Waldo, a photo-sharing platform that has historically targeted businesses, schools, camps, sports leagues, and other organizations, is capitalizing on the growing anti-Facebook sentiment to promote its newly launched consumer product. The company today is introducing a service aimed at private photo-sharing among family and friends which it’s promoting as an “ad-free, non-toxic” and private alternative to mainstream social sites, like Facebook and Instagram.

Of course, that’s just Waldo’s marketing. Consumers, arguably, already have private, ad-free photo-sharing alternatives outside social media. They can create invite-only photo albums on platforms like Google Photos or share privately via Apple’s iCloud. They can send photos through encrypted mobile messaging apps. Still, Waldo believes there’s room for a standalone app that’s available cross-platform and offers a differentiated feature set.

The Waldo app is available on iOS, Android and the web and includes a wireless DSLR uploading feature aimed at photo enthusiasts. Consumers who want to use the service for private sharing can create galleries for their events and then invite people they want to share those photos with. As others join the shared galleries, they can opt in to have Waldo send alerts about any photos they’re in through push notifications or text alerts.

The app also offers closed-loop commenting and reactions that allow the photo owner and the commenter to have a private interaction not seen by anyone else in the album.

The new consumer plans are offered as either a Plus or Premium subscription at $4.99/mo or $9.99/mo, respectively. The former supports up to 5 family members and the latter up to 10, with unlimited invites and contributors. Plus also includes 100 GB of storage while Premium offers 200 GB.

These are more expensive plans than offered by big tech rivals, however. For comparison, a Google One Basic storage plan of 100 GB, which includes photos and files, is $1.99/mo, and 200 GB is $2.99/mo. iCloud+ is $0.99/mo for 50 GB in the U.S. or $2.99/mo for 200 GB. So Waldo will really need to sell consumers on its feature set of facial recognition-powered smart notifications, private reactions, and custom print options.

Waldo plans to build on its existing partnerships with professional industries, like camps, schools, and churches which use Waldo as a tool to share photos privately with parents others.

Over the past five years, Waldo has slowly grown its footprint outside of the consumer space. Today, it has “hundreds of thousands” of customers, including a combination of families and employees of the K-12 institutions and businesses its app serves. Its business customers can use the app’s facial recognition features (with parents’ permission) to automatically identify and tag their students, campers, event-goers, and other attendees. That way, parents don’t have to look through the hundreds of photos the organization may snap in order to find just those that feature their own child or children.

This paid subscription-based service has been adopted by groups across the U.S. and Canada, but Waldo doesn’t disclose its revenue.

Waldo tells us the plan is not to pivot from its existing b2b offering, but instead expand to a new group of users.

Because parents and others may already have Waldo installed on their phones, the company sees the potential in shifting them over to its consumer photo-sharing service. And the recipients of the shared photos don’t necessarily have to download the app to join in — the service can be used without an app installed from the web browser on any device.

As a user of Waldo through my own child’s camp, this transition makes sense. Instead of downloading Waldo’s shared photos to my phone only to then turn around and reshare them with grandparents through another platform, I could see how it may be easier to just join Waldo’s consumer subscription plan and push a “camp photos” albums to a few family members.

“We will continue to provide our communities with our Waldo Pro solution as it is an important value add for our families who seek to have all of their families photos, irrespective of who took them, in a single cloud-based, mobile-friendly location, and a huge benefit to our communities who benefit from a safer photo-sharing platform,” Waldo CEO Rodney Rice told TechCrunch.

“The launch of Waldo Plus and Premium represents our opening up the platform from only being accessible as a member of one of our ‘Waldo-fied’ communities to every consumer being able to use the platform for everyday sharing and all the events in their lives,” he says.

Instagram’s standalone messaging app Threads is shutting down. The app will no longer be supported by the end of December 2021, the company confirmed to TechCrunch after reports began circulating via social media of its impending closure. Instagram is planning to alert its existing Threads users with an in-app notice beginning on November 23, which will direct them to return to Instagram to message their friends going forward.

Threads was first introduced in 2019 as a companion app to Instagram shortly after the company shut down its other standalone messaging app, Direct. Instead of focusing solely on the inbox experience, Threads was built as a “camera-first” mobile messager designed to be used for posting status updates and staying in touch with those you designated as your “Close Friends” on Instagram. The app didn’t gain mainstream adoption, however. But instead of iterating on the experience, Threads received little attention until a revamp last year which made it possible to message everyone — not just “Close Friends” — as Direct had once offered.

Though the app had offered a way to update your Status — or even automatically update it, based on your location — it had been difficult to navigate between the different sections of the app until the 2020 redesign. With the update, Instagram attempted to make it easier to switch between friends’ Stories, the Camera interface, and other parts of the experience. It still didn’t function as a quick way to read through your messages, though, and didn’t gain significant traction as a result of the changes.

