consumer business or are seeking maximum growth, you might instead choose a popular national newspaper with a big circulation.

Who should tell your story?

After you’ve set goals and have an idea regarding the kind of publication or journalist you want to work with, it’s time to build a ranked list of specific reporters. Here, expertise is key.

Nearly a year after stepping down as chief executive of HBO, Richard Plepler and his production company Eden Productions have signed a five-year deal with Apple TV+.

Plepler started at HBO back in 1993 and became CEO in 2013. During his time in that role, HBO had continued success with shows new (“True Detective” and “Big Little Lies”) and old (“Game of Thrones”). It also launched its direct-to-consumer subscription streaming service, HBO Now, which in some ways was the precursor to HBO Max — an upcoming service from AT&T and WarnerMedia that will incorporate HBO as part of a larger offering.

Plepler left HBO in the aftermath of AT&T’s acquisition of its corporate parent Time Warner. Reports suggested that AT&T executives wanted HBO to ramp up its content production in the hopes of growing the subscriber base and time spent watching the service.

According to The New York Times, Plepler’s deal will see Eden Productions creating TV shows, documentaries and feature films exclusively for Apple TV+.

In explaining his move, Plepler told The Times that he didn’t want to try to “duplicate” his time at HBO — instead, it made sense to “do my own thing.” He also said that his only serious talks were with Apple: “I thought that Apple was the right idea very quickly, just because it was embryonic enough that I thought maybe, you know, I could make a little contribution there.”

 

Every time I’ve seen Qoobo’s creator, Shunsuke Aoki, in person, he’s always had it nearby, usually in a tote bag. The robotic cat pillow is one of the all-time great conversation starters. It doesn’t make much sense at first glance: a round, fur-covered pillow that wags as you pet it. But in a country with an aging population like Japan, it’s a kind of warm, quiet comfort for those who can’t afford the time or expense that comes with a real pet.

For those who can’t afford the expense of Qoobo (currently listed as $149 plus $50 shipping on Amazon), Yukai Engineering will be debuting Petit Qoobo next week at CES. The basics are the same, but Qoobo’s younger sibling is roughly half the size, and will likely be a little over half the price (though that’s still TBD).

The smaller version of the cat pillow is still a prototype, with a crowdfunding campaign set for Japan in March. Shipping will follow at some point in the fall through Amazon and Yukai’s site.

In addition to a petting-powered tail wag, the final version will sport a microphone to detect sound, as well as some haptic feedback for the occasional purr, to let you know the little cat is still kicking.

I won’t convince you that you need Qoobo in your life, but I will say that every time I’ve seen the cat pillow in person, at least one person has been ready to buy the thing. A smaller, significantly cheaper version should sell like hotcakes among the allergic and non-allergic alike.

A California law aimed at requiring gig economy companies to classify workers as employees took effect January 1. That hardly settled the matter.

Trussle, the online mortgage broker backed by the likes of Goldman Sachs, LocalGlobe, Finch Capital and Seedcamp, has lost its founding CEO.

Ishaan Malhi, who co-founded the fintech startup five years ago, has resigned with “immediate effect,” according to a rather brief press release issued by Trussle this morning.

The company is now searching for Malhi’s replacement and in the interim says it will be led by Chairman Simon Williams and others in the senior leadership team. “Williams will be supported by co-founder Jonathan Galore who helped establish Trussle in 2015 and remains closely involved in the business,” reads the press release.

Williams joined Trussle’s board in April 2019, and has had a long stint in financial services. He spent nine years at Citigroup, heading up its International Retail Bank, and more recently served as head of HSBC’s Wealth Management group until 2014.

Meanwhile, the departure of Malhi seems rather abrupt, not least as he doesn’t appear to be involved in the recruitment of his successor. As well as resigning from the role of CEO, the Trussle co-founder has resigned from the startup’s board.

Trussle itself declined to provide further detail, with a spokesperson for the company advising that any questions with regards to why Malhi has resigned should be put to him. I pinged Malhi for comment but he declined to take my call having committed to spending the day with family.

However, he did give a statement to The Telegraph newspaper, telling reporter James Cook: “it was my decision to step down.”

More broadly, the story appears to be being spun as a young first-time founder growing a business to a size where more experienced leadership is needed to take it to the next stage. And it’s certainly true that the company has been staffing up in recent months, growing to 120 staff members (as of late November 2019) and bolstering the leadership team.

Along with Williams, Trussle announced in November that it had recruited ex-Wallaby Financial co-founder Todd Zino as CTO, and ex-head of Zoopla content strategy Sebastian Anthony as head of Organic Growth and Product Manager.

At the time of the announcement, Malhi said in a statement that “culture remains to be our competitive advantage” — a culture that has since seen its founding CEO depart abruptly before a replacement has been found.

Although, as one person with inside knowledge of Malhi’s departure framed it, Trussle has been attempting to diversify the startup’s leadership team for a while now and make the company “less of a one-man show.”

