Category: Tech news

One of the bigger pieces of product news at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week was the announcement that Facebook will soon turn on a new dating feature.

It has also quietly made a hire that points to its growing interest in developing more specific uses of its data, although not for the dating feature specifically. Dr Steve Carter, a data scientist who helped design and build the psychometric and relationship models that became the basis of eHarmony — the dating site where he was a founding member and worked for nearly 20 years — is working at the social network, out of its offices in Los Angeles.

But Facebook has confirmed to us that Carter is not working on the new dating service, and the company declined to say what he is doing.

His LinkedIn profile notes that he joined Facebook in August 2017. Back in January, there was a brief mention of Carter doing work for Facebook, but at the time it was not known that he’d actually left eHarmony months before that. It seems that he’s only recently updated his profile with that information, coinciding with Facebook now finally making its dating intentions public.

Carter’s profile on LinkedIn describes him as a data science manager, “helping Facebook get even better at making meaningful and beneficial connections between people and communities.”

His expertise lies squarely in building matchmaking algorithms. Before this, he held a number of roles at eHarmony, starting as a research analyst on the founding team in 1999, before eHarmony had even launched, working his way up to chief scientist at the company, which has had backing from the likes of Sequoia and TCV in its history.

In that time, he also picked up four patents in online social matchmaking, including one for employment matching. Those patents are all owned by eHarmony.

Facebook, which is still feeling the heat from controversies that have arisen around some of its more scaled-up services like programmatic advertising and viral political content, has shifted its focus to communities, and also exploring more direct and discreet ways that its social graph can be leveraged. Dating is one of the more obvious applications of that concept.

“One in three marriages in the US start online,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his presentation F8 this week. “[But] today we haven’t even built any features to help people find partners,” he said. “There are 200 million people on Facebook who list themselves as single, so clearly there is something to do here. And if we’re focused on helping people build meaningful relationships then this is perhaps the most meaningful one of all.”

There hasn’t been too much written about how eHarmony’s algorithm works, but in a lecture in May 2017 (two months before officially leaving eHarmony), Carter opened up about it to describe it a little.

It turns out that while there may be a lot of questions that get asked of a user’s preferences, ultimately eHarmony threw out everything except for the most extreme likes or dislikes in order to avoid creating what Carter refers to as “a universe of one.” 

This is an interesting idea when you apply it to Facebook, and you can see what the attraction might be for a data scientist in wanting to use the platform to build a dating service. (That’s to say nothing of the fact that Facebook sort of started as a dating site of sorts, where people prominently displayed their relationship statuses on their profile pages, popularizing “it’s complicated” as the short story for all of love’s actual complications.)

As we noted yesterday, when Facebook launches its service, it wants to make it as noninvasive as possible.

You get the option to create a dating profile. And that profile won’t be visible to your friends; only to others who have also opted in, and only if they fit your criteria and match your profile, and only if they are not already your friends and connections on the network.

Applying Carter’s concept of matching data between users on eHarmony, Facebook already has a huge trove of information about you, based on what you post and like and share. Facebook can therefore make its dating profile questions — and its need to rely on them — less heavy. (That format could also provide a good contrast to other sites like Tinder, which require you to swipe across many profiles to create shortlists of people who might match with you.)

In hiring Carter, Facebook has picked up someone who has worked on relationships beyond those you forge through dating.

Last year, his former employer eHarmony divested a business that Carter had developed called Elevated Careers, which was acquired by a startup called Candidate.Guru.

Elevated Careers sounds a lot like a dating service, except with ’employer’ and ’employee’ replacing the two people looking for love, which reminds you just how similar the mechanics can be for any matching service (something Facebook must also realise).

It lets an employer assess a potential employee’s compatibility by matching up attributes of the candidate’s personality and values to those of his/her potential manager, as well as to the hiring organization’s culture. It also has algorithms that tell you how well a candidate’s skills and background are suited to a particular job. Given Facebook’s interest and work in recruitment and job finding, it will be interesting to see how and if that product also gets developed.