The app today is ranked No. 214 in the Photo & Video category on the U.S. App Store — an indication of its continued failure to catch on with a broader audience. It’s also rated a middling 3.1 stars across 2,500 reviews as users complain about its usability, layout, missing features, and glitches. To date, Threads has seen approximately 13.7 million global installs from across the App Store and Google Play, according to estimates from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The closure comes at a time when Meta (formerly, Facebook) is revamping its messaging platforms. Following Threads’ debut, Facebook made Messenger and Instagram interoperable — meaning Instagram users could message friends on Facebook and vice versa. The updates included a host of new features as well, like ways to co-watch videos, react with emoji, change the chat color, and more. Eventually, the company wants to include WhatsApp in this cross-platform messaging experience.

Of course, those changes begged the question as to where that leaves a smaller companion app like Threads.

The app’s closure message was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, and subsequently written up by smaller blogs. But Instagram had not yet confirmed the details publicly as the message wasn’t yet displaying to the app’s users.

The company told TechCrunch its decision to close Threads came about because many of its most-loved features — like automatic captions and status — have either rolled out or are now rolling out to Instagram. Instagram also felt it could better focus its messaging efforts by not splitting its attention between two different apps.

“We know that people care about connecting with their close friends, and we’ve seen this particularly over the past few years with the growth of messaging on Instagram. We’re now focusing our efforts on enhancing how you connect with close friends on Instagram, and deprecating the Threads app,” an Instagram spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. “We’re bringing the fun and unique features we had on Threads to the main Instagram app, and continuing to build ways people can better connect with their close friends on Instagram. We hope this makes it easier for people to have all these features and abilities in the main app,” they added.

The company says it will release new messaging features on the main Instagram app in the months ahead.

On November 23, All Threads users on both iOS and Android will begin seeing the notices that the app will shut down by December, and Instagram’s Help Center will also display a notice that explains Threads will no longer be supported. When the app’s support ends, existing users will be logged out and the app will be removed from the App Store and Google Play. When the app closes down at year-end, all Threads features will be available on the main Instagram app.

Just a few months after launching support for podcast subscriptions to U.S. creators, Spotify today is making the service available to creators in global markets. The company says the service, which allows creators to mark episodes as “subscriber-only” content, will now become available in 33 new markets worldwide.

When podcast subscriptions publicly launched in the U.S., Spotify had introduced a couple of key changes to how the service worked. Before, creators had only been able to choose from one of three price points for their paid shows. But Spotify heard from creators they wanted more pricing flexibility, so it revamped pricing with the introduction of 20 price point options for creators to choose from, starting as low as $0.49 and increasing to as much as $150.

The company also launched a feature that would allow creators to download a list of their subscribers’ contact information, so they could further develop their direct relationship with their audience.

As the service rolls out globally, Spotify isn’t introducing any new features, it says. Instead, the expansion is just about bringing podcast subscriptions to more people.

Spotify’s podcast subscription platform isn’t the only one on the market. Apple offers its version of subscriptions, but takes a 30% cut of creator revenue, which drops to 15% in year two — similar to other subscription apps. Spotify, meanwhile, is hoping to grow its service by waiving its commissions for the first two years. When the free period ends, it then plans to take a much lower commission of just 5%.

Spotify’s subscription podcasts service is offered via its podcast creation platform Anchor, which notes the subscriptions available today on both iOS and Android to 29 markets. The remaining four markets will roll out next week.

Included in the global rollout are Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Next week, Canada, Germany, Austria, and  France will be supported.

In other podcast news, Spotify additionally announced a multi-year exclusive agreement with Bad Robot Audio, a new audio-focused division of Bad Robot, the production company formed by J.J. Abrams in 2001.

Bad Robot is behind shows like “Lost,” “Alias,” “Fringe,” “Person of Interest,” “Castle Rock,” “Westworld,” and others, as well as films like “Super 8,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker,” and the “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Cloverfield” franchises.

The new division is being led by former Audible and Spotify award-winning executive, Christina Choi, who joins as Head of Podcasts at Bad Robot. The company isn’t yet detailing what shows it may offer on Spotify, but notes that they’ll include both “narrative non-fiction and fiction podcast productions.”

It was way back in 2017 that the company that became Ultraleap (Ultrahaptics, as weas) demonstrated at TechCrunch Disrupt a technology that pioneered ultrasound to replicate the sense of touch. The impressive ‘Star Wars’ demonstration took the crowd by storm.

It was quite the demo (see the video below). The underlying technology was based on post-graduate research from inventor – and still CEO – Tom Carter. Ultrahaptics went on to raise $23 million, begin to interest car companies, and later absorb the much-hyped Leap Motion, which, it turns out, was a match made in heaven, by uniting both hand tracking and mid-air haptics.

Ultraleap has now raised an $82 million (£60 million) Series D funding, led by a combination of Tencent, British Patient Capital’s ‘Future Fund: Breakthrough’, and CMB International. Also participating were existing shareholders Mayfair Equity Partners and IP Group plc.

