Author : zebethcontrol

Trouble brews at Arrival, TuSimple ousts its CEO and Cruise expands in San Francisco • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Arrival, The Station, TransportationNo Comments

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Too much news, so let’s just jump in. Please email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec Micromobbin’ So much of the conversation surrounding shared micromobility in cities has a negative valence. Coverage often focuses scooter crashes, the devices parked haphazardly on the sidewalk and the congestion of too many scooter operators. But these fail to point out the environmental and economic benefits micromobility bring to cities. For example, Lime recently gave its scooter data to German research institute Fraunhofer ISI, and the organization found that shared e-scooters help reduce carbon emissions within city transportation networks. The researchers surveyed Lime riders in spring 2022 across Stockholm, Paris, Melbourne, Berlin, Seattle and Dusseldorf and found that in each city, if shared scooters and bikes hadn’t been available, a significant number of riders would have taken their most recent trips via car, taxi or ride-hail. The researchers also looked at a lifecycle analysis of Lime’s latest Gen4 e-bikes and e-scooters to measure the service’s carbon footprint from cradle to grave and found that shared micromobility reduces more carbon emissions that it emits. I also mentioned the economic impact from shared micromobility. Two separate reports from Voi and Neuron show that the availability of e-scooters and e-bikes has improved accessibility to high streets and main shopping areas, which have been suffering since the pandemic, and had a positive impact on spending in several cities. The Voi study, which was done by economic consultancy firm Volterra, focused on certain cities in the UK and found an expected increase in retail and food and beverage spend to total £37 million, which would otherwise have been spent online or at out-of-town retail parks. This boost is expected to help support up to 1,400 jobs. Furthermore, the study found that e-scooter operations could lead to a £1.2bn boost for the studied trial areas struggling high streets if introduced permanently as a result of increased food and beverage purchases alone. Neuron’s study looked at the impact of e-scooters on Brisbane, Australia and found that 66.4% of trips resulted in a purchase. Of these, 42.2% of riders made a food and beverage purchase, 32.5% bought something in retail, and 17.9% visited a gym, movie or event. The average spend for each rider trip was $61.05. In 2021 to 2022, Neuron estimates its service contributed $116.6 million in direct, indirect and enabled economic activity towards Brisbane’s economy. Queensland Economic Advocacy Solutions supported these findings and found Neuron’s estimated economic contribution to Brisbane’s economy could rise to $160.5 million by 2026 to 2027. You’re reading an abbreviated version of Micromobbin’. Subscribe for free to the newsletter and you’ll get a lot more. Deal of the week This week we’re just compiling a list of deals that got my attention this week. Let’s jump in: Aventon received backing from Sequoia China, bringing the e-bike maker’s post-money valuation up to $590, from $200 million eight months ago. Miles Mobility, a German startup, acquired UMI Urban Mobility International GmbH from Volkswagen Passenger Cars and with it the WeShare car-sharing business. Neither party disclosed the financial terms of the deal. Miles said it plans to integrate WeShare’s 2,000 VW-brand electric vehicles into its fleet. It also plans to order more than 10,000 all-electric vehicles from the Audi, Seat/Cupra and Volkswagen Passenger Cars brands, which are scheduled for delivery in 2023. Newtrul, which describes itself as the Expedia for freight booking, raised $5.3 million in a round led by SignalFire and Flex Capital as well as previously unannounced investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Crowley, Oren Zaslansky, CEO of Flock Freight, John Larkin, and Brad Hollister. Volocopter, a German startup building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, has secured $182 million for the second signing of its Series E round. That’s on top of the $170 million Volocopter raised for the same round in March at a $1.87 billion post-money valuation. Want more deals? A whole list of them were in the subscription version this week. Subscribe for free here. Notable reads and other tidbits Autonomous vehicles Argo AI’s lidar unit, an 80-person team and the lidar tech they developed, is being shopped around by Ford and VW. The two automakers, which plowed $3.6 billion into Argo AI and then abruptly pulled support and shut it down, are looking to squeeze any remaining value out of the AV company. Aurora said in its Q3 earnings it will have enough money to continue to develop its autonomous vehicle technology until its commercial launch in mid-2024 — an effort to assuage shareholders amid a tightening capital market and a week after competitor Argo AI suddenly shut down. But wait! Aurora said it will have to go raise capital; the company didn’t share when that will need to happen. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt tweeted that its driverless robotaxi service is expanding to most of San Francisco. This expanded area is only available to employees for now. Waymo also expanded its robotaxi service in downtown Phoenix to now include pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. (Technically, it’s to the 44th Street Sky Train station, which is the outermost stop on the airport train and brings people directly to terminals) Waymo’s airport rides, which are only open to the “trusted tester” program for now, will initially use a human safety operator. XPeng received a permit to begin testing its G9 electric SUV as an autonomous vehicle on public roads in Guangzhou. The company will begin testing a small fleet

