24 September 2020

LinkedIn launches Stories, plus Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams video integrations as part of wider redesign


With the employment market remaining sluggish as the world continues to struggle with Covid-19, a company that has built its popular businesses largely around recruitment is launching a redesign that pushes engagement in other ways as it waits for the job economy to pick up.

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned site now with 706 million registered users, where professionals network and look for work, is today taking the wraps off a new redesign of its desktop and mobile apps, its first in four years.

And within that, LinkedIn is introducing several new things. First and foremost, starting in the US and Canada and then expanding globally, LinkedIn is rolling out its own version of Stories — the popular, ephemeral video and photo narratives that have become a major engagement engine on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. It’s also updating its direct messaging service with several new features like video chat. And it’s rebuilt its search feature to net in a wider set of parameters.

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The message to LinkedIn’s user base is this: we can be useful in other ways.

LinkedIn has been, to be sure, working on ways to make itself and its job tools particularly relevant to people in the last eight months, which have been truly outside of everyone’s previous norms, with its own takes on helping connect people together. But it’s also come under fire for not necessarily acting fast enough when its hat as recruitment network hasn’t been used very well.

Today’s news, in a way, doesn’t draw a line under all that — indeed, LinkedIn will very much hope to continue being a recruitment go-to as it picks up, even if job posting has really slowed down of late — but it is the company’s demonstration of its other purposes.

“The effort didn’t start with Covid, but over the last few years we’ve tried to diversify, by bringing the social network and conversations aspects of our platform to the forefront,”  and Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn’s VP of product, in an interview.

Stories have been one of the most notable developments across all social media in recent years, so it’s not too much of a surprise to see LinkedIn also jumping on the bandwagon. To be clear, this isn’t the Stories effort it worked on a couple of years ago focused on building its credibility and profile with college students, but something completely different and aimed at all its users, just as Stories have evolved in the wider market to be used by everyone, not just young Snapchat users.

LinkedIn has ben testing this newer version for the last three months in a handful of countries — Brazil, Netherlands, UAE, Australia, and France — and the company said that “millions” of Stories have been shared in that time across hundreds of thousands of conversations.

As you would expect, the subjects focus more on work life, influencer types speaking to their LinkedIn audiences — the video equivalents, in other words, of the kind of content LinkedIn is already known for, but now in a more engaging, image-first format. For now, Prasad said that there are no ads in these, but the plan will be to bring in paid content eventually. In wider LinkedIn, advertising, along with premium subscriptions, sit alongside recruitment in LinkedIn’s business model, so that would make sense.

Messaging, meanwhile, has been one of the more popular services on LinkedIn, allowing for more private conversations between connections and would-be contacts. The site doesn’t disclose usage numbers but says that messages sent are up by 25% in the last year.

That will be something LinkedIn also hopes to boost, again with a turn to video. In this instance, it’s announcing integrating with Zoom, BlueJeans (disclaimer: owned by Verizon, which also owns us), and Microsoft’s Teams for video chats.

It’s good to see LinkedIn expanding outside of the Microsoft ecosystem to bring in tools that are already popular elsewhere, similar to how Facebook’s Workplace has done with its integrations. But I have to admit, I’m really surprised it’s taken LinkedIn so long to bring video chat into its messaging service, but better late than never.

Alongside that, it’s also bringing in the ability to recall, delete and edit messages (hear that, Twitter?); respond with emoji’s (already widely used in business communication thanks to them being a part of Slack and other collaboration tools, as well as smartphone keyboards); and tools that flag incendiary and other harassing content.

The search updates, finally, are one more way that LinkedIn is trying to improve how people engage across the whole of its platform. Results now will include not just people and companies, but jobs, courses, events and other content, “making it easier for members to find what they need, and also explore other aspects of LinkedIn they may not have known existed,” in the words of new CEO Ryan Roslansky.

Keywords will still be king, but if you search on a word like “Java,” he said, results will include not just people with that skill, but jobs, courses, groups and, yes, Stories, focused on it. 