Commenting, Tom Carter, Ultraleap CEO, said recent chatter about the VR-based “Metaverse” from companies like Facebook, as well as the shift to touchless interfaces brought about by the pandemic, had helped its fund-raising.

“The metaverse concept is not new to Ultraleap,” he said. “It has always been our mission to remove boundaries between physical and digital worlds. The pandemic has accelerated the rise of the term as more people now understand the power of enhancing the physical world with digital elements. For Ultraleap, this new era is not constrained to VR headsets. Like the internet, it is a reality we will interact with, in all parts of life: at home, in the office, in cars, or out in public. Our aim with this Series D raise is to accelerate the transition to the primary interface – your hands – because there are no physical controllers, buttons or touchscreens in anyone’s vision of the metaverse.”

Ultraleap’s fifth-generation hand tracking platform, dubbed Gemini, is clearly heading towards a number of devices. It’s already built into multiple platforms, camera systems, and third-party hardware including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset and Varjo’s VR-3 and XR-3 headsets.

Ultraleap’s plan is to take Gemini to different operating systems, increase investment in tooling / R&D and let developers run away with their imaginations on how to apply the technology.

Of course, one of the key drivers of this touchless technology is of course The Great Pandemic. Like, who wants to touch anything anymore, right?!

Thus, companies like PepsiCo and Lego are already using Ultraleap’s technology in public interfaces.

And as was hinted at back in 2017, automakers are looking to make the ‘in-cabin experience’ a real thing. So Ultraleap is already working with DS Automobiles and Hosiden on new mid-air haptics experiences.

Carter expanded on these moves on a call, explaining that the potential for user interfaces that work inside VR-based metaverses are the vision for Ultraleap’s technology: “Admittedly, the metaverse is a very buzzy thing at the moment, but it really does describe the thing that we’ve been working towards: removing the barriers between humans and virtual content.”

“We’ve raised this round to help transition everyone towards that optimum interface of your hands, across all of the markets that we target. So on XR, we’ve launched Gemini, and in the last few weeks, a new generation of hand tracking, which is getting super rave reviews. It’s really now time to scale out-of-home. Pepsi’s deployment had 85% user preference and parity with touchscreens in terms of completion times for putting your orders through.”

Then there’s automotive. He said: “UX is the new horsepower’. We’re still driving, but we are moving towards being much more focused on the experience within the cabin… whether you’re working, working, being entertained, or other sorts of similarly Metaverse-like activities within your car.”

He said it turns out that there’s a very big safety benefit in using these mid-air interfaces over trying to use a touchscreen, where you have to take your eyes off the road: “It reduces the mental load on the driver by about 20%, by reducing the number of glances off the road that the driver takes. Transitioning to that interface makes the driving experience safer. And then once you have that interface and people are used to interacting in this way, it makes the transition to the future world easier.”

Here’s the 2017 demonstration:

Partly as a result of modern employment trends, and partly as a result of the pandemic’s effect on the world of work, there’s an increasing gap between traditional full-time employment and freelancing. So-called ‘job pairing’ splits a full-time position between two people to reduce working hours without sacrificing the career continuity of those involved.

Roleshare is a talent marketplace that matches professionals with each other so they can both apply and share one full-time job. The startup has now raised an initial pre-seed funding round of over $550,000 from largely UK-based super angels to build a global “rolesharing” marketplace and is now committed to launching with “large multi-sector organizations”, it says.

The idea here is that companies end up being able to both retain their top talent, as well as bring in new talent at the same time.

Sophie Setareh Smallwood, co-founder and co-CEO of Roleshare, told me over a call: “Job-sharing has been around for some time. It started to become a thing in the 70s when women started to become more active in the workforce. In the private sector, it’s something that has happened in an ad hoc capacity, whether it’s about juggling parenting duties or whatever.”

Since senior strategic roles are not really “part-time-able”, job-sharing becomes an interesting solution, she told me.

“But it’s not something that’s easy to solve for, right? There’s an interpersonal element of putting two people together, to, in essence, share the responsibilities of a job.

Roleshare says it makes all this easier for companies to find out if any of their roles are able to be ‘job shared’ and then matches-up candidates. Individuals can add their jobs for free (clearly a ‘trojan horse’ into the enterprise), or companies can, for a fee. This means it provides liquidity of talent for companies seeking to make some roles a job-share.

Roleshare quotes a UK study that shows employees who share jobs are 30 percent more productive than those who do not, because it helps with work-life balance and alleviates job-related stress. It can also increase diversity, skills, and greater business continuity inside companies, says the startup.

“Our solution has been described as “third way” by MIT Sloan Management Review” Smallwood told me over email.

She added that the “competitive landscape is broad (talent marketplaces / flexible working / knowledge worker + Gig Economy)” but that there are “not very many direct competitors, except for a few players like tandemploy (DE), duome (U.K.), jobpairing (US), among others.”

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2027, 50 percent of the workforce will be freelance. An MIT Sloan Management Review/Deloitte survey indicated that nearly 90 percent of managers consider external workers to be part of their workforce.