Along with Steve Carter, we’ve been trying to figure out whether Facebook has been hiring other people to build a relationships team that it could task with building out dating and other products. It turns out that there is definitely some crossover of employees who have worked at various dating sites over the last several years, who are now at Facebook — but most likely, this is mostly a product of the general churn that you get in the tech world, where people are often jumping from one job to another.

But a few other hires stand out. Just this month, Facebook happened to hire Badoo’s head of mobile engineering, who appears to be based out of London. This sales director for “e-commerce and dating” started his new role in January 2018, working out of Paris (so I guess there is already some early considering for how to build this as a business too). There are two recent hires from Tinder, one in Los Angeles and one in Menlo Park. And the former data lead from Hinge also joined in the last six months, also based in Los Angeles, and now working in “scaled marketing.”

Story updated with Facebook comment, and to confirm he is not working on the new dating feature

Italian startup Freeda Media is raising a $10 million Series A round led by Alven Capital. U-Start and business angels are also participating in the round.

Freeda Media runs the popular Freeda Facebook page. With nearly 1.4 million likes, the page has an impressive reach. 24 million unique users see Freeda content every month in Italy, including 100 percent of millennial women who live in Italy. The company is also quite active on Instagram.

In other words, Freeda Media is a new media company that runs mostly on social media platforms. Many of the Facebook posts are short videos, social cuts with subtitles and quick interviews. Some posts link to Freeda’s own website for more traditional articles with text and photos. But there’s no front page per se.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to other markets, starting with Spain. More interestingly, Freeda is still quite young as it took them 15 months to reach this level.

The company compares itself with other media brands for women, such as Elle, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or Man Repeller. According to CrowdTangle, Freeda has a much higher engagement rate compared to its direct competitors.

Freeda Media’s business model is branded content and native advertising. But the startup is looking at other potential revenue streams. There’s clearly a risk of branded content overload for social-first media organizations. When you build a Facebook audience based on trust, your reputation can also quickly deteriorate and the algorithms can turn on you. So far, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Internationalization is going to be key to foster Freeda’s growth. If Freeda can replicate the same impressive numbers in multiple countries, the startup could end up convincing bigger advertisers and distributing more or less the same content in multiple countries.

NASA’s latest mission to Mars, InSight, is set to launch early Saturday morning in pursuit of a number of historic firsts in space travel and planetology. The lander’s instruments will probe the surface of the planet and monitor its seismic activity with unprecedented precision, while a pair of diminutive CubeSats riding shotgun will test the viability of tiny spacecraft for interplanetary travel.

Saturday at 4:05 AM Pacific is the first launch opportunity, but if weather forbids it, they’ll just try again soon after — the chances of clouds sticking around all the way until June 8, when the launch window closes, are slim to none.

InSight isn’t just a pretty name they chose; it stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, at least after massaging the acronym a bit. Its array of instruments will teach us about the Martian interior, granting us insight (see what they did there?) into the past and present of Mars and the other rocky planets in the solar system, including Earth.

Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been pushing for this mission for more than two decades, after practically a lifetime working at the place.

“This is the only job I’ve ever had in my life other than working in the tire shop during the summertime,” he said in a recent NASA podcast. He’s worked on plenty of other missions, of course, but his dedication to this one has clearly paid off. It was actually originally scheduled to launch in 2016, but some trouble with an instrument meant they had to wait until the next launch window — now.

InSight is a lander in the style of Phoenix, about the size of a small car, and shot towards Mars faster than a speeding bullet. The launch is a first in itself: NASA has never launched an interplanetary mission from the West coast, but conditions aligned in this case, making California’s Vandenberg air base the best option. It doesn’t even require a gravity assist to get where it’s going.

“Instead of having to go to Florida and using the Earth’s rotation to help slingshot us into orbit… We can blast our way straight out,” Banerdt said in the same podcast. “Plus we get to launch in a way that is gonna be visible to maybe 10 million people in Southern California because this rocket’s gonna go right by LA, right by San Diego. And if people are willing to get up at four o’clock in the morning, they should see a pretty cool light show that day.”