The bigger design focus of the redesign, meanwhile, is best described as a shift to more “warmth.” That might seem like an odd term to associate with LinkedIn, and I’m frankly not sure how well a social networking site for professionals will wear it, but the company is shifting to less of the cold “LinkedIn Blue”, bigger lettering for more accessibility, and more images with less text.

We may still be in the knowledge economy, but LinkedIn’s new approach seems less intent on trying to remind you of that. Indeed as work and home life become one for many of us, so too is LinkedIn trying to cross that chasm itself.


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Facebook gives more details about its efforts against hate speech before Myanmar’s general election


About three weeks ago, Facebook announced it will increase its efforts against hate speech and misinformation in Myanmar before the country’s general election on November 8, 2020. Today, it gave some more details about what the company is doing to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation. This includes adding Burmese language warning screens to flag information rated false by third-party fact-checkers.

In November 2018, Facebook admitted it didn’t do enough to prevent its platform from being used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar.

This is an understatement, considering that Facebook has been accused by human rights groups, including the United Nations Human Rights Council, of enabling the spread of hate speech in Myanmar against Rohingya Muslims, the target of a brutally violent ethnic cleansing campaign. A 2018 investigation by The New York Times found that members of the military in Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, instigated genocide against Rohingya, and used Facebook, one of the country’s most widely used online services, as a tool to conduct a “systematic campaign” of hate speech against the minority group.

In its announcement several weeks ago, Facebook said it will expand its misinformation policy and remove information intended to “lead to voter suppression or damage the integrity of the electoral process” by working with three fact-checking partners in Myanmar — BOOM, AFP Fact Check and Fact Crescendo. It also said it would flag potentially misleading images and apply a message-forwarding limit it introduced in Sri Lanka in June 2019.

Facebook also shared that in the second quarter of 2020, it had taken action against 280,000 pieces of content in Myanmar that violated its Community Standards against hate speech, with 97.8% detected by its systems before being reported, up from the 51,000 pieces of content it took action against in the first quarter.

But, as TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas noted, “without greater visibility into the content Facebook’s platform is amplifying, including country specific factors such as whether hate speech posting is increasing in Myanmar as the election gets closer, it’s not possible to understand what volume of hate speech is passing under the radar of Facebook’s detection systems and reaching local eyeballs.”

Facebook’s latest announcement, posted today on its News Room, doesn’t answer those questions. Instead, the company gave some more information about its preparations for the Myanmar general election.

The company said it will use technology to identify “new words and phrases associated with hate speech” in the country, and either remove posts with those words or “reduce their distribution.”

It will also introduce Burmese language warning screens for misinformation identified as false by its third-party fact-checkers, make reliable information about the election and voting more visible, and promote “digital literacy training” in Myanmar through programs like an ongoing monthly television talk show called “Tea Talks” and introducing its social media analytics tool, CrowdTangle, to newsrooms.


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Why we must confront hard historical truths | Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Why we must confront hard historical truths | Hasan Kwame Jeffries

To move forward in the United States, we must look back and confront the difficult history that shaped widespread injustice. Revisiting a significant yet overlooked piece of the past, Hasan Kwame Jeffries emphasizes the need to weave historical context, no matter how painful, into our understanding of modern society -- so we can disrupt the continuum of injustices pitted against marginalized communities.

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Click this link to view the TED Talk

Airship acquires SMS commerce company ReplyBuy


Airship is announcing that it has acquired mobile commerce startup ReplyBuy.

The startup (which was a finalist at TechCrunch’s 1st and Future startup competition in 2016) works with customers like entertainment venues and professional and college sports teams to send messages and sell tickets to fans via SMS. It raised $4 million in funding from Sand Hill Angels, Kosinski Ventures, SEAG Ventures, Enspire Capital, MRTNZ Ventures and others, according to Crunchbase.

Airship, meanwhile, has been expanding its platform beyond push notifications to cover customer communication across SMS, email, mobile wallets and more. But CEO Brett Caine said this is the first time the company is moving into commerce.

While sports and concerts tickets might not be a booming market right now, Caine suggested that the company is actually seeing increased purchasing activity “in and around the Airship platform” as businesses try to drive more in-app purchases. He also suggested that both the COVID-19 pandemic and increased restrictions on mobile data collection and ad targeting are going to “accelerate direct-to-consumer motion by large brands.”

