Earlier this year, Spotify introduced its new audio advertising marketplace, the Spotify Audience Network, which allows advertisers to reach audiences across Spotify’s ad-supported music and original and exclusive podcast programs, as well as third-party podcasts from Megaphone publishers, all in one place. Today, the company is launching access to the Spotify Audience Network to creators who use its Anchor podcast publishing tool in the U.S.

Support for Anchor had been previously announced when Spotify first unveiled its plans for the Spotify Audience Network back in February during its “Stream On” live event. The company described the new platform as a potential game changer for the world of podcast monetization, as it would give advertisers tools to reach the Spotify audience of hundreds of millions.

The news had shortly followed an investigative report by The Verge, which found that Anchor was struggling to find sponsors for smaller podcasters, as it had promised to do. Instead, Spotify itself was found to be the main sponsor for Anchor advertising to date. The debut of the Spotify Audience Network, however, put that report into perspective. It seemed that Spotify may have chosen to prioritize the building out of this larger ad marketplace, rather than working on sponsor outreach for smaller shows.

The Spotify Audience Network has already launched in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, where it now powers advertising across Spotify’s shows and other third-party podcasts, like those from The Wall St. Journal and ViacomCBS. Though the company today declined to say how many total podcasts are participating in the marketplace, it said the total has risen by more than 50% since launch, and about 4x more advertisers are now running ads on the network. Many are first-time podcast advertisers, like Saks Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, when it added Megaphone inventory to the Spotify Audience Network, it increased advertiser reach by 30%. In June, Megaphone publishers saw fill rates increase by over 10% in June and CPMs increase by over 40%, Spotify claims.

Image Credits: Spotify

With the additional support for Anchor, Spotify notes advertisers will be able to reach a large swath of Spotify’s podcast catalog as Anchor powers 70% of the podcasts on Spotify. It will also enable advertisers to reach popular shows like “Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry,” “How Long Gone,” and “Office Hours live with Tim Heidecker,” the company noted.

Instead of taking a percentage revenue share from advertiser payments, Anchor creators who are part of the Spotify Audience Network will receive a flat rate RPM (revenue per thousand listeners), the company told TechCrunch. But this detail isn’t mentioned on the website which presents the ad options to Anchor creators.

Spotify said the expansion is only one way it’s working to make it easier for advertisers to reach the podcast listener base on its platform.

The company is also soon launching support for podcast ad buying in Spotify Ad Studio, its self-serve channel now live in 26 global markets. Before, advertisers would have needed a direct relationship with the Spotify team and a sizable budget to advertise on its podcast network. But the Ad Studio’s launch of podcast ad buying will enable smaller advertisers, like universities, independent artists, app developers, and others, to now buy ads on podcasts, Spotify says. This launch will take place in the U.S. before rolling out to more markets.

An early beta tester of this functionality included Two Men and a Truck, which used the Spotify Ad Studio to test advertising in podcasts for the first time. The business says it will now make podcast advertising a part of its marketing plan going forward, as a result.

Related to today’s news, Spotify announced it was joining the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM), as the first audio platform member. Here, it will help to set the brand safety standards for the audio industry.

It also announced it would give advertisers tools to exclude sensitive topics from their ad buys, to give them more control over where their messages are heard. And it will offer new controls that will allow advertisers to target ads by context. Spotify offered an example of this by explaining how an animal shelter could target ads at a podcast about pets.

Podcasts historically have struggled to monetize effectively, outside of larger networks that could deliver sizable audiences across their various programs. That’s why Spotify has been snatching up various networks over the years, like Megaphone, Gimlet, Parcast, and The Ringer, for example. But for smaller publishers, it’s been difficult to compete and capture much, if any, of the potential advertising revenue.

With the expansion of the Spotify Audience Network to Anchor, creators would at least have a better chance at being exposed to more advertisers and campaigns. But as the payouts are still based on their audience size, it won’t likely dramatically change their fortunes overnight. However, Anchor does offer podcasters a few other ways to monetize, including its newer podcast subscriptions and Ambassador ads (which lets creators with over 50 listeners promote Anchor), in addition the premium sponsorships available to shows with larger audiences.

Google today announced that eco-friendly routes, a feature it first talked about earlier this year, is now live for iOS and Android users in the U.S., with support in Europe launching in 2022. And while this new routing option, which gives drivers the choice between the fastest and most fuel-efficient route, is clearly the highlight of today’s release, Maps is also getting two other new features: a new “lite navigation” mode for cyclists who may want routing but don’t want turn-by-turn directions (launching in the coming months) and expanded bike and scooter share information for when you just want to jump on that Donkey Republic bike for your sojourns through Berlin.

“With the eco-friendly routing feature, will always show you the fastest route — and now also the one that’s most fuel-efficient, if it doesn’t happen to also be the fastest,” Russell Dicker, the senior director of Transportation at Google Maps, told me. “So with just a few taps, you can see the relative fuel savings between the different options, the ETA difference if there is one and choose the one that works best for you.” For those users who always want to see the fastest route, no matter what, Google Maps will have a setting that will also allow them to only see that.