The Atlas V will take it up to orbit and the Centaur will give it its push towards Mars, after which it will cruise for six months or so, arriving late in the Martian afternoon on November 26 (Earth calendar).

Its landing will be as exciting (and terrifying) as Phoenix’s and many others. When it hits the Martian atmosphere, InSight will be going more than 13,000 MPH. It’ll slow down first using the atmosphere itself, losing 90 percent of its velocity as friction against a new, reinforced heat shield. A parachute takes off another 90 percent, but it’ll still be going more than 100 MPH, which would make for an uncomfortable landing. So a couple thousand feet up it will transition to landing jets that will let it touch down at a stately 5.4 MPH at the desired location and orientation.

After the dust has settled (literally) and the lander has confirmed everything is in working order, it will deploy its circular, fanlike solar arrays and get to work.

Robot arms and self-hammering robomoles

InSight’s mission is to get into the geology of Mars with more detail and depth than ever before. To that end it is packing gear for three major experiments.

SEIS is a collection of six seismic sensors (making the name a tidy bilingual, bidirectional pun) that will sit on the ground under what looks like a tiny Kingdome and monitor the slightest movement of the ground underneath. Tiny high-frequency vibrations or longer-period oscillations, they should all be detected.

“Seismology is the method that we’ve used to gain almost everything we know, all the basic information about the interior of the Earth, and we also used it back during the Apollo era to understand and to measure sort of the properties of the inside of the moon,” Banerdt said. “And so, we want to apply the same techniques but use the waves that are generated by Mars quakes, by meteorite impacts to probe deep into the interior of Mars all the way down to its core.”

The heat flow and physical properties probe is an interesting one. It will monitor the temperature of the planet below the surface continually for the duration of the mission — but in order to do so, of course, it has to dig its way down. For that purpose it’s installed with what the team calls a “self-hammering mechanical mole.” Pretty self-explanatory, right?

The “mole” is sort of like a hollow, inch-thick, 16-inch-long nail that will use a spring-loaded tungsten block inside itself to drive itself into the rock. It’s estimated that it will take somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 strikes to get deep enough to escape the daily and seasonal temperature changes at the surface.

Lastly there’s the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, which actually doesn’t need a giant nail, a tiny Kingdome or anything like that. The experiment involves tracking the position of InSight with extreme precision as Mars rotates, using its radio connection with Earth. It can be located to within about four inches, which when you think about it is pretty unbelievable to begin with. The way that position varies may indicate a wobble in the planet’s rotation and consequently shed light on its internal composition. Combined with data from similar experiments in the ’70s and ’90s, it should let planetologists determine how molten the core is.

“In some ways, InSight is like a scientific time machine that will bring back information about the earliest stages of Mars’ formation 4.5 billion years ago,” said Banerdt in an earlier news release. “It will help us learn how rocky bodies form, including Earth, its moon, and even planets in other solar systems.”

In another space first, Insight has a robotic arm that will not just do things like grab rocks to look at, but will grab items from its own inventory and deploy them into its workspace. Its little fingers will grab handles on top of each deployable instrument and grab it just like a human might. Well, maybe a little differently, but the principle is the same. At nearly 8 feet long, it has a bit more reach than the average astronaut.

Cubes riding shotgun

Insight is definitely the main payload, but it’s not the only one. Launching on the same rocket are two CubeSats, known collectively as Mars Cube One, or MarCO. These “briefcase-size” guys will separate from the rocket around the same time as InSight, but take slightly different trajectories. They don’t have the control to adjust their motion and enter an orbit, so they’ll just zoom by Mars right as Insight is landing.

CubeSats launch all the time, though, right? Sure — into Earth orbit. This will be the first attempt to send CubeSats to another planet. If successful there’s no limit to what could be accomplished — assuming you don’t need to pack anything bigger than a breadbox.

The spacecraft aren’t carrying any super-important experiments; there are two in case one fails, and both are only equipped with UHF antennas to send and receive data, and a couple of low-resolution visible-light cameras. The experiment here is really the CubeSats themselves and this launch technique. If they make it to Mars, they might be able to help send InSight’s signal home, and if they keep operating beyond that, it’s just icing on the cake.