Airship isn’t disclosing the deal price, but Caine said the seven-person ReplyBuy team will be joining the company, with CEO Brandon O’Halloran becoming Airship’s general manager of commerce and CTO Anthony Saia leading the commerce engineering team.

“Nobody directly connects more brands to mobile consumers than Airship,” O’Halloran said in a statement. “Joining Airship offers ReplyBuy the opportunity to serve the global market with a more comprehensive solution across more industries, and provide more valuable mobile customer experiences.”

Caine added, “These are really key roles, demonstrating the importance, in our view, of extending commerce to the customer engagement experience.”

He also said that Airship will continue to support ReplyBuy as a standalone product, while also integrating and extending its capabilities to other areas of the Airship platform.

“This one-to-one commerce at scale is a key part of the ReplyBuy solution,” he said. “We’re going to bring it into all the digital channels that Airship powers [to create] a seamless, fast, easy experience around commerce.”


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India’s ShareChat raises $40 million, says its short-video platform Moj now reaches 80 million users


ShareChat, an Indian social network that focuses entirely on serving users in non-English languages, said on Thursday it has raised $40 million from a clutch of investors after the Indian startup added tens of millions of new users in recent months.

The five-year-old Bangalore-based startup said Dr. Pawan Munjal, chief executive and chairman of giant two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp, Ajay Shridhar Shriram, chairman of chemical manufacturing company DCM Shriram, and existing investors Twitter, SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, and India Quotient financed the new round of capital.

Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup’s new fundraise is part of its pre-Series E financing round. TechCrunch understands the startup is engaging with several major VC funds and corporate giants to raise more than $100 million in the next few months. ShareChat has raised about $264 million to date.

The new capital will help ShareChat better support creators on its platform, Sachdeva said. ShareChat launched the short-video app Moj in early July, days after New Delhi banned TikTok, which at the time had about 200 million users in India.

In the weeks following TikTok’s ban in India, scores of startups have launched short-video apps in the country. DailyHunt has launched Josh, and Times Internet’s MX Player has launched TakaTak. But Moj has clearly established dominance1 among short-form video apps.

ShareChat said Moj has amassed over 80 million monthly active users, who are spending about 34 minutes on the platform each day.

ShareChat’s marquee and eponymous app, which caters users in 15 Indian languages, itself has grown “exponentially.” The app has amassed 160 million monthly active users 2, up from 60 million during the same period last year. A user on an average spends about 31 minutes on the app each day, the startup said.

“ShareChat has grown phenomenally this calendar year,” said Sachdeva. The growth of ShareChat in the social media category is a rare success story for the Indian startup ecosystem.

“India could never have dreamt of having a homegrown social media platform, had ShareChat not embarked on the impossible in 2015. ShareChat’s success has given immense hope to India’s startup fraternity, and motivated entrepreneurs to take audacious bets in India’s internet ecosystem,” said Madhukar Sinha, Partner at India Quotient, one of the earliest backers of ShareChat.

In yet another move that is not very common among Indian startups, ShareChat announced earlier this week that it was adding $14 million to its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), taking the total to $35 million.

Sachdeva said that for a startup of ShareChat’s scale, it is crucial that its employees feel valued, because there are enough other giants in the market looking for similar talent. “Our biggest competitors are global peers from the U.S. and Beijing,” he said.

The new capital will also help the startup further invest in its AI prowess and build new products and establish deeper partnerships with music labels, Sachdeva said. TechCrunch reported earlier this year that ShareChat had quietly launched a fantasy sports app called Jeet11.

Sachdeva said Jeet11 is gaining good traction and the startup’s foray into fantasy sports and short-video app categories demonstrates how fast it moves.

ShareChat has also been working with advertisers as it solidifies its monetization avenues, he said. “The brands are loving the fact that they can engage very strongly with users,” he said.

The startup is also thinking about expanding outside of India, though such plans are in early stage, he said. A fraction of ShareChat’s users today already live outside of India. The app has attracted many users of Indian diaspora, he said.