Image Credits: Google

Google believes that this new routing option “has the potential” to allow Maps users to avoid over 1 million tons of carbon emissions per year — the same as removing 200,000 cars from the road. I tend to be a bit skeptical about numbers like that — at least until the feature has been in use for a while and we get some real-world data. I do believe, however, that a lot of users will opt for the slightly longer but more fuel-efficient route, not in the least because in Google Maps itself, the focus is on fuel efficiency, which saves users money, after all, and not carbon emissions, which still remain a bit of a nebulous concept to many.

By default, routing is a difficult problem, even without taking fuel efficiency into account. “You can either do things quickly, or you can do things accurately but very, very slowly,” Dicker noted. “What we’ve managed to do is build a number of techniques that allow us to get a lot of good options really, really quickly and at scale, because, of course, everything at Google is about scale.”

Dicker noted that the core variables that go into choosing a more fuel-efficient route are things like distance, time, elevation, speed and being able to stay at a consistent speed.

Lite navigation, as Google calls it, was born out of the rise in demand for biking directions in Google Maps over the past year, Dicker said. But many cyclists don’t have their phone in front of them while they ride and they don’t necessarily want turn-by-turn directions either. So the focus of the lite navigation mode is on providing information about your ETA and upcoming elevation changes, as well as seeing where you are on the map, of course.

As for bike and scooter sharing, Google Maps now shows where you can find sharing stations in 300 cities around the world on Android and iOS, thanks to partnerships with Donkey Republic, Tier and Voi base in Europe, as well as Bird and Spin in the U.S.

Byteboard, a service designed to replace the on-site technical interview part of a company’s hiring process with a web-based alternative, will be spinning out of Google, TechCrunch learned and Google confirmed. The product was originally incubated as part of the company’s internal R&D lab known as Area 120, where it’s been led by General Manager Sargun Kaur. With this move, Byteboard will be the first Area 120 project to exit Google and become its own standalone company. But Google notes this will be an exception, not the rule.

Google told us that the spinout will have no impact on any existing Area 120 teams or the group’s future strategy. Instead, its R&D division will continue to focus on funding projects that are most likely to advance Google’s own opportunities, the company said.

In addition to the spinout, Byteboard has taken on new investment from Cowboy Ventures and others, in the $10 million-$15 million range. But we understand this is not a “buyout,” as Google will retain equity in the new company, which will continue to be led by co-founders Kaur and Nikke Hardson-Hurley.

“We’re thrilled to see the strides Byteboard has made over the past three years incubating within Google’s Area 120,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Byteboard’s solution is equipping high-growth businesses with the tools they need to assess and hire top technical talent, with greater efficiency and fairness. We look forward to continuing our work with Sargun, Nikke, and the rest of the Byteboard team,” they said.

Launched in 2019, Byteboard’s idea was to create a tool that would make the technical interview experience less tedious and more effective. The team noted at the time that the current process for interviewing software engineers didn’t really work for measuring how well someone would do in a day-to-day engineering job. Instead, interviews often benefitted those who had the time and resources to prepare, as they would test more for memorization rather than the practical application of people’s skills.

Image Credits: Byteboard

Byteboard flips this around by presenting job candidates with a real-world coding environment where they can select from supported languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C++, C#, JavaScript (node.js), Go, and PHP.

The web-based interview is conducted in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while the mobile interview is offering in Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android), and the data engineering interview is offered in Python and Java.

Its end-to-end service includes the interview platform, a bank of calibrated questions across 20+ essential software engineering skills, and an assessment after the fact. A group of experienced engineers review and rate the interviews. And this evaluation is handled anonymously, with the aim of taking the bias out of the process.

The business took off following its 2019 debut. After a brief slump during the early days of Covid lockdowns, Byteboard picked up again in Q3 2020 as companies returned to hiring. According to Byteboard’s website, those using its service have included Lyft, Hulu, Figma, Imperfect Foods, PlayVS, Betterment, Robinhood, GoodRx, ETHOS, Ezoic, and Glowforge.

In addition to the benefits of running the interview process through the web, instead of in-person (another concern in the Covid era), the quality of the data and assessment, and the less stressful environment for the candidates, Byteboard could also save companies money as they would no longer have to pay engineers to staff the interviews and measure the results.

However, the potential for Byteboard may have been limited as a Google-owned product.

Because engineers are a part of the human evaluation process with Byteboard, that would have made Google a part of the hiring group for other companies — including, in some cases, companies it directly competed with. That obviously raises ethical issues, as companies generally wouldn’t let competitors involve themselves in their hiring process. This is largely why Byteboard is moving forward as its own business, instead of a Google-owned project.

Of the half-dozen total team members at Byteboard, a few are joining the standalone company and a couple are choosing to stay at Google where they’ll move on to new projects, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Google didn’t confirm the details of this aspect of the deal, but noted Byteboard will continue to expand on its core product and operational focus, with more to share over the next few months.