After laying off half of its staff, Twitter might be asking some employees to come back • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Apps, elon buys twitter, Layoffs, TwitterNo Comments

Twitter is reaching out to some employees to come back after it engaged in a mass layoff last week, according to multiple reports. The company’s new owner Elon Musk laid off 3,700 people from Twitter — almost half of its staff — after he completed the takeover. A Bloomberg report cited sources saying that the company asked some folks to return as they were laid off “by mistake.” It also noted it was calling some other employees back as they were critical for building features for the platform Musk envisions. In addition to this, several posts on the anonymous app Blind also indicated that Twitter might have called a few employees back. Casey Newton also reported in a thread that on internal slack, remaining employees were asked to make a list of potential candidates that could be called back. From Twitter Slack: “sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4PM PST Sunday. — Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 6, 2022 The company had dismissed people across multiple departments including human rights, accessibility, machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability, advertising, marketing, communications, engineering, and curation. So it is not surprising that it realized some of those folks might be critical to keep the platform running smoothly and working on new features. Within weeks of taking over the company, Musk has promised a bunch of new features like revamped verification process and a new Twitter Blue experience priced at $8. The Tesla CEO has also set very tight deadlines for these feature rollouts. With a ton of people laid off across functions, it might be tough for the remaining employees to get things done in time. Last week, a bunch of former Twitter employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company for not giving them adequate notice before dismissing them from their jobs. The case alleged Twitter of violating worker protection laws like the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act — both require 60 days of advance notice before a mass layoff. Job cuts haven’t been the only chaotic thing at Twitter after the Musk takeover. The product rollout has also been a mess. Over the weekend, several folks received notifications on their iOS device that the company is rolling out the blue checkmark to people who are ready to pay $7.99 a month. However, Esther Crawford, a product lead at Twitter clarified that these notifications were just a part of a test. Over the weekend, Twitter reportedly shelved the plan of rolling out the new verification system until after Tuesday’s midterms elections in the US. Twitter didn’t comment on the story, but maybe because the whole communication staff was laid off. You can contact this reporter on Signal and WhatsApp at +91 816-951-8403 or im@ivanmehta.com by email.

Devialet launches a high-end portable speaker • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in audio, Devialet, Devialet Mania, Gadgets, Speaker, StartupsNo Comments