Setareh Smallwood added: “What makes us unique is our team (ex PayPal, Facebook, ebay), and our story. Roleshare didn’t exist when I needed it, so I quit Facebook to build it. We are the only talent marketplace that allows companies to source talent pairs for specific roles internally and externally, our platform matches talent from both sides to co-apply and share roles. We also uniquely allow talent to post their existing jobs as shareable as a form of direct sourcing.”

Roleshare has been backed by a number of European angels including Ian Hogarth, Azeem Azhar, Gabbi Cahane, Brendan Gill and Thish Nadessan among several others.

Runway, a startup that emerged from the challenges that faced Rent the Runway’s first iOS team, is now exiting beta and launching its service that simplifies the mobile app release cycle — or, as the team describes it, offers “air traffic control” for mobile releases. The company has additionally raised a $2 million round of seed funding for its product, led by Bedrock Capital.

Other investors include Array Ventures, Chapter One, Breakpoint Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Four Cities, Harvard Management, Seed Capital, SoftBank Opportunity Fund, and various angels.

The idea for Runway comes from co-founders Gabriel Savit, Isabel Barrera, David Filion, and Matt Varghese, who had all worked together on the first mobile app team at Rent the Runway. While there, they learned that getting an app release out the door involves a lot of overhead in terms of time spent and wasted, and a lot of back-and-forth on internal communication apps like Slack. Interdisciplinary teams consisting of engineers, product, marketing, design, QA, and more all have to keep each other updated on their own part of the app’s release process — something that’s still often done using things like shared documents and spreadsheets.

Runway instead offers an alternative with its dedicated software specifically designed for managing the various parts of the app’s release cycle.

The system integrates with a company’s existing tools, like GitHub, JIRA, Trello, Bitrise, CircleCI and others, to automatically update teams as to what’s been done and what action items still remain. Since launching into beta this spring, Runway has doubled the number of supported integrations, which also now include tools like Linear, Pivotal Tracker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Travis CI, Slack, Bugsnag, Sentry, TestRail, and more, with others on the way soon.

Image Credits: Runway

During its test period, Runway has been used by a handful of early customers, including ClassPass, Kickstarter, Capsule and others, who, as of this March, had pushed out over 40 app releases via its platform.

Since its beta, it’s grown its client base to 15 and now includes Gusto, NTWRK, Brex, and Chick-fil-A as customers, as well as some bigger names in at the enterprise end of the scale, the company notes. (One is a “favorite food delivery app,” we understand). Several of these customers have also contributed statements of support for using Runway over their old methods. For instance, ClassPass’s Mobile Lead Sanjay Thakur said the system results in “less confusion” and less time spent on releases.

“Our engineers tell me their load during sprints in the release manager role has shrunk,” Thakur said.

Kickstarter’s Senior iOS engineer Hari Singh noted that “things are easier now” with Runway, and remarked, “it’s nice to have all of our team members looking at the same thing, all the time. There’s no subjective opinion of what’s happening,” he said.

“Runway has not only made releases faster, but mental stress around releases is something we don’t have to worry about anymore,” noted Senior Software Engineer Hari Singh of NTWRK. “We used to be hesitant to release as often as we would have liked. Now, we know it’s going to go smoothly, and we know it’s going to require minimal effort.”

As of today, Runway says its early adopters have since pushed out 60 app releases through its platform. It has also made a number of key product changes and updates since its beta in March.

Image Credits: Runway

These include the addition of many more automation for tasks that would have otherwise been handled manually or other chores like automatically pausing unstable phased releases, automatically accelerating stable phased releases, adding in default Release Notes for the app stores’ “What’s New” section, support for rollouts with automatically increasing staged percentage (including Android), selecting the latest build in the app stores, submitting new builds for beta review on iOS, tagging release at the end fo the release cycle, autogenerating changelogs, attaching artifacts, adding missing labels or fixing versions to tickets in project management tools, and more.

Runway also added support for quicker hotfix releases, an approvals feature that loops in external stakeholders, a screenshot viewer and approval gate, build artifact downloads directly from the CI pipeline, regression testing integrations, stability monitoring integrations, TestFlight and Play Store beta track testing integrations, additional capabilities for frequent releases like bumping the version number in code, and support for roles, permissions, and access control lists, among other things. It’s also attained SOC 2 certification.

One area it’s still working on is simplifying the onboarding of new customers. Because it’s designed to be a broad platform, the initial setup process where a customer connects Runway to its many internal apps and services can take time. However, Runway believes that ultimately, its ability to adapt to many teams’ different tools and processes will be a selling point, not an obstacle to its adoption.

As it goes to launch, Runway continues to charge $400 per month per app for its standard tier but has now added on custom, enterprise pricing for larger businesses, as it has more companies on the high-end in the pipeline. It may add new pricing for indie teams in the future, we’re told.

Runway says it will apply the new funds to hiring, including the hire of multiple full-stack engineers (particularly ex-mobile engineers), and a full-time employee to help with growth and marketing. It has already made its first full-time hire with the addition of a form senior mobile engineer.