Netflix is today officially launching a new feature for its Android users that will make it easier to find something to watch when you can’t make a decision. The feature, called “Play Something,” is a shuffle mode option that will play another movie or show Netflix believes you may like, based on your interests and your prior viewing behavior.

These selections may include a movie or show you’re already watching but haven’t completed, a movie or show on your watch list, or a brand-new series or film that Netflix’s personalization algorithms suggest, among other things.

The feature had been in development for some time before its public release. Last year, for example, Netflix was testing it as “Shuffle Play.” And in its Q4 2020 earnings, Netflix said it would roll out its shuffle mode to users worldwide during the first half of 2021, describing it as a way to “instantly watch a title” that was chosen just for the user.

That rollout schedule was partially realized.

“Play Something,” as the feature was rebranded to, officially launched to worldwide users on Netflix’s TV app back in April. Here, the option can be found in several places, including on the profile selection screen underneath your profile name, on the navigation menu to the left of your screen, and on the tenth row on your Netflix homepage — a location that’s meant to appear right at the point where you’re beginning to get frustrated with browsing and may have otherwise exited the app. In addition, Netflix users with screen-readers could also use Text-to-Speech (TTS) to use “Play Something.”

The company said at the time it would soon start testing the feature on mobile devices, starting with Android. It then began those tests in late May.

In other words, you may very well have had the feature on your own Android device long before this “official” debut — but not all of Netflix users globally have been able to try it yet.

That’s now changing, as Netflix is officially bringing “Play Something” to all Android mobile devices worldwide, with the rollout that starts today. The company says it will test the feature on iOS in the “coming months.”

On mobile, the “Play Something” button hovers over the content at the bottom of the phone’s screen as you scroll and also has its own dedicated tab in the app.

Image Credits: Netflix

User response to the addition, so far, has been positive, Netflix noted — even pointing to a few tweets where people praised the feature.

But for Netflix, the shuffle mode feature isn’t only about giving users another, easier way to watch — it’s a means of retaining users in the app before they jump to another entertainment option, whether that’s a rival streamer or even a social media app for video, like TikTok.

In fact, the threat from short-form video is serious enough that Netflix recently built its own TikTok-like feature for its mobile app called “Fast Laughs,” which shows a feed of comedy videos meant to drive users to its content. Putting harder numbers to this potential threat, TikTok, at an event last week, noted that 35% of its users were watching less TV due to TikTok, citing data from its own research.

“Play Something” joins other newer additions as well, including a smart downloads feature called “Downloads for You” and support for partial play downloads, as well as last year’s addition of the Top 10 list.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are all the rage at the moment. We’re seeing explosive growth in this sector as people experiment with building companies on top of tokens and smart contracts. And where new organization types bloom, so does the need for infrastructure.

Utopia Labs is a team of 4 founders who met on Discord and Twitter over the past few months — a story that is getting increasingly familiar in the crypto-driven web3 space where everything is moving incredibly fast at the moment.

The CEO Kaito Cunningham recently worked at crypto firm M31 and is in the On Deck Catalyst program. Utopia’s co-founders Pryce Adabe Yebesi, Alexander Wu and Jason Chong, also have held a scattering of tech builder background gigs from Facebook internships to LunchClub to Microsoft. The collective interest in DAOs, though, was what brought them together to begin chatting and eventually building for the space. 

If you’re not familiar with the DAO explosion happening, what we’re seeing is communities come together around a thesis that in the past may have required an LLC or C-corp structure in order to execute instead turning to blockchain solutions. Basically, company structure governed by a smart contract instead of legacy legal structures. Some current estimates put the value governed by DAO treasuries at over $6B, up from $1B earlier this year. 

If you plot the curve, you’ll see the potential for growth is pretty enormous. And with the vast majority of DAOs operating across international boundaries on a global scale, there is a big need for infrastructure build out that takes over where the contract ends, nemly in areas like payroll, expenses, token distribution and HR management. 

Utopia Labs is building out a stack of infrastructure tools for DAOs and they’re starting with the payments bit. They’ve raised $1.5M from a group of investors to begin hiring a full stack engineer and front-end engineer.  

The round was led by Kindred Ventures who has invested in other bleeding edge crypto platforms like Zora and Bitski. Other investors participating include Syndica DAO, 4th Revolution Capital and angels like Trevor McFedries at Brud, Alex Zhang at Friends With Benefits (another major DAO), Tyson Battistella from Zora, Anirudh Pai at On Deck, Colin Goltra at Binance, Gabby Dizon from YGG, Jason Choi from Spartan Fund, Jeff Weinstein from Stripe and several others.

If all of this sounds incredibly bleeding edge, it is. The team literally founded the company earlier in September — yes, the month that we are at the end of currently. They saw the opportunity to build out in this space that has energized the web3 space and dove in. 

Many DAOs pay members in their own tokens, increasing ownership stakes to provide members with an opportunity for greater rewards down the line or immediate liquidity. Utopia is building right on top of Gnosis SAFE, the financial core of most DAOs. The V1 product is focused on member payments and invoice workflows. 

The vast majority of DAOs are operating token distribution and payments based on raw dumps of data. As the saying goes, where you see a CSV, there’s a business opportunity. 