When you say portable speakers, most people think about cheap Bluetooth speakers that you can easily put in your backpack when you’re going to the park. But Devialet has something different in mind with the Devialet Mania. The French high-end speaker maker wants to make the most luxurious and best sounding portable speaker around. The Devialet Mania costs $790 (€790) and is available today. “We are launching a new product, the Devialet Mania. And it represents the end of a long process. We started with amps, then there were the Phantom speakers, the Gemini earbuds and the Dione soundbar,” Devialet CEO Franck Lebouchard told me. “We are entering a new market with this portable speaker.” When Devialet decided to build a portable speaker four years ago, the concept was quite simple. Devialet wanted to design a speaker that works on battery, but a hi-fi speaker. “Hi-fi means a lot of things. It means great sound quality of course. Hi-fi also means stereo sound or at least stereo rendering,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania is a spherical speaker with no front or back. There is a handle at the top of the device that invites users to pick it up and carry it around. But you won’t put it in your backpack to go to the park as it weighs 2.3kg (around 5 pounds). You can take it with you when you go on vacation, but it has mostly been designed to carry around the house. Image Credits: ZebethMedia When you start playing music, the first thing that you are going to notice are the two woofers that are set up in a ‘push-push’ configuration to avoid unwanted vibrations. At the top of the device, there are four full-range speakers each pointing in a different direction. When you put the Devialet Mania on a table in the middle of the room, the full-range speakers alternatively broadcast the left channel or the right channel (clockwise: left, right, left, right). This way, wherever you sit, you mostly hear sound from the two full-range speakers that are in front of you — and you get stereo sound. There are four microphones in the device as well as an accelerometer. The Devialet Mania detects when it has been moved to a new location. Thanks to its built-in microphones, it can also detect when it’s next to a wall. In that case, the Devialet Mania determines the front and back of the device. The two full-range speakers on the left of the device broadcast the left channel, while the two speakers on the right broadcast the right channel. Using microphones to actively adapt the sound of the speaker was one of the selling points of Apple’s original HomePod. But Devialet insists on sound quality as well, such as its SAM proprietary technology (Speaker Active Matching). “We are the only ones that combine portable, hi-fi and automatic calibration,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania works with Devialet’s own app and features both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. On Wi-Fi, it supports AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. The battery is supposed to last 10 hours at a normal volume. There are some built-in buttons that let you pause the music, change the volume, activate Bluetooth and more. There’s a single USB-C port on the device for charging. And because the Devialet Mania has microphones, the company is integrating Amazon Alexa for the first time. You can disable the feature entirely with a physical slider button near the USB-C port. In addition to the base model that comes in black or white, there’s a $990 (€990) ‘Opéra de Paris’ model with gold-plated finishes and an optional docking station — the base can also be purchased separately. “If we want to become a global player in the audio industry, we need to have a product in each major segment of the audio market — wireless earbuds, soundbars and portable speakers,” Lebouchard said. According to him, portable speakers and soundbars each generate €6 billion in sales every year. Image Credits: Devialet As for the company’s older products, Devialet released an update to its Phantom speakers in January 2021 with newer components and a matte finish. “With Phantom, we release a big update every couple of years,” Lebouchard said. When it comes to amplifiers, the Expert Pro was the company’s first product but it hasn’t been updated in a while. “Amps aren’t a priority for us because it’s a very small market. But the Expert is an important product for our brand, for audiophile enthusiasts. We want to make the best amplifier in the world because we can’t say that we are the company with the best sound in the world without selling the best amplifier in the world,” Lebouchard said. So I guess it means “stay tuned.” Over the past year and a half, Devialet has shipped wireless earbuds, a soundbar and a portable speaker. Lebouchard told me that there’s one missing product in the lineup — and it’s headphones. But don’t hold your breath for Devialet headphones as the company is not sure it would be a strategic move. “When you go outside, people moved on from headphones to wireless earbuds,” Lebouchard said. Image Credits: ZebethMedia

After 40 million app downloads, PhotoRoom raises $19 million • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Apps, Generative AI, photo app, photo editing, PhotoRoom, StartupsNo Comments

French startup PhotoRoom has raised a $19 million Series A funding round. The company develops a popular photo editing app for e-commerce vendors and small businesses. In particular, it helps you remove the background behind objects you are about to sell so that your photos look more professional. Balderton Capital is leading the Series A round with angels from Facebook, Hugging Face and Disney+ also participating. Existing investor Adjacent is also putting more money in the company. PhotoRoom isn’t the only app that helps you remove photo backgrounds. Another popular app in the “Graphics & Design” category on the App Store is Pixelcut. More generic apps, such as Picsart also have background removal features. But PhotoRoom has focused on one niche in particular — small businesses reselling objects on eBay, Poshmark or Depop. In just a few taps, these marketplace experts can process a batch of photos and create images that are ready to be used. It can help them save a lot of time and sell more products. Behind the scenes, PhotoRoom uses deep learning to identify different objects and elements on a photo. A flat photo becomes a multi-layer images, which means that users can delete the photo background, blur it or replace it with something else entirely. The same technology can be used to retouch image and remove unwanted objects. PhotoRoom has a large library of background templates and helps you export images in different formats with each platform constraints in mind. And it’s been working remarkably well as the company managed to attract 40 million downloads on iOS and Android. There are 7 million monthly active users and hundreds of thousands of users pay a subscription fee to unlock all the features in the app. It currently costs $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year. Up next, PhotoRoom wants to bring generative AI to its app, starting with Stable Diffusion. That’s why it is raising money as the company has been profitable with its current team. “Until now, we grabbed an object and we erased the background. But then users have been looking for a background to put the object back in front of a template,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. With a text prompt, PhotoRoom will generate a marketing product photo based on your object. The feature will be available in beta for some users at first. It will be rolled out to all users progressively. “By focusing intently on user needs, Matthieu and Eliot have created a product that stands out from the rest. The importance of online photography is immense and PhotoRoom has both the traction and the ambition to become a market leader,” Balderton Capital partner Bernard Liautaud said in a statement. Image Credits: PhotoRoom