Pinterest today announced a new initiative designed to help the company increase its pace of innovation. The company is introducing an in-house, experimental products team it’s called TwoTwenty — named after the address of Pinterest’s first office. The team is comprised of engineers, designers, and other product experts who will research, prototype and test new features and ideas, then identify those that gain traction. Successful products will be then handed off to other teams within the company to take to scale.

The team has already had its hand in some of Pinterest’s latest launches, the company notes. Its first exploration was with the live-streamed creator events, which later evolved to include features like the ability to rewatch livestreams and support for shopping product recommendations. These became a part of Pinterest’s recently announced product, “Pinterest TV,” a live shopping feature on the app that aims to compete with rival services from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other dedicated live stream shopping platforms.

The Pinterest TV lineup includes a host of “shows” from creators, where fans can interact and ask questions while participating in the live shopping event. And it offers a virtual studio to creators, which was also an idea that emerged from TwoTwenty’s work, Pinterest says.

The idea to create an in-house team now dedicated to new project ideas comes at a time when Pinterest is trying to reinvent itself for the modern era of online social, which is more focused on formats like video and live streaming amid a maturing creator economy.

In that light, the launch of Pinterest TV represented a significant pivot away from Pinterest’s original idea of an online image pinboard where users research and discover new ideas, which sometimes translate into an online purchase. With video and live shopping, Pinterest aims to better attract a younger demographic who has grown up with social apps like Instagram and TikTok, where video and live content is core to the experience. If it fails to successfully make this shift, it could be on its way out as a top social platform. (In fact, reports that Pinterest was discussing an exit by way of PayPal have been circulating, but PayPal said it’s not pursuing an acquisition at this time.).

Pinterest explained its new incubation team will field ideas from an online submission portal called the “Idea Factory” as well as from its company-wide “Makeathons” (hackathon events). The team will then further experiment with the ideas and prototypes to see if any gain traction. Initially, the team includes Product Lead David Temple, who’s been heading up creator products; early engineer Ryan Probasco; and Content Lead Meredith Arthur, previously of CBS; Albert Pereta, who joined Pinterest by way of its 2014 Iceberg acquisition; among others.

In total there are 15 people on the team now and it’s actively recruiting new members.

Other large tech companies also formalize their efforts to drive innovation through dedicated teams.

Facebook, for instance, launched its “NPE Team” in 2019 to test out new ideas and features, to see how users would react. But over the years, none have scaled to become their own, new Facebook (now Meta) brand — they’ve instead informed the development of other Facebook and Instagram features. Meanwhile, Google had been allowing its more entrepreneurial-minded employees to experiment within its Area 120 in-house incubator. By comparison, this group has launched a number of successful products that have exited to other areas of Google’s business, like Search, Shopping, Commerce, and Cloud. That team has now been elevated with the recent reorg that sees it under new leadership and paired alongside other long-term-focused innovations, like the holographic videoconferencing project known as Project Starline.

“With TwoTwenty, we prioritize a collaborative approach and accelerate ideas from employees around the company,” said Temple, in an announcement. “With the resources of an established brand, we’re able to explore and invest in new solutions to help people find inspiration to live a life they love,” he added.

In an effort to expand beyond music, Spotify has been investing hundreds of millions to build out its podcasts business. Now the company has set its sights on another form of audio, with today’s acquisition of digital audiobook distributor Findaway.

Spotify declined to share the financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory review and approval.

Founded in 2004, Findaway’s core focus has been on bringing more audiobooks to listeners worldwide.

It today operates a collection of brands and products led by its large audiobook distribution business that connects content creators with reseller partners like Apple, Google, Scribd, Audible, Nook, Rakuten Kobo, Chirp, Storytel (a Spotify partner), Overdrive, Audiobooks.com, and dozens of other global brands.

Other brands under the Findaway umbrella include Findaway Voices, which connects authors with professional narrators; Audioworks, which sees the company producing audio for top publishers; Playaway, which brings preloaded audiobook products to libraries and schools; Orange Sky Audio, which works to bring a more diversified audio catalog to listeners; and AudioEngine, which offers tools and technology that allow developers to integrate a broad catalog of audiobooks into their own platforms. 

Spotify is bringing in Findaway’s full team of around 150, it says, and then plans to build on Findaway’s existing investments in the audio industry. It also plans to bring expanded access to audiobooks to Spotify’s 381 million monthly active users.

“With this acquisition, the plan is to accelerate into the audiobooks space by expanding our platform,” said Nir Zicherman, Spotify’s Head of Audiobooks. He explained that today, Spotify users tend to go to other platforms to access audiobooks, and it wants to enable that consumption to take place with Spotify’s app itself. Initially, that may see Spotify users leveraging the company’s new Open Access Platform technology (OAP) to authenticate with existing credentials to access audiobooks from Findaway and other audiobook partners, like Storytel.