You can follow along with InSight’s launch here; there’s also the traditional anthropomorphized Twitter account. We’ll post a link to the live stream as soon as it goes up.

There’s little that’s more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most part, those solutions relied on the user explicitly taking action. Now, following the launch of a similar feature on mobile, Chrome on desktop is also getting much smarter about which sites it’ll allow to autoplay and which it’ll block — and it’ll learn from your behavior to personalize this feature.

Google says a “significant number of autoplays” are paused and muted, or have their tabs closed, within six seconds. I’m actually guessing most people close those tabs faster, but six seconds seems like a good enough measure to know whether a user wanted to hear the sound from a video or not.

Going forward, Google will learn from your own browsing behavior and learn which sites you’ll want to mute. For users who aren’t logged in — or who are new to Chrome — the browser will automatically mute about 1,000 sites by default based on that six-second measure it’s using to detect annoying sites.

The company promises that this new system, once you’ve trained it, will block about half of unwanted autoplays. But since none of these systems are perfect, Google admits that it’ll occasionally get things wrong and that you’ll have to manually unmute some sites.

On mobile, Google uses a somewhat different system for allowing autoplays. Here, it’ll allow them when a site has been added to the home screen by a user. I doubt a lot of people do this, even with sites they regularly visit, so on mobile this pretty much amounts to a complete ban on autoplays.

It’s worth noting that this is all about audio. Videos that are muted when they autoplay will still be allowed to autoplay. Google also allows autoplays when a user has tapped or clicked somewhere on the site during a browsing session, which seems like a loophole that the company will hopefully close soon.

Twitter today announced a new collaboration with Google that will see it moving a portion of infrastructure to Google’s Cloud Platform. The move is another high-profile win for Google in the cloud computing market, following its recent deal with Fitbit. Specifically, Twitter says it’s moving its cold data storage and its flexible compute Hadoop clusters – something it believes it needs to do in order to keep scaling its business.

Currently, Twitter’s Hadoop clusters are housed in its own physical data centers, the company told TechCrunch. This is a relatively small percentage of its total infrastructure, however – the bulk of its infrastructure will still remain in Twitter’s own data centers, we understand.

Twitter declined to share the impact of the move, in terms of cost savings or financial impacts.

The company publicly announced the news in a blog post this afternoon, where it noted it’s been assessing its platform and infrastructure needs over the past few years. It said it needs to be well-positioned to keep up with its growth.

Even though Twitter’s user growth has been historically flat, it sees hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day. And Twitter saw acceleration on this metric in April, which, if it continues, means even more daily tweets.

“The Hadoop compute system is the core of our data platform, and Twitter runs multiple large Hadoop clusters that are among the biggest in the world,” explained Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, in the announcement. “In fact, our Hadoop file systems host more than 300PB of data across tens of thousands of servers,” he said.

Agrawal said that when the migration is complete, it will enable “faster capacity provisioning; increased flexibility; access to a broader ecosystem of tools and services; improvements to security; and enhanced disaster recovery capabilities.”

“Architecturally, we will also be able to separate compute and storage for this class of Hadoop workloads, which has a number of long-term scaling and operational benefits,” he added.

Twitter isn’t saying how long the migration will take.

The move to Google Cloud comes at a time when there’s heavy competition among cloud service providers – and Amazon is leading in terms of revenue. Grabbing a portion of Twitter’s business, then, is another big name win for Google, following its collaboration with Fitbit, announced just days ago.

“There is strong alignment with Twitter’s engineering strategy to meet the demands of its platform and the services Google Cloud offers at a global scale,” said Brian Stevens, Google Cloud CTO, in a statement. “Google Cloud Platform’s data solutions and trusted infrastructure will provide Twitter with the technical flexibility and consistency that its platform requires, and we look forward to an ongoing technical collaboration with their team.”