Amazon introduces a $7.3 annual Prime Video subscription tier in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon Prime Video, Apps, india, Media & Entertainment, prime videoNo Comments

Amazon has introduced a new price tier for Prime Video in India, making the on-demand video streaming service even more affordable as it races to win more customers in the South Asian market where it competes with giants including Disney’s Hotstar and Netflix. The e-commerce group said it will offer the yearly subscription to Prime Video Mobile Edition, an affordable tier it introduced last year, at 599 Indian rupees, or $7.3. At this price, it’s the cheapest way to subscribe to Amazon’s on-demand video streaming service in the country. Prime Video Mobile Edition limits viewing to mobile devices and caps the video resolution at standard definition. “India is one of our fastest growing and most engaged locales worldwide. Our success in the country can be attributed to innovations that are focused on creating an exceptional entertainment experience for customers,” said Kelly Day, VP of International at Prime Video, in a statement. “In fact, India is turning into an innovation hub for Prime Video. An initiative like Prime Video Mobile Edition, that had its genesis in India, is now being rolled out across multiple countries in Latin America and South East Asia. We are confident that the new Prime Video Mobile Edition annual plan will further help accelerate the growth of our India business and give an even larger customer base access to the high-quality content on the service. With this launch we look forward to entertaining every Indian with our popular on-demand entertainment content and live sports.” (More to follow)

Apple warns of lower iPhone 14 Pro models shipment due to Covid-19 restrictions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in Apple, Gadgets, Hardware, iphone 14, iPhone 14 ProNo Comments

Apple warned investors and customers on Sunday that it expects to ship fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models as the world’s most valuable tech firm grapples with ongoing Covid-19 restrictions in China. The company said it continues to see strong demand for the pro models of the new iPhone 14 lineup, but has slashed its earlier shipment estimates. “The facility [located in Zhengzhou, China] is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity. As we have done throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we are prioritizing the health and safety of the workers in our supply chain,” the company said in a blog post. (More to follow)

Twitter said to delay verification check mark rollout until after US midterm elections • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in election security, Elon Musk, Social, Startups, Twitter, twitter blue, verificationNo Comments

Twitter is reportedly delaying the rollout of verification check marks to subscribers as the social network attempts to steer clear of possible impact to Tuesday’s midterm elections. The Elon Musk-owned social media company had planned to rollout the revamped version of its subscription service, Twitter Blue, on Monday. The firm started testing the new features on Saturday, according to an app update note. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The reported move to delay the rollout of verification badges comes just days before the U.S. midterm elections, with polls closing on November 8. The New York Times reports that the move was aimed at limiting the potential fallout of verified users impersonating political or government figures, such as President Biden, or news outlets claiming false results that may discourage others from voting. Jen Easterly, the director of CISA, the U.S. government agency tasked with overseeing election security and protecting voting infrastructure, said last week that the agency it found “no information credible or specific about efforts to disrupt or compromise,” but warned of the ongoing risks that disinformation campaigns sown by foreign actors aimed at undermining confidence in the elections system. Security experts like Chris Krebs, the former CISA director who was fired by President Trump for refuting false claims of election fraud, warned that Twitter’s new verification rules would be a “major risk” ahead of the midterm elections. At the time of writing, several verified users were impersonating Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, despite the risk of having their accounts suspended for impersonation. The revamped Twitter Blue, which will cost $7.99 a month in the U.S., includes a range of new features including the coveted blue check mark to anyone who subscribes as well as cuts down the number of ads served to them on the platform. Musk is betting on turning the subscription service into a major revenue source for Twitter, which he acquired last month for $44 billion. Musk financed $13 billion for the purchase from banks and needs to pay more than $1 billion a year in interest payments. The company began cutting costs earlier this week, laying off roughly half its workforce, or about 3,700 jobs. In a series of tweets earlier this weekend, Musk claimed the company’s revamped Twitter Blue “can beat” the ad-revenue YouTube offers to creators, and that he was also working on fixing the search functionality on Twitter. Twitter will soon allow users to attach long-form texts to tweets, he said. Twitter plans to roll out the revamped Twitter Blue to subscribers in many markets in the coming months. In response to a tweet, Musk said he is hopeful that Twitter Blue will roll out to users in India “in less than a month.”