More broadly, however, OAP offers the flexibility for publishers to determine how their content is sold that works with their own business models, meaning they may introduce a variety of new ways consumers could unlock and listen to audiobook content on Spotify going forward.

The first integrations of OAP are expected to arrive early next year, said Spotify.

“As an industry, we think there’s massive potential and growth ahead for audiobooks,” Zicherman noted. “Combining Spotify and Findaway and their amazing team and their amazing tech, the idea is to realize that future faster than we ever could as separate companies.”

According to research estimates, the audiobook industry is expected to grow from $3.3 billion as of 2020 to $15 billion by 2027, which is why Spotify believes Findaway is worth the investment. The company also noted that it sees the Findaway deal as the beginning of its ambitions in the audiobooks space, so it may choose to expand the team further in the future.

Spotify plans to have Findaway continue to run its various brands and services much as it does today, with the same staff and partners, operating from its Cleveland area headquarters. This approach is similar to how Spotify handled its acquisition of podcast creation platform Anchor, which continued to offer distribution to other platforms — including Spotify’s competition.

The company has signaled its interest in audiobooks ahead of today’s announcement. In January, it began testing the format with a handful of classics, like “Frankenstein,” “Jane Eyre,” “Persuasion” and others, narrated by celebs. It had also previously offered the first “Harry Potter” book with chapters narrated by stars like Daniel Radcliffe, David Beckham, and Dakota Fanning.

And in May, it announced a partnership with audiobooks platform Storytel to allow Spotify users to access their audiobooks through Spotify’s app, also powered by OAP. (The company wouldn’t say if the deal with Findaway grew out of similar partnership discussions, but that seems a likely possibility.)

Today’s acquisition doesn’t signal a shift away from Spotify’s commitment to podcasts in order to chase a new area of audio investment, we’re told.

“Podcasts will remain a critical part of our focus as a business,” said Zicherman. “This is an expansion into a new content type that we know our consumers want, and, in many cases, are already listening to. We want to bring that on platform so they can enjoy it on Spotify, as well.”

Google Labs is back, but this time around, it’s not a consumer-facing brand delivering a range of experimental products. Instead, it’s the internal name given to a new team at Google created under a reorganization that aims to gather the company’s many innovative projects and long-term bets under one roof. The new group will be led by Clay Bavor, a veteran Googler and VP whose most recent role has seen him leading the company’s forward-looking efforts in virtual and augmented reality, including its cutting-edge holographic videoconferencing project known as Project Starline.

Bavor will lead the new organization that will contain Google’s existing AR and VR efforts, its futuristic Starline, its in-house incubator called Area 120, as well as any other “high-potential, long-term” projects. He will report directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Launched in 2016, Area 120 was envisioned as a way to better retain entrepreneurial-minded talent at Google, while giving teams the ability to test out new ideas while still having access to Google’s data, products, and resources.

Over the years, the organization has cranked out a number of successful projects and exits, including the HTML5 gaming platform for emerging markets called GameSnacks, now integrated with Google Chrome in some countries; the technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout; an AirTable rival called Tables which exited to Google Cloud; an A.I.-powered conversational ads platform AdLingo, which also exited to Cloud; video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, which exited to Google Search and Shopping, respectively; and the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce, among others.

Currently, Area 120 is incubating projects like the workplace video platform ThreadIt, spectrum marketplace Orion, document scanner Stack, and more. At any given time, it has around 20 projects underway, though not all of them are made public.

However, under the prior organizational structure, Area 120 was three layers deep in terms of reporting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai — even though Pichai himself had to sign off on its every exit. The group was also housed amid a potpourri of groups reporting to Don Harrison, President of Global Partnerships and Corporate Development. With the reorganization, Area 120 will be relocated alongside other innovative projects, potentially gaining the participating teams and their efforts increased visibility.

Though Google is only using the branding “Labs” internally to have something to call its new group, the name it selected has a rich history at the company. Hardly a boring choice, the “Google Labs” brand was associated in the past with Google’s public-facing experiments that often moved from beta into general availability.

During its run from 2002-2011, Google Labs produced products like Personalized Web Search, Google Web Alerts, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Reader, Google Shopper (now Google Shopping), Aardvark (a Quora-like Q&A site), a Lens precursor called Google Goggles, Gesture Search for Android, iGoogle, Google Maps, Google Transit, Google Video, Google Talk, Google Trends, Google Scholar, Google Code Search, Google Suggest, Google Groups, and others that become core Google products and services.

While Google’s new plan is not about making Labs a public brand — individuals will be hired into the project teams themselves (like Starline, e.g.) — the reorg itself could elevate the focus on some of Google’s bigger bets. And by bringing Labs under Bavor’s leadership — a veteran Googler who led product management for many high-profile Google projects over the years, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Apps for Work (now Google Workspace) — Google is putting into place a leader with experience turning innovative ideas into core products.

In an announcement to staff, the company described the reorganization as one that’s “focused on starting and growing new, forward-looking investment areas across the company.”