“To our amazement, the first version of Sharechat app was created in just a few days of beanbags and redbull in our office. And five years later they have done the same with Moj. As a new era unfolds with Moj, we are yet again solidly behind this team to support them. We believe Moj is designed for bigger success and will succeed across India, and beyond India in the years to come,” said India Quotient’s Sinha.


1 Instagram reaches about 150 million monthly active users in India, but it’s unclear if more than half of the app’s userbase has embraced Reels yet.

2  Many players in the industry rely on mobile insight firm AppAnnie and Sensor Tower to track the performance of their apps, their portfolio startups’ apps, and those of their competitors. We often cite AppAnnie and Sensor Tower data, too.

According to AppAnnie, ShareChat had fewer than 20 million monthly active users in India last month. Startup founders and other tech executives who TechCrunch has spoken to say that AppAnnie’s data is usually very reliable, and I can tell you that most of the figures companies claim publicly match with what you see on AppAnnie’s dashboard.

But another thing I have heard from many startup founders is that AppAnnie’s data often misses the mark for apps that have a significant portion of their user base in smaller cities and towns — as is the case with ShareChat.

I asked Sachdeva about it, and he said that ShareChat and many other apps that are popular in smaller Indian cities have not integrated AppAnnie’s SDK into their apps. AppAnnie relies on developers integrating its SDK into their apps to be able to assess the performance of that app and others installed on the handset.

This would explain why AppAnnie estimates that WhatsApp, which claims to have over 400 million users in India and is also popular among users in smaller Indian cities and towns and villages, has about 330 million users.

The contrast between the numbers ShareChat has officially shared and what one of the most reliable and widely used third-party firms offers was too significant, and I thought I should mention this. (An industry executive shared AppAnnie’s figures with TechCrunch.)


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YouTube will add mail-in voting info box next to videos that discuss voting by mail


YouTube has been relatively quiet about its strategy to battle the flow of misinformation leading into the 2020 U.S. election, but the platform has a few new measures in store.

The video sharing site will begin attaching a box with vetted facts about mail-in voting on any videos that discuss the topic. The new mail-in voting info boxes will link out to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a bipartisan think tank.

YouTube first rolled these info panels out in 2018 and this year expanded them to address misinformation around COVID-19. The platform’s fact-checking info boxes resemble similarly unobtrusive info labels on Twitter and Facebook. While Twitter in particular has begun taking stronger action on election-related posts that break platform rules, social platforms have opted to broadly serve up contextual facts rather than targeting misinformation with more eye-catching warnings.

Example of YouTube COVID-19 info panel

YouTube is a little late to the party, but it will also add a few features encouraging users to register to vote. Searches about voter registration will soon point users to an info box at the top of the page leading them to state-specific resources like registration deadlines and how to check voter registration status.

Similarly, queries about “how to vote” will point YouTube users to vetted information from non-partisan third-party partners about state voting rules, requirements and deadlines. These searches will surface voting resources in both English and Spanish. The company will also begin surfacing new information in searches for federal candidates for Congress or the presidency.

Like Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook, YouTube is also launching its own set of original informational election videos that will package facts on voting in the U.S. The YouTube videos take a playful approach, spoofing popular video trends like cooking tutorials. YouTube will also add reminders during “key moments” for the 2020 election reminding users to register and telling them how and where to vote.


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UK launches COVID-19 exposure notification app for England and Wales


The last two regions of the UK now have an official coronavirus contacts tracing app, after the UK government pushed the button to launch the NHS COVID-19 app across England and Wales today.

Northern Ireland and Scotland launched their own official apps to automate coronavirus exposure notifications earlier this year. But the England and Wales app was delayed after a false start back in May. The key point is that the version that’s launched now has a completely different app architecture.

All three of the UK’s official coronavirus contacts tracing apps make use of smartphones’ Bluetooth radios to generate alerts of potential exposure to COVID-19 — based on estimating the proximity of the devices.

A very condensed version of how this works is that ephemeral IDs are exchanged by devices that come into close contact and stored locally on app users’ phones. If a person is subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19 they are able to notify the system, via their public health authority, which will broadcast the relevant