How ButcherBox bootstrapped to $600M in revenue • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in ButcherBox, Commerce, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, food delivery, grass fed, Startups, sustainable foodNo Comments

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving. For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow. At the recent Creative Technologist conference organized by venture capital fund Baukunst, Salguero shared that the company has seen $600 million worth of revenue without taking a penny of external investment and talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way. A rocky start ButcherBox isn’t Salguero’s first rodeo. His first company was CustomMade.com, which raised $30 million in venture capital from First Round Capital, Google and Atlas Ventures in a series of funding rounds. But in spite of all the money it raised, the company wasn’t successful. “My experience was really bad. We lost everyone’s money, which I felt a lot of shame about,” Salguero recalls. “At the very end, I had diluted myself so much, I owned just 5.5% of the company. The business failed, and we ended up going bankrupt, losing everyone’s money.” After that, Salguero decided to walk a very different path with his next company, which he started after being confronted with a very personal problem. His wife has a thyroid condition, and in the process of doing an elimination diet to figure out what foods she might be intolerant to, they learned about grass-fed beef. However, this kind of meat was hard to find in the supermarkets in Boston. “While CustomMade was falling apart, I started calling farmers and asking them if I could buy a half-share of meat,” Salguero laughs. That’s a lot of meat, and he describes it as “basically two trash bags full of beef.” “I was meeting meat farmers in parking lots, buying a couple of trash bags full of meat — I’m sure that didn’t seem sketchy at all,” he said. “But it was too much meat for my freezer, so I ended up selling the excess meat to friends or people I was working for.” Some of his buyers repeatedly told him that it would be much better if the meat was delivered to their houses, and thus, the basic idea for ButcherBox was born. Meat in the mail “I got obsessed with the idea and started researching how you ship meat in the mail. I had no idea how to do it. But I’m a big believer in finding people who have done something before and then asking them for help. It skips a lot of the hard work,” Salguero explains. “I found the former head of operations of Omaha Steaks, which at the time was the big behemoth of meat in the mail. And he just said ‘Oh, yeah, my non-compete just ended. I’ll be glad to help you.’ He put all the pieces together at the beginning.” Then everything started happening all at once. Salguero was fired from CustomMade and even though he had aspirations of taking a 100 days off, going on a silent meditation retreat and recharging, he threw himself into building ButcherBox less than a week later. He hired an intern and launched a Kickstarter campaign in September of 2015, a decision made out of a desperation to never raise money again. Fundraising wouldn’t be necessary, he thought, as he wanted to do this as a hobby rather than as a big business. “I’m only going to put in $10,000 into this thing,” Salguero recalls deciding, adding that he vowed to keep things light and easy. “I gave equity to the Omaha Steaks guy, and I gave equity to the branding studio, which in retrospect was a mistake, because I had way too low of a valuation.” Mike Salguero, CEO at ButcherBox speaks at the Baukunst Creative Technologists conference. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia All aboard the rocket ship “We agree with vegetarians.” Mike Salguero, CEO, ButcherBox The company had a goal of $25,000 for the crowdfunding campaign, but it ended up raising eight times that amount in preorders. It soon converted a lot of the preorder customers into subscribers, and the rest is history. The company went from revenue of $275,000 in 2015 to $5 million in 2016, then $31 million in 2017 and kept growing. When COVID-19 hit, the meat-packing industry didn’t fare well, but ButcherBox’s revenue just kept growing as people started subscribing to home delivery services like there was no tomorrow. In 2019, the company had revenues of $225 million, but the pandemic tailwinds nearly doubled its top line to $440 million. In 2021, the company recorded $550 million, and this year, Salguero is optimistic his company will go past the $600 million mark. “This whole time, I’ve just been on a rocket ship,” Salguero says. Beyond the numbers, the company has continued to stay true to its original mission of trying to make a difference. ButcherBox became a certified B corp in January 2021, joining the ranks of other heart-forward companies such as Allbirds, Ben & Jerry’s, King Arthur Flour and Patagonia, and further fortifying its aspirations as a company that takes a stand. Growing without external investment Figuring out how you build and grow a company without external investment is an exercise in scrappiness, but Salguero’s team had a few tricks up its sleeve, starting with the Kickstarter campaign and a number of communities who cared deeply about how and what they eat. The company figured out how to growth-hack its way to success by tapping bloggers and nutritionists. “You said eat grass-fed beef,” the company would tell them and created an affiliate model to help incentivize them to promote its products. “We don’t have any money, so we can’t pay you up front, but we will pay you for every box that person