“Central to this org is a new team called Labs, focused on extrapolating technology trends and incubating a set of high-potential, long-term projects,” it said.

Google has not publicly announced its reorganizational efforts. But after hearing about the moves from internal sources, Google confirmed to TechCrunch the changes are as we’ve described, including Bavor’s new position.

“Clay has taken on an expanded role. His work will focus on long-term technology projects that are in direct support of our core products and businesses,” a Google spokesperson said.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today the comapny has begun testing a new feature this week called “Take a Break” which will allow users to remind themselves to take a break from using the app after either 10, 20 or 30 minutes, depending on their preferences. As an opt-in feature, however, the reminders may have a limited impact as users would have to be motivated to set up the new control for themselves.

The company had previously said it was looking into “Take a Break” reminders. Mosseri, for instance, mentioned the coming addition when commenting on Instagram’s plans to pause its plans to build a version of its service for younger users, Instagram for Kids. He referenced Instagram’s plans to build in “nudges” and “reminders,” like “Take a Break,” as an example of how Instagram was addressing issues related to its product’s impact on users’ mental health.

Meta’s (previously, Facebook’s) Global Head of Security Antigone Davis also referenced Instagram’s  “Take a Break” reminders when the company was grilled in a Senate hearing over teen mental health back in September. He said the idea with the feature was to encourage users to stop looking at the app after they had been browsing for too long, and cited it as one of the many ways the company was working to improve the experiences of young people using its platform.

But similar to Instagram’s experiment with removing Like counts from posts, which it also ultimately decided to make an opt-in feature, these new “break” reminders won’t likely impact platform usage as they’re not being made the default experience. In addition, it’s unclear if users will adopt the feature given that iOS and Android’s built-in screen time controls already allow device owners to set limits on the time spent in mobile apps either on an individual basis or by category, like “social.”

Instagram, in other words, appears to want credit for building mental health features without actually going so far as to make any universal changes that would impact its app usage.

This is not the first time Instagram has pulled such a stunt. In 2018, Instagram rolled out a “You’re All Caught Up” notice that appeared when you reached the end of all the new content from the past two days on your Instagram Feed. But last year, Instagram regressed and decided to use the space below the “You’re All Caught Up” notice to push suggested posts and ads in an attempt to keep users engaged even after they had reached a stopping point.

If Instagram was serious about addressing mental health, it could designate a time to show users a reminder within its app, and then offer controls that would allow users to turn it off or adjust the duration. Its competitor TikTok already does this by inserting videos into users’ For You feeds that suggest it’s time to take a break after the user has been scrolling for too long. TikTok also leverages influencers with millions of followers to issue these warnings, which can be more effective than just a pop-up notification.

Mosseri says the new “Take a Break” reminders are launching this week as a test with a limited number of users, for the time being, but the company expects to roll out the feature publicly in the coming months.

YouTube today announced its decision to make the “dislike” count on videos private across its platform. The decision is likely to be controversial given the extent that it impacts the public’s visibility into a video’s reception. But YouTube believes the change will better protect its creators from harassment and reduce the threat of what it calls “dislike attacks” — essentially, when a group teams up to drive up the number of dislikes a video receives.

The company says that while dislike counts won’t be visible to the public, it’s not removing the dislike button itself. Users can still click the thumbs down button on videos to signal their dislike to creators privately. Meanwhile, creators will be able to track their dislikes in YouTube Studio alongside other analytics about their video’s performance, if they choose.

The change follows an experiment YouTube ran earlier this year whose goal was to determine if these sorts of changes would reduce dislike attacks and creator harassment.

At the time, YouTube explained that public dislike counts can affect creators’ well-being and may motivate targeted campaigns to add dislikes to videos. While that’s true, dislikes can also serve as a signal to others when videos are clickbait, spam, or misleading, which can be useful.

YouTube said it had also heard from smaller creators and others who were just getting started on the platform that they felt they were being unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. The experiment confirmed this was true — creators with smaller channels were targeted with dislike attacks more than larger creators were.

YouTube declined to share the specific details or the data collected through those experiments when TechCrunch asked, however. But it said it ran its tests for “multiple months” and conducted “in-depth analysis of the impact” as to how the changes affected both users and creators alike.

The company had experimented with different designs for removing the dislike counts, including one where the word “Dislike” appeared underneath the thumbs down button instead of the number of dislikes. This is the design the company has now settled on, which is less of a disruptive change to the row of engagement buttons beneath a video.

Image Credits: YouTube

The company would not be the first major platform to experiment with the idea of reducing the public visibility of signals that convey user sentiment. For similar mental health-related reasons, Instagram a couple of years ago began tests to hide its Like counts globally. It believed the focus on achieving Likes could be detrimental to its community and may make creators less comfortable expressing themselves on the platform. Ultimately, though, neither Facebook nor Instagram could fully commit to a decision and instead put the power to hide Likes back under users’ control — a move that effectively kept the status quo intact.