Could your startup use $100,000? Then drop whatever you’re doing and apply to compete in Startup Battlefield while you still can. Applications are still open to qualifying companies — meaning you haven’t yet launched to the public and have received little to no press coverage. Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. Don’t miss out on your chance to introduce your company from the world’s biggest startup stage. Apply today.

This is no “ordinary” Disrupt SF. This is our biggest, most ambitious Disrupt ever and, this year, it’s the only Disrupt taking place in North America. That’s why we supersized the Startup Battlefield grand prize to $100,000 cash. And here’s more good news. TechCrunch does not take any fees or equity from Battlefield startups, and it doesn’t cost anything to apply or to participate in the competition.

Here’s a quick look at how Startup Battlefield works. Seasoned TechCrunch editors review each application and select approximately 20-30 companies in a highly competitive vetting process. TechCrunch selects contestants based on their team, product and market potential, and the acceptance rate is roughly three to six percent.

Each team receives free pitch coaching from the seasoned TechCrunch team and will be well-prepared to step onto the Disrupt Main Stage. In the preliminary round, teams get six minutes to pitch and demo their products to a panel of judges composed of TechCrunch editors, top VCs, technologists and entrepreneurs. After each pitch, judges follow up with a Q & A.

The judges then select six companies to move forward to a final pitch-off in front of a fresh set of judges — and a second set of follow-up questions. From the six comes one startup to claim the title of champion, win the vaunted Disrupt Cup and take home the largest grand prize in the history of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield.

The entire Battlefield takes place in front of a live audience of several thousand startup enthusiasts — including influential VCs, investors and media outlets (representing more than 400 outlets). We also live-stream the whole shebang around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (and make it available later on demand).

Every Startup Battlefield contestant, regardless of the outcome, joins the ranks of the Startup Battlefield Alumni community. We’re talking almost 800 companies — including notables like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. These alumni companies have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits.

And in a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, TechCrunch also provides free exhibit space in Startup Alley for all three days of Disrupt SF to all Battlefield contestants. Between the Battlefield competition exposure and exhibit time in Startup Alley, the networking possibilities are practically limitless.

Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. Applications to Startup Battlefield won’t be open much longer, so apply today. We can’t wait to see you there!

Even as Amazon continues to grow at a staggering rate, it is pumping the brakes on its long-planned hometown expansion. The retail giant threw down the gauntlet this week when it announced that it would stop construction on a new building because of a proposed city tax.

The new law is designed to address Seattle’s housing crunch, charging large companies $500 per head. The proposal is pretty clearly aimed at Amazon’s own expansion, and the company is taking the move to heart, potentially abandoning construction on a new building and just moving into a pre-existing space instead.

A spokesperson for the company told The New York Times that it’s “evaluating options” and has “paused all construction planning,” pending the results of the vote. The move apparently caught Seattle city council off guard, ahead of the May 14 vote.

“I’m deeply concerned about the impact this decision will have on a large range of jobs — from our building trades, to restaurant workers, to nurses, manufacturing jobs and tech workers,” the city’s mayor Jenny Durkan told the paper. “At the same time, our city must urgently address our homelessness and affordability crisis and lift up those who have been left behind.”

It’s hard not to see echoes of San Francisco’s own housing and homelessness crises in the rise of Seattle’s tech industry. And while $500 a head would be a drop in the bucket for Amazon, the company clearly understands its leverage as the city’s largest employer. The move comes as various cities around North American have tripped over themselves to house Amazon’s second headquarters. Wherever the company ultimately lands seems likely to sweeten the deal with some manner of corporate tax cut.

Amazon, meanwhile, is facing scrutiny from a number of angles, including, notably, the president, who has called out the company’s shipping deals as part of a larger, ongoing feud with Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Facebook is counting on artificial intelligence to remedy problems including violent imagery, hate speech, and fake news. It’s making progress, but big hurdles remain.

Last October, Google launched its Advanced Protection Program for users who want to ensure the highest degree of protection for the data they store in services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive. Users who need that kind of protection can opt into this program, but, in return, they have to use security keys for the two-step verification and can only access their Google data from Google’s own web and mobile apps.