The team says they’ve build invoices and reimbursements workflows so that DAOs can receive, pay out and manage invoices and reimbursement requests. They’ve also built all-in-one transactions to allow DAOs to batch payments in one transaction across multiple people and coins. 

Next up is financial analysis and accounting to attach labels and metadata to payments in order to avoid manual accounting via Etherscan dump. 

The forward looking roadmap includes traditional fiat currency services, cross-chain DAOs, real-world compliance workflows and DAO ecosystem partnerships. 

The world of DAOs is currently on fire, with dozens of viable organizations that have significant momentum — but not nearly enough infrastructure to make them truly efficient. It’s a truly interesting and diverse landscape that has come a long way since The DAO nearly derailed Ethereum back in 2016. Today’s DAOs are more company scale than network scale but are moving faster and building cooler things than containers for money.

“On-chain payroll make DAOs truly crypto-native,” says Cooper Turley, a co-founder of FWB and full-time DAO explorer. “In a world where dozens of members are contributing from every corner of the world, automating salaries, incentives and bounties are the only way in which DAOs can scale.”

In addition to what Utopia Labs is doing, Multisafe, Commonwealth, Parcel and Colony are all names to watch in the DAO infrastructure space. 

An under-the-radar, bootstrapped startup from Vienna, Austria — a hit with developers for technology that underpins user experience for some of the world’s most popular apps — is doubling down on momentum and announcing its first outside investment, in the form of a large growth round of funding.

PSPDFkit — which provides APIs and an SDK that developers use to power document processing features like e-signing, document viewing and editing, collaboration and much more — has raised €100 million ($116 million). The funding is coming from a single investor, Insight Partners.

PSPDFkit is already profitable, and it has been for a while, so this investment is about stepping up its pace of growth. It plans to use the investment to build more developer tools, make strategic acquisitions (co-founder and CEO Jonathan Rhyne is mum about what, except to say that it will be to expand the suite of useful tools that it provides); and, for the first time, make some concerted efforts in the areas of sales and marketing.

A lot of PSPDFkit’s growth to date, in fact, has been by word of mouth, a strategy that has gotten it very far up to now. Its customers include Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, Volkswagen, Fabasoft, Wolters Kluwer Deutschland, and the European Patent Office, among a number of others that it works with under NDA.

In many cases, not every company is happy to admit just how much of their user experience and technology have been built by third parties, and that’s the situation with where and how PSPDFkit is used, too, but the fact remains that it’s quietly huge: altogether, PSPDFkit’s tech, by way of its APIs and SDKs, is now approaching 1 billion users in 150 countries.

Unsurprisingly, this traction has also meant that PSPDFkit has had a lot of acquisition interest over the years. Large technology companies building productivity tools, working with developers already, and are already very active in mobile apps and cloud services have all knocked on PSPDFkit’s door. Although the startup is not disclosing its valuation, you can guess that, given its size and profitable status, with this latest round, it’s definitely become a more expensive buy. (And if all goes to plan, will become even more so.)

The story of PSPDFkit is an interesting one that mirrors a lot of how mobile development itself has grown up over the years.

Originally the company started out around 2011 as a framework and toolset created by Austrian engineer Peter Steinberger, who was already involved in the iOS developer community and could see a need in the market from a number of apps for document-manipulation features like e-signing, document editing, and document viewing. Apps were letting us turn a lot of things into virtual experiences, and paper was shaping up to be one of the first things to go.

That need turned out to be a classic use case for building that functionality and making it something that many others could access by way of SDKs and APIs: document manipulation tools — even something so basic as previewing a file that is contained in a cloud-based folder — are very hard to build from scratch, are not necessarily part of companies’ core businesses, yet are nevertheless central to how they work.

Steinberger’s framework thus became one of the early examples of how SDKs and APIs could be used to integrate different services and functionality into other apps — a basic principle has now been applied to a whole host of other features: embeeded financial services, eg, neobanks; embedded payments, eg Stripe and others; embedded communications, eg, Twilio, Sinch, etc; and so on.

(The name PSPDFkit was a reference to Peter Steinberger’s initials; PDF because PDFs were, and largely remain, the company’s initial focus; and “kit” in reference to the SDK that it was.)

As mobile app creation and usage started to really take off, so did Steinberger’s framework, and soon Martin Schürrer joined him in building it. Rhyne — who was working in the U.S. as an attorney representing developers — then became their lawyer after meeting them at a developer event. Soon into that relationship, the three realized that not only was there a proper, growing business to be managed, but Steinberger and Schürrer had little interest in doing that. By 2014, Rhyne gave up practicing law and came on as a third co-founder, with Steinberger and Schürrer in Vienna, and Rhyne based out of North Carolina in the U.S.

With this round, Steinberger and Schürrer are stepping away from full-time roles but remain “significantly invested” in the business, while Rhyne is staying on as CEO.

Things evolved rapidly from there, in keeping with the meteoric rise of apps themselves.