YouTube’s changes to the “dislike” count are being introduced at a time when there’s been a public reckoning over big tech and its impact on mental health, particularly when it comes to minors. Companies have been rethinking how their systems are designed to target and influence their user base, as well as what sort of changes they can make ahead of coming regulations. In a number of markets, lawmakers have been dragging in tech execs to hearings — YouTube included — and are crafting legislation aimed at reigning in some of tech’s more problematic elements. Mental health is only one area of regulatory interest, though, along with ad targeting, privacy, algorithmic boosting of misinformation, and more.

In YouTube’s case, the company has attempted to get ahead of some of the required changes by implementing increased protections and privacy features for users ages 13 to 17 while also decreasing the monetization potential for “unhealthy” kids’ content.  But the larger shift in the market is also pushing companies to consider the other areas of their platforms that are potentially toxic to broad groups of people.

That said, YouTube told TechCrunch today’s removal of the dislike count is not being guided by any regulatory changes, but rather its support for creators.

“We are proactively making this change because YouTube has a responsibility to protect creators, especially smaller creators, from harassment and dislike attacks,” a spokesperson said.

The company, of course, is also rolling this out when the battle for creator talent is becoming hugely competitive among tech giants. Today’s social platforms are establishing funds to retain their top creators amid increased competition, particularly from the growing threat of TikTok. YouTube this year announced a $100 million creator fund to jumpstart its short-form video platform, for example. And, over the past year or so, it’s introduced several new features and policies aimed at improving the creator experience.

The changes to the dislike count will roll out globally across YouTube’s platform starting today, including all devices and the web.

Last week, Netflix launched its debut lineup of mobile games to Android users globally. Today, the games are expanding to users on iOS. The lineup, which includes two “Stranger Things” games and a few other casual gaming titles, will be delivered to iOS users the same way they are on Android. That is, they’re not streamed from the cloud, but actually installed to users’ phones or tablets directly from the App Store.

With the Android launch, Netflix introduced a new “Games” tab within the app where users could browse the catalog and find a game they wanted to play. But to actually play the game, they would be directed to the Google Play Store to install the game on their device. Upon first launch, users would then sign into the game with their Netflix credentials.

Netflix says it’s using a similar system with the launch of Netflix games on iPhone and iPad. Except now, users are directed to Apple’s App Store for the downloads, not Google Play. The games will also require users to authenticate with their Netflix membership information in order to begin playing.

The company believes this system is compliant with Apple’s App Store rules, which were modified last year to be more permissive around gaming apps.

Though updated in response to address the growing number of cloud gaming services, Apple’s policy indicates that developers are allowed to offer a centralized app that offers its subscribers access to a gaming catalog, so long as each title within that catalog has its own, dedicated App Store listing. Apple said this would allow it to review each gaming title separately. The system had actually been pioneered by the subscription-based gaming service GameClub, as a way to offer a broader selection of classic gaming titles that were only playable by its members.

However, there is one difference between the iOS implementation of Netflix games and how the system works on Android.

Netflix users on Android have their own dedicated “Games” tab in the app’s navigation, but iOS users will not. Instead, iPhone members will only see a dedicated games row in the app where they can select any game to download. Meanwhile, iPad members will see the row (pinned to position 6) and will be able to access games from the categories drop-down menu.

Image Credits: Netflix

The comapny told TechCrunch that while Apple has been a great partner on Netflix games, it wasn’t entirely clear to Netflix if a gaming tab would bump up against another App Store policy, which bans apps that offer their own “app stores.” Since Netflix believes the tab is not critical to being able to offer the gaming experience to iOS users, it made the decision to launch without it. However, if the company is able to get more clarity around this rule in the future, it may be able to add a Games tab to its iOS app like the one available now on Android.

At launch, the gaming lineup remains the same as it does on Android. This includes two titles from BonusXP, “Stranger Things: 1984” and “Stranger Things 3: The Game;” as well as two titles from Frosty Pop, “Teeter” and “Shooting Hoops;” and one title from Rogue Games, “Card Blast.” The first two games are spinoffs from the popular Netflix show, “Stranger Things,” but the latter three are just casual titles.

Longer-term, Netflix has plans to expand this catalog with other additions and gaming genres. For example, the company in September acquired the independent game developer Night School Studio, best known for narrative-driven titles like “Oxenfree,” to further build out its library of Netflix games.

Netflix explained its interest in gaming as just another way to entertain and retain subscribers — not a way to generate direct revenues from the games themselves. At present, the games are free to download, free from ads, and don’t include any in-app purchases. The company has said that as its catalog grows, it could apply its same recommendation algorithms to suggest new games to mobile users, instead of just TV shows and movies.

“We view gaming as another content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation, and unscripted TV,” Netflix’s Q2 2021 shareholder letter stated, adding that the company’s initial focus would be on free games designed for mobile devices. “Since we are nearly a decade into our push into original programming, we think the time is right to learn more about how our members value games,” Netflix said.