Today, Google is opening up this last restriction a bit by allowing access through Apple’s own native iOS apps like Mail, Calendar and Contacts. Users in the Advanced Protection program can now choose to give those apps access to their data, too.

“Our goal is to make sure that any user-facing an increased risk of online attacks enrolls in the Advanced Protection Program,” Dario Salice, Google’s product manager for this services, writes. “Today, we’ve made it easier for our iOS users to be in the program, and we’ll continue our work to make the program more easily accessible to users around the globe.”

Like before, the program is meant mostly for those users who are most likely to become the victim of a sophisticated attack, including journalists, activists, politicians and business leaders. By supporting Apple’s own native apps, the service will likely be attractive to a wider audience now. For some reason, not everybody loves Google’s own mobile apps, after all.

Another startup wants to make on-demand car washing work, where others have failed. Washé, a Boca Raton-based service for on-demand washes, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business, which involves a mobile app consumers use to connect with Washé’s network of around 1,000 licensed and insured car washing professionals.

The round was led by veteran tech entrepreneur Ron Zuckerman, currently a board member at TV Time, and included other, unnamed investors.

Washé, which operates in parts of Florida, Southern California, and more recently, Georgia and New Jersey, has performed roughly 100,000 car washes to date in the South Florida market – its largest – and is currently seeing 125 percent growth, it says.

To use the service, customers download the Washé app to their phones, create a profile and pick a package. There are four available, ranging from $30 to $120. With a tap of a “Wash Me Now!” button, a mobile washer (or Washér, as the company says) is deployed to the customer’s location, like their home or office. The washer has all their own equipment, so the job can really be anywhere – they don’t need the customer’s power or water.

When the job is a complete, customers are sent a photo of the work and can choose to tip or rate the washer in the app.

Washers are primarily existing business owners who use the service as lead generation, allowing them to focus on making money – not finding customers. Washé’s focus, meanwhile, is on the customer experience – it vets the washers, and inspects their vehicles and equipment before bringing them on.

But Washé will also train those who want to be their own boss, and it sells car wash equipment to help them get started. The products are available at local Washer hubs and online at The Washé Store – which gives it an e-commerce business on the side of its B2C operation. In addition, washers without a van can rent a branded one from Washé to use.

Washers can set their own hours and are paid through the app, including tips. These payments are automatically deposited to their bank account. Washérs keep 70 to 80 percent of the transaction, like a typical marketplace, with the variance depending on things like package or location.

Beyond the consumer-facing service, the startup also offers a service for businesses who want to offer car washes as an amenity for employees, customers, or others on-site. The company offers its tech platform for businesses to track and manage car wash activity. It currently partners with corporations, valets, hotels, and travel companies, including Office Depot, Citrix, Curbstand, Jetsmarter, and the Setai Hotel. Some of these are single locations, not large deals, as this business is just getting off the ground.

The B2B business is more flexible, however, offering more options for packages and pricing, as well as specific times Washé will be available.

The fundraise will be focused on growing both the B2C and B2B operations, the company says, as well as hiring to expand its 15-plus person team in Boca Raton.

The idea of bringing services to the customer is of growing interest in an on-demand world, where you can order nearly anything online, and have it show up at your location – sometimes just an hour or so later. Washé believes that services like the one it offers will be able to ride this wave, as people begin to expect not just products – but anything else they need – to come to them, as well.

Specifically, the company points to recent market intelligence from IBIS World Industry, which says there’s a $3 billion mobile car wash industry in the U.S, and a $10 billion total U.S. car wash industry. IBIS expects that demand to grow over the next five years, too.

Of course, on-demand car washing hasn’t always fared well. It’s extremely difficult to become the “Uber for X,” (in this case, car washes), and Washé still has a long way to go to prove itself.

But the company believes its focus on matching supply and demand will help it to succeed.

“What is key is that you have to balance the supply and demand. So you have to really understand how to how to engage your supply channels…our supply is equally as important to us as our customers,” explains Washè CEO Matt Stadtmauer.