Starting out on iOS, today PSPDFkit provides tools that can be used for building apps on Android and the web, using Flutter and React Native. The strategy is to work on building out a bigger platform to handle multiple, related functionality that developers might want to use related to documents, and perhaps the wider world of productivity.

Rhyne’s basic description of what PSPDFkit and its customers do today is “obsoleting paper.” But over time — not unlike how Stripe has progressed from its core feature, providing APIs to power payments, to a wider suite of services related to transactions — PSPDFkit sees an opportunity to do more, too, not least because the world’s expectations have also changed.

For example, Rhyne recalled how PSPDFkit put out a real time collaboration platform in 2015, “but we were like, ‘Man, it’s not getting traction, people don’t really want to use this.'” Then Covid-19 happened, he continued: “Now every single customer is saying, ‘This looks great. Yeah, we want to use that…’ I think that we’re seeing a change in the way people interact with documents.”

That speaks of a lot of opportunity both for the startup, and for its investors.

“Software developers and engineers are on the cutting edge of work simply by the nature of their craft,” said Ryan Hinkle, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “How they work and collaborate should be on the cutting edge, too. With PSPDFKit’s software development kits and hosted solutions, the company is revolutionizing document processing for enterprises and the developers they task with keeping the company at the forefront of innovation. Insight is thrilled to play a role in the company’s growth journey.” Hinkle is joining the board with this round.

Spotify earlier this year began beta testing new features to make podcasts more interactive through the use of listener polls and Q&As. Today, the company says these features will become publicly available to all creators through its podcast creation app, Anchor.

To use the new options, creators who publish and distribute using Anchor will be able to post a question or poll alongside their episode. At present, Anchor supports adding just one poll and one Q&A to an individual episode, not several.

When the podcast is published on Spotify, the polls and Q&As will appear at the bottom of the podcast’s episode page on the Spotify mobile app, both iOS and Android. Listeners can then follow the prompt to respond to the poll or Q&A in the app.

Image Credits: Spotify

After responding to the poll, listeners will immediately be able to view how the rest of the podcast audience voted so they can see how their own answers stacked up. But their Q&A responses are delivered privately to the podcaster. The podcast creator can choose to pin specific responses that will appear publicly below the question. These will display the listener’s Spotify username, so the feature should be used with that in mind. In other words, this feature is the podcast equivalent of the radio call-in — except it’s not live or recorded audio from the listener, it’s text.

These features have been in testing before today’s public launch with hundreds of creators throughout the year. During this time, the company says creators have used Q&As to ask for suggestions for future guests, get feedback about topic choice and format, and add gamification elements to their programs, where listeners are encouraged to return to hear what the hosts say about the listeners’ response.

Image Credits: Spotify

The new features are now being made available to any Anchor creators and Spotify users in 160 markets around the world. This is not Spotify’s entire global footprint, which is today 178 markets per its website. But it is a large majority.

Interactivity is just one way that Spotify has been working to revamp the traditional podcast experience. The company has also rolled out paid podcast subscriptions, a combined “Music + Talk” show format, and an app for hosting “live” shows, called Spotify Greenroom.

Netflix is expanding its mobile gaming push with the launch of three more gaming titles which will become exclusively available to Netflix members in select European markets. The company today is introducing a trio of casual games — “Shooting Hoops,” “Teeter Up,” and “Card Blast” — to Netflix members in Spain and Italy, as well as Poland, where Netflix recently began marketing its first members-only mobile games within its Android app.

Similarly, the new titles will be made available using the same model. Through a new “Games” tab inside the Netflix app, members will be directed to the games’ listings on the Google Play Store for their region. Here, they’ll download and install the game as they would any other app. But when it comes time to log in, they’ll need their Netflix credentials to begin playing.

The new games will also be entirely free to play, without any advertising or in-app purchases. While the first two titles to launch within Netflix’s Games tab were tied to the popular series, “Stranger Things,” these new games have no connection to any Netflix movie or show. Instead, they are simple, casual games meant to appeal to a wide range of gamers. They represent Netflix’s increased investment focused on making mobile games a part of a broader entertainment offering that is now growing to include more than just streaming content.

The games will today arrive in Poland, where they’ll join the existing “Stranger Things” titles. Meanwhile, Netflix members in Italy and Spain will gain access to both the trio of new games and the two existing “Stranger Things” games.

The additions will officially launch today at 8 AM PT, which is 5 PM in Italy and Spain. That’s when the games will go live on Netflix’s service.

The company recently spoke about its plans to expand into the gaming market during its Q2 earnings, saying it was in the early stages of exploring what this model may look like.

“We view gaming as another content category for us, similar to our expansion into original films, animation, and unscripted TV,” read Netflix’s shareholder letter, adding that its 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,” the company explained.

Image Credits: Screenshot of Teeter Up on Google Play

In late August, Netflix made good on those statements when it shifted two “Stranger Things” titles created by the Allen, Texas-based game studio BonusXP to become Netflix exclusives. These games, however, had been previously available on the Play Store and continues to be playable by those who already had them installed. But new gamers could now discover the two games — “Stranger Things: 1984” and “Stranger Things 3: The Game” from within the Netflix app.