What’s also clear is that the online mortgage broker space is a tough one and pretty capital-intensive due to high customer acquisition costs compared to traditional brokers where cross-selling is the norm but cost of operations is greater and less scalable. The promise of the online broker model is that once scale is achieved, lower operational costs will start to offset those higher and fiercely competitive acquisition costs.

In other words, a classic venture/digitisation bet, but one that is yet to pan out definitively.

As another reference point, one source tells me that Trussle is projected to make a £10 million loss in 2019 based on £2 million in revenue. I also understand from sources that the startup recently closed an internal funding round from existing investors — separate from its £13.6 million Series B in May 2018, and that its backers remain bullish. As always, watch this space.

Australia’s bushfires have scorched millions of acres, putting millions of people at risk. Welcome to the hellish future of life on Earth.

After acquiring Ukraine startup Looksery in 2015 to supercharge animated selfie lenses in Snapchat — arguably changing the filters game for all social video and photo apps — Snap has made another acquisition with roots in the country, co-founded by one of Looksery’s founders, to give a big boost to its video capabilities.

The company has acquired AI Factory, a computer vision startup that Snap had worked with to create Snapchat’s new Cameos animated selfie-based video feature, for a price believed to be in the region of $166 million.

The news was first reported by a Ukrainian publication, AIN, and while I’m still waiting for a direct reply from Snap about the acquisition, I’ve had the news confirmed by another source close to the deal, and Snap has now also confirmed the news to TechCrunch with no further comment on the financial terms or any other details.

Victor Shaburov, the founder of Looksery who then went on to become Snap’s director of engineering — leaving in May 2018 to found and lead AI Factory — declined to provide a comment for this story. (The other founders of AI Factory are Greg Tkachenko and Eugene Krokhalev.)

Cameos, launched last month, lets you take a selfie, which is then automatically “animated” and inserted into a short video. The selection of videos, currently around 150, is created by Snap, with the whole concept not unlike the one underpinning “deepfakes” — AI-based videos that look “real” but are actually things that never really happened.

Deepfake videos have been around for a while. But if your experience of that word has strong dystopian undertones, we now appear to be in a moment where consumer apps are tapping into the technology in a race for new — fun, lighthearted — features to attract and keep users. Just today, Josh reported that TikTok has secretly built a deepfake tool, too. I expect we’ll be hearing about Facebook’s newest deepfake tool in 3, 2, 1…

From what I understand, while AI Factory has offices in San Francisco, the majority of the team of around 70 is based out of Ukraine. Part of the team will relocate with the deal, and part will stay there.

Snap had also been an investor in AI Factory. Part of its early interest would have been because of the track record of the talent associated with the startup: lenses have been a huge success for Snap — 70% of its daily active users play with them, and they not only bring in new users, but increase retention and bring in revenues by way of sponsorships or users buying them — so creating new features to give users more ways to play around with their selfies is a good bet.

It’s not clear whether AI Factory will be developing a way to insert selfies into any video, or if the feature will be tied just to specific videos offered by Snap itself, or whether the videos will extend beyond the timing of a GIF. It’s also not clear what else AI Factory was working on: the company’s site is offline and there is very little information about the company beyond its mission to bring more AI-based imaging tools into mainstream apps and usage.

The company’s LinkedIn profile says that AI Factory “provide[s] multiple AI business solutions based on image and video recognition, analysis and processing,” so while the company will come under Snap’s wing, there may be scope for the team to build some of its technology into more innovative ways for businesses to use the Snap platform in the future, too.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Updated with Snap’s confirmation of the acquisition.

Indian tech startups secured nearly $14 billion in 2019, more than they have raised in any other year. This is a major rebound since 2016, when startups in the nation had bagged just $4.3 billion.

But even as more VC funds — many with bigger checks — arrive in India, the financial performance of startups remains a cause for concern.

Whether it’s mobile payments or education learning apps, each startup today faces dozens of competitors in their category. Many of these sectors, such as social commerce and digital bookkeeping, are just beginning to see traction in India, which has resulted in investors backing a large number of similar players.

This has meant more marketing spends; to create awareness among consumers (or merchants) and stand out in a crowd, many firms are heavily marketing their services and offering lofty cashbacks to win users.

What is especially troublesome for startups is that there is no clear path for how they would ever generate big profits. Silicon Valley companies, for instance, have entered and expanded into India in recent years, investing billions of dollars in local operations, but yet, India has yet to make any substantial contribution to their bottom lines.

If that wasn’t challenging enough, many Indian startups compete directly with Silicon Valley giants, which while impressive, is an expensive endeavor.

How expensive? Here’s an exhaustive look at the financial performance of several notable startups and major firms in India as disclosed by them to local regulators in recent weeks. These are Financial Year 2019 figures, which ended on March 31, 2019. Some of the filings were provided to TechCrunch by business intelligence platform Tofler.

Flipkart

Flipkart, which sold a majority stake to Walmart for $16 billion last year, posted a consolidated revenue of $6.11 billion for the financial year that ended in March. Its revenue is up 42% since last year, and its loss, at $2.4 billion, represents a 64% improvement during the same period. The ecommerce giant this year has expanded into many new categories, including food retail.