Stadtmauer previously worked in the investment industry, specifically hedge funds, before getting the bug to do something more entrepreneurial. He says he got the idea to try Washé from a friend, and developed the app with help from Tel Aviv-based Execute – meaning, the technical side of the business is currently outsourced to some extent.

The company tested the market for over six months in 2016 in Boca Raton, and had seen some success.

“[Washé has a] strong go-to-market strategy, plus a scalable footprint that allows us to take what was initially a B2C model and grow it into a vertically-integrated business where we’re doing B2B,” says Stadtmauer. “We have product line for the do-it-yourself market, in addition to strategic integrations with other apps and the auto care space. We have a very interesting roadmap that touches all the various four points of our vertical business lines,” he adds.

Washé is currently available on iOS, where it has a notably good 4.7-star rating, and Android, where it’s a 3.9. Customers complaints relate to the quality of the wash, which can be subjective, but also a tough problem to address at scale. Other times, the complaints are more technical in nature – something that Washé could improve by bringing engineering and development more in-house.

 

The app has been live since April 2016, initially in a smaller, beta period. It now plans to expand further into L.A., plus new markets in Arizona, greater California, and the Tri-State area, among others.

“Washé is leading the way in the on-demand car wash space by offering an innovative platform for both consumers and businesses,” said Ron Zuckerman, in a statement. “Washé’s success over the past two years demonstrates tremendous growth potential and I’m excited to work with them to expand Washé in the U.S and globally.”

Amazon today launched in-skill purchasing to all Alexa developers, along with Amazon Pay for skills. That means developers have a way to generate revenue from their voice applications on Alexa-powered devices, like Amazon’s Echo speakers. For example, developers could charge for additional packs to go along with their voice-based games, or offer other premium content to expand their free voice app experience.

The feature was previously announced in November 2017, but was only available at the time to a small handful of voice app developers, like Jeopardy!, plus other game publishers.

When in-skill purchasing is added to a voice application – Amazon calls these apps Alexa’s “skills” – customers can ask to shop the purchase suggestions offered, and then pay by voice using the payment information already associated with their Amazon account.

Developers are in control of what content is offered at which price, but Amazon will handle the actual purchasing flow. It also offers self-serve tools to help developers manage their in-skill purchases and optimize their sales.

While any Alexa device owner can buy the available in-skill purchases, Amazon Prime members will get the best deal.

Amazon says that in-skill purchases must offer some sort of value-add for Prime subscribers, like a discounted price, exclusive content or early access. Developers are paid 70 percent of the list price for their in-skill purchase, before any Amazon discount is applied.

Already, Sony’s Jeopardy!, Teen Jeopardy!, Sports Jeopardy!; The Ellen Show’s Heads Up; Fremantle’s Match Game; HISTORY’s Ultimate HISTORY Quiz, and TuneIn Live, have launched Alexa skills with premium content.

To kick off today’s launch of general availability, Amazon is announcing a handful of others who will do the same. This includes NBCU’s SYFY WIRE, which will offer three additional weekly podcasts exclusive to Alexa (Geeksplain, Debate Club, and Untold Story); Volley Inc.’s Yes Sire, which offers an expansion pack for its role-playing game; and Volley Inc.’s Word of the Day, which will soon add new vocabulary packs to purchase.

In-skill purchases is only one of the ways that Amazon offers a way for developers to generate revenue.

The company is also now offering a way for brands and merchants to sell products and services (like event tickets or flower delivery) through Alexa, using Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills. Amazon Pay integrates with existing CRM and order management solutions, says Amazon, allowing merchants to manage sales in their current process. This is generally available as of today, too.

And it’s been paying top developers directly through its Developer Rewards program, which is an attempt to seed the ecosystem with skills ahead of a more robust system for skill monetization.

The news was announced alongside an update on Alexa’s skill ecosystem, which has 40,000 skills available, up from 25,000 last December.

However, the ecosystem today has a very long tail. Many of the skills are those with few or even no users, or just represent apps from those toying around with voice app development. Research on how customers are actually engaging with their voice devices has shown that generally, people are largely using them for things like news and information, smart home control, and setting timers and reminders – not necessarily things that require voice apps.

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