That same model continues with the new releases.

“Card Blast” is licensed from U.S.-based Rogue Games, while”Shooting Hoops” and “Teeter Up” come from Canadian developer Frosty Pop.

These developers aren’t credited on the Play Store listings, as the games themselves are published under Netflix’s Google Play account.

Reached for comment, after TechCrunch happened upon one of the new titles, Netflix confirmed the details about the launch plans and offered a statement about its mobile gaming expansion.

“Starting today, Netflix members in Spain and Italy can play five mobile games on Android as part of our ongoing games rollout,” a Netflix spokesperson said. “These five games include ‘Stranger Things: 1984,’  ‘Stranger Things 3: The Game,’ ‘Card Blast,’ ‘Teeter Up,’ and ‘Shooting Hoops,’ which are all also available in Poland now. We’re still in the very early days, but we’re excited to bring these exclusive games as part of the Netflix membership – with no ads and no in-app purchases.”

Earlier, Netflix explained it chose Poland as the initial test market for mobile gaming because the country has an active mobile gaming audience, which made it seem like a good fit for this early feedback.

Today, the company notes that Italy and Spain were chosen as additional markets for similar reasons and because the European market, overall, is an important one for Netflix.

Netflix says it plans to launch games in other regions, including the U.S., at some point in the future, but could not say when. It also eventually aims to bring its games to iOS.

The suite of mobile games will be available within the Games tab in Netflix’s Android app in Poland, Italy, and Spain, starting at 11 AM PT today. 

Apple is bringing its 3D maps to more cities within the Apple Maps app, including London, L.A., New York, and San Francisco. The experience, launching with iOS 15, follows several years of investment in Apple’s mapping platform to make the app more competitive with the market leader, Google Maps. This has included not only the addition of 3D maps, like those arriving now to major markets, but also overall more detailed maps, improved transit features, AR viewing modes, and more.

Many of these features have taken time to roll out, with major metros around the U.S. and world being the first to gain the enhancements. AR viewing, for instance, only began launching to select cities this year.

Image Credits: Apple

With 3D maps, however, Apple Maps users will be able to see more details for areas across the city including their neighborhoods, commercial districts, marinas, buildings, and more, the company says, along with elevation details, new road labels, and even custom-designed landmarks.

For example, Apple Maps will show renderings for famous spots, like Coit Tower in San Francisco, Dodger Stadium in L.A., the Statue of Liberty in NYC, and the Royal Albert Hall in London, with more landmarks to come in time.

Image Credits: Apple

Later this year, these sorts of 3D maps will become available in Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., Apple says. Then, next year, they’ll arrive in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Apple is also enhancing its road-level navigation in Apple Maps, with more clearly displayed turn lanes, medians, bus, and taxi lanes, and crosswalks. These appear in a 3D viewing mode which makes it easier to see the best lane to choose based on traffic conditions or make better route planning purposes. The app will also display the estimated time of arrival, based on the current conditions, as Google Maps does. This new navigation, which was previously announced for a 2021 release, will arrive in CarPlay later this year, Apple said, without giving a more specific deadline.

Image Credits: Apple

Similarly, other major maps updates which had been announced earlier this year, are also now rolling out. This includes transit features designed to make Apple Maps more competitive with third-party apps often favored by transit takers, like Citymapper. Now, nearby transit stations are prominently displayed at the top of the screen and users can pin favorite lines in Maps for easy access. And once a route is selected, Maps will automatically notify users when it’s time to disembark — something users can track on their Apple Watch, too.

Apple Maps offers more immersive walking directions with step-by-step guidance powered by augmented reality. This allows users to raise their phone to scan the buildings in their area, which lets Maps generate a more accurate position in order to provide more detailed guidance. This has been rolling out to select markets over the course of the year.

iOS 15 users can also view a new 3D globe of the earth and they can tap an Explore Guides button in the Apple Maps app to access curated Guides from brands like Time Out, The Washington Post, the National Park Foundation, Complex, and The Infatuation These will offer suggestions about things to do or see in various cities worldwide. Users can also make guides of their own to share with friends and family.

A new forecast on the state of the app economy indicates the third quarter will see record-breaking revenues spent on apps and games. According to App Annie, consumers worldwide will spend $34 billion on apps and games in Q3, a 20% year-over-year increase on spending. The increase indicates that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on consumer habits and behavior is having a lasting effect when it comes to how people are now using apps for entertainment, shopping, work, education, and more.

App Annie, we should note, made headlines last week for having massaged its data in earlier years using confidential sources, then misrepresented this to its trading firm clients as having been statistically modeled with internal controls to prevent such a thing from occurring. This resulted in a $10+ million securities fraud settlement with the SEC, as firms used the data to make investment decisions, as a result.

But App Annie data today still remains a fairly accurate representation of the mobile market, despite these manipulations, and for now is still one of many top companies that supply large app publishers, marketers, and investors with information related to the mobile ecosystem.