BigBasket

BigBasket delivers groceries and perishables across India and became a unicorn this year after it raised a $150M Series F led by Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, the U.K.’s CDC Group and Alibaba. The startup posted revenue of $386 million, up from $221 million last year. Its loss, however, more than doubled to $80 million from $38 million during the same period.

Grofers

BigBasket rival Grofers, which raised $200 million in a financing round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, reported $62.6 million on revenue of $169 million. The company’s chief executive and co-founder, Albinder Dhindsa, has said that the startup is on track to sell goods worth $699 million by the end of FY 2020.

MilkBasket

Milkbasket, a micro-delivery startup that allows users to order daily supplies, reported revenue of $11.8 million, up from $4 million last year. During this period, its loss widened to $1.3 million, from $130,000 last year.

Lenskart

Lenskart is an omni-channel retailer for eyewear products. Earlier this month, it raised $275 million this month from SoftBank Vision Fund. It posted a revenue of $68 million — and its loss shrank from $16.5 million to $3.8 million in one year.

Rivigo

Rivigo, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to build a more reliable and safer logistics network, raised $65 million in July this year. Its revenue increased 42% to $143.8 million while its loss also increased to $83 million.

Delhivery

SoftBank-backed logistics firm Delhivery, which raised $413 million earlier this year from SoftBank and others, said its revenue has grown 58% to $237 million since FY18, while its loss has almost tripled to $249 million.

According to newly released third-party data, TikTok has reason to dance.

The famous short-video application saw its in-app purchase revenue rise 310% on a year-over-year basis, according to Apptopia, a startup that tracks mobile app revenue and usage. (The Boston-based startup has raised $8.2 million to date and competes with AppAnnie.)

TikTok’s revenue gains are impressive in more than percentage terms. The popular social application’s in-app revenue is now at a material scale — topping $50 million according to a chart published by Apptopia’s Adam Blacker. And while the company’s year-over-year growth is rapid, its sequential gain from a Q3 in-app top-line figure of around $20 million may be even more eye-popping.

At $50 million a quarter, TikTok could generate hundreds of millions in yearly revenue — enough to go public on its own. And likely enough to provide material assistance to its parent company, ByteDance.

Update: SensorTower, another player in the mobile app intelligence business, told TechCrunch that its data shows “gross TikTok in-app spending at approximately $87 million for the fourth quarter ($62 million net) in all markets across the App Store and Google Play” excluding China. Even more, SensorTower’s Randy Nelson said in an email that his firm calculates TikTok’s “year-over-year growth [landing] closer to 521%.” Damn.

ByteDance, a China-based technology company worth well north of $70 billion, is known for its Toutiao social media service, as well as TikTok. TikTok was formed out of the fusion of Musical.ly, which ByteDance bought in late 2017, and and its own application Douyin. The app is an unquestionable breakout success around the world.

TikTok is so successful in the American market that various parts of the U.S. government banned its use due to concerns regarding its corporate parent’s possible links to the Chinese government.

Tensions between the United States and China have risen in recent years, partially driven by the Trump administration’s stance regarding trade, and have spilled over into the technology industry — where the two countries had been inextricably linked.

Huawei and ByteDance are not the only Chinese companies caught — fairly or not — in the crossfire, but they are the among the best-known entities currently constrained by cross-Atlantic rancor.

ByteDance is an incredibly valuable company, at least according to its investors. The company is valued at nearly $80 billion as TechCrunch reported in 2018. It is considered an IPO candidate for 2020. Perhaps TikTok’s explosive growth in in-app revenue will help it file with the SEC.

Lenovo sells pricey ThinkSmart Hub conferencing devices. It also sells far less expensive smart displays. Next week at CES it will announce that it will be crossing the streams on the two distinct product lines with the arrival of the ThinkSmart View. The device looks to essentially be a Google Assistant-style smart display, repurposed for the office setting.

Instead of centering around Google’s home AI, however, the system is essentially powered by Microsoft Teams. Basically, it’s a way for offices to offer up a devoted Teams audio/video conferencing device at the fraction of the cost of its other enterprise solutions. The View starts at $349 (or $449 with an included pair of Bluetooth headphones for open offices). Compare that to the $1,800 asking rate for last year’s ThinkSmart Hub 500.

The device probably makes the most sense for smaller conference rooms and SMBs on higher budgets. It could, too, work at individual desks or for remote workers, though it’s going to take heavy use to justify the purchase of one of these, versus just installing Teams on your PCs. Still, it’s an interesting push for the smart display category, as manufacturers look for life beyond the kitchen and bedroom.

Benefits include quick access to Teams meetings and a physical shutter for privacy. No reason why Lenovo couldn’t also do one of these for Google office Hangouts, as well. They certainly beat paying exorbitant prices for one of those Microsoft or Google smart whiteboards.

The View launches this month.