Cloudflare reaches $1B run rate, promises $5B in 5 years. Investors? Not impressed • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in cloudflare, earnings, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EnterpriseNo Comments

Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company, reported earnings on Thursday, reaching a significant milestone. With almost $254 million in revenue, the company is on a run rate of over $1 billion for the first time. Revenue, which was up 47% over the previous year, also beat the street’s estimate of $250.6 million. That win was offset by a third-quarter loss of $42.5 million, or 13 cents a share. Still, Cloudflare posted a much smaller loss than in the year-ago quarter when it reported losses of $107.3 million, or 34 cents a share, per MarketWatch. After earnings, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince announced that the company set a lofty goal to reach $5 billion in revenue organically within five years. “Even as we achieve $1 billion, we have penetrated less than 1% of our identified market for products we already have available today.” “That’s why we’re confident we’re on the path to organically achieve $5 billion in annualized revenue over the next five years,” Prince told analysts in the earnings call. Prince also pointed out how rare it is for a company to reach $1 billion in revenue. “Only 6% of public software companies achieved this milestone, so we’re proud to have crossed it, but nowhere close to finished,” Prince said. Per usual, the markets treated this news with a kick in the teeth, with the company’s stock down as much as 13% overnight Thursday and down over 18.5% by the close on Friday. But how realistic is the $5 billion goal, given its current situation and predicted revenue for 2023?

Puzzle Tales’ with new gameplay • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in Apps, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Netflix, Stranger ThingsNo Comments

Netflix is bringing the “Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales” game to its platform with new gameplay based on the content from Season 4 of the show. Users will be able to play as new characters features in Season 4 in this no-ads game as the company continues its push towards gaming. Users have to solve puzzles in this game to beat enemies like Demogorgons and other supernatural monsters. In the process, they can collect up to 50 versions of characters from the show. The company describes the game’s graphics as “nostalgic 1980s Saturday morning cartoon art style.” “Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales” was first released in 2021 and it was removed from the App Store and Play Store in August after Netflix acquired the game’s publisher for $72 million. At that time, the streaming service announced that it is working on revamping the game and moving it to Netflix exclusively. Users can download the updated game starting today using this link. This release of the title joins other Stranger Things games like “Stranger Things: 1984” and “Stranger Things 3: The Game.” The game also builds on Netflix’s efforts to let fans engage with the show in various ways. Earlier this year, the streaming company partnered with Reddit for Stranger Things-based customized avatars and teamed up with Spotify for personalized playlists. At ZebethMedia Disrupt, the company’s VP for gaming Mike Verdu said that Netflix is exploring avenues to get into cloud gaming. He added that the streaming giant is also opening its second gaming studio in California after establishing its first studio in Helsinki in August. The company also launched game handles that can be used across exclusive titles in September. While the company making a lot of efforts into making gaming a success, it hasn’t seen stellar results. According to a report from Apptopia published in August, Netflix games were only averaging 1.7 million daily users. During its Q3 2022 earnings, the company announced that it now has 223 million subscribers.