The firm said that the largest contributor to app revenue in Q3 continues to be in-game spending and mobile subscriptions — the latter, a focus of lawsuits and increased regulation as both Apple and Google fight to retain their right to a cut of the purchases flowing through their app store platforms. Gaming continues to account for the majority of consumer spend, though non-gaming spending has grown its share over the past few years, thanks to subscriptions.

Android also still continues to outpace iOS on downloads, but the reverse is true when it comes to consumer spending.

Image Credits: App Annie

Downloads in Q3 will have grown by 10% year-over-year to reach a record high of 36 billion, driven by Google Play and particularly downloads in emerging markets like India and Brazil. The strongest growth was also seen in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico, and the Latin American market has begun to catch the attention of global publishers now, as well, as one with growth potential.

Industries driving download growth include travel, education, and medical — all three of which have had pandemic impacts. Travel app downloads grew 35% quarter-over-quarter on Google Play and 15% on iOS as the summer travel season has picked up amidst widespread vaccine rollout. Medical and education apps, of course, have pandemic ties, as users turned to mobile technology to keep up with online learning and with doctors’ appointments, Covid testing, and vaccine appointments.

But iOS still reigns when it comes to revenue generated by mobile apps, accounting for 65% of app stores’ consumer spending globally, which is in line with the past four quarters.

Image Credits: App Annie

Consumer spending on iOS apps grew 15% year over year to $22 billion, and 15% year-over-year on Google Play to reach around $12 billion. Most of this revenue is generated by gaming apps, which account for 66% of the spend across both apps stores. In terms of non-gaming apps, iOS commands 76% of consumer spending. Much of the growth outside of gaming, across both platforms, comes from entertainment apps, photo and video apps, social media, and dating apps, the firm says.

The U.S. and China are the largest iOS markets for consumer spending, with Japan, the U.S., and Taiwan accounting for the strongest growth. On Google Play, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea were the largest markets by consumer spend, but Japan, Russia, and Australia drove the growth.

While examinations of revenue and downloads have historically helped to paint a broad picture of the state of the mobile economy, as markets mature there’s greater interest in user engagement with apps — like those consumers already have installed on their devices.

A report from an App Annie competitor Sensor Tower, also out today, dives into active users, sessions, and retention metrics for games and non-games alike. The firm found that the top 500 apps worldwide now average 91.7 million monthly active users and this number has grown by 8.4% year-over-year during the second quarter, up from 84.6 million in Q2 2020.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Business apps saw the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between Q1 2018 and Q2 2021, climbing nearly 42% over that time frame, Sensor Tower said. Meanwhile, consumers in Q2 2021 spent the most time in entertainment apps, with each of the top 100 seeing nearly 29 minutes of daily usage, on average.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Among games, shooter genre games — like PUBG Mobile and Garena Free Fire  — saw the most daily active users in Q2, as the top 50 games in this genre averaged 7.6 million daily active users. In terms of weekly actives, however, hypercasual games came out on top.

Sensor Tower also credits earlier increases in active users across apps to the Covid-19 pandemic as users who turned to mobile devices during lockdowns. But after a slight dip in Q3 2020, growth in active users has now returned to pre-pandemic levels, it said.

A startup called Lounge wants to reimagine work for the fully remote era where tools like Slack, Zoom, and Teams have fallen short in terms of helping companies build culture and creating relationships between employees who have never yet met in person — and now, it seems, never will. Instead of offering message boards and profiles that reduce a user’s identity to a photo and short bio, Lounge’s richer profiles aim to communicate more about the person, like their timezone, weather, location, team, and their participation in company events — like a steps or meditation challenge. It also offers tools that allow employees to get to know one another and connect on a more personal level, like drop-in audio chat and photo sharing.

The idea for Lounge comes from co-founders Alex Kwon, CEO, and Jason Jardim, CTO, who had previously worked together at Life360. During the pandemic, the two had been developing a family to-do list type of app while working remotely. While that project was scrapped, the co-founders learned a lot about remote work — and its pitfalls — during this time.

Kwon had never before worked remotely, he says, and found the experience lacking.

“Doing a once-a-day stand-up on a Zoom call and then just being chatty here and there with a one-hour delay on Slack was just way too lonely for me,” he explains.

He said it lacked the same magical spark you get from having real conversations with co-workers, which can also often lead to new ideas. That type of in-person collaboration is one key reason why many companies want their staff back in the office, pandemic or not.

But Kwon believes in-person is not the only way to introduce camaraderie among a team and grow a company’s culture.

“People have been [forming] relationships online ever since the origin of the internet,” he says. “People meet in games and get married online in World of Warcraft. And the majority of my friends now have met their significant others on dating apps. And where do they start? Online.”

So if friendship and love can happen online, Kwon argues, then work-related camaraderie can, too.

Image Credits: Lounge

The co-founders began experimenting with ways to feel more connected, including at one point, a 24/7 Zoom call so they could just chat as inspiration struck. But that felt too invasive and kids were often interrupting. Always-on audio had a similar problem. This ultimately led to the development of a simple app that allowed them to quickly connect over audio chats with just a tap, but while respecting each other’s privacy.

The success of this app to solve their own remote work issues led them to scrap their to-do list startup idea and work on Lounge instead.

Today, Lounge presents employees as visualizations of virtual desks which are grouped by teams, projects, or even by hobby or interests. That way, it’s easy to see who’s working on what, similar to how company org charts would work. But the desks offer a more personalized experience. The visualizations reflect the person’s time zone and even their weather, by including little windows that let you see if it’s nighttime or daytime, for instance. You’ll also see the person’s profile photo and other data — like the steps they’ve taken a company-wide challenge.

Image Credits: Lounge

In addition to the employees’ own desks, Lounge also introduces the concepts of multi-person “rooms.” Unlike Slack channels focused only on topics or projects, Rooms can be designed to serve almost any purpose. They can even represent a virtual version of what in traditional offices would have been a physical space. You may join rooms for townhall meetings or whiteboard sessions or even hang out virtually with fellow teammates in a public room like the company cafeteria, for example.

Rooms can be locked or unlocked. If you’re heads-down on a project, you don’t have to respond to your visitors — you can lock the room instead. Visitors can then leave a private DM by typing into the chat, as you would with Slack. But if a room is open, you can click to engage with the co-worker synchronously over audio. This is the virtual version of walking up to someone’s desk and saying hi, except now you’re using an online tool to do so. The other person will hear your greeting then unmute themselves to respond and have an audio conversation.

“Think of it as a combination of Zoom calls and Slack,” says Kwon.

Image Credits: Lounge

Lounge is also working on a photo-sharing feature, inspired by Kwon’s earlier startup Oneminute, which allows people to snap and share random photos that would then appear on their virtual desks for a time and in other places in the app. The idea here is to give people a sense of what you’re up to or to share something more personal — like a photo of your dog or a weekend hobby. This is something employees already do in Slack channels today. But now they could contribute to an ongoing stream of shared photos that could help new hires learn about their teammates and find reasons to start chatting with them.

The startup has been in private beta with select customers since April but has hundreds of signups on its waitlist. So far, it’s been targeting smaller teams under 20 employees. Today, Lounge is launching into an open beta, with apps for Mac, web, and iOS being prioritized.

Lounge has raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Unusual Ventures, Hustle Fund, Translink, Unpopular Ventures, and other angels.

Facebook today provided an update on how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its ad business. The company had already warned investors during its second quarter earnings that it expected to feel an even more significant impact in its ad targeting business by Q3. This morning, it reiterated that point, but also noted that it had been underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 15%, which had led advertisers to believe the impact was even worse than they had expected.

According to Facebook’s announcement published to its business blog, this exact percentage could vary broadly among individual advertisers. But it said the real-world conversions, including things like sales and app installs, are likely higher than what advertisers are seeing when using Facebook’s analytics.

Facebook’s stock has dropped by nearly 4% on this news, as of the time of writing.

This is not the first time Facebook has shared misleading metrics. In the past, however, it had inflated its video ad metrics and didn’t quickly act to correct the problem, leading to a class-action lawsuit. In this case, however, the issue with the metrics isn’t making Facebook look better than it is, but worse. The company noted it’s been hearing from its advertising community that they are seeing a larger-than-planned impact to their ad investments on the network, raising concerns.

Facebook offered advertisers a few tips to help them better understand a campaign’s impact and performance in this new era. It suggested waiting a minimum of 72 hours or the full length of the optimization window before evaluating performance rather than making assessments on a daily basis, as before. It also said advertisers should analyze reporting at the campaign level, when possible, as some estimated conversations are reported with a delay. And it suggested advertisers choose web events (like a purchase or sign-up) that are most aligned with their core business, among other things.

To address the issues with improving its measurements, Facebook said it’s working to improve its conversion modeling, accelerating its investments to address reporting gaps, launching new capabilities to track web conversions, and extending its ability to measure in-app conversions in apps that have already been installed. The company said it would work quickly to fix bugs, including one that recently had led to underreporting of approximately 10%, which was previously shared with advertisers.

The company in August explained how it’s been working to adapt its personalized ads business in light of both Apple and Google’s privacy changes and the new regulatory landscape, but those efforts will take time, it said.

Outside of the ad tech updates themselves, Facebook has also been working on new products that would allow advertisers to better position themselves in front of consumers browsing Facebook’s apps. Just last week, for instance, it revamped its business tool lineup with the introduction of new features and expansions of smaller tests that would offer businesses more ways to be discovered. One such test in the U.S. would direct consumers to other businesses and topics directly underneath news feed posts. It also now allows businesses to add WhatsApp buttons to their Instagram profiles and create ads that send Instagram users to WhatsApp business chats.

Facebook has been warning advertisers for some time that Apple’s new privacy features, which allow mobile users to opt out of being tracked across their iOS apps, would cause issues for the way its ad targeting business typically operated. And it repeatedly argued that Apple’s changes would impact small businesses that relied on Facebook ads to reach their customers. When the changes went into effect, Facebook’s concerns were validated as studies found very few consumers are opting into tracking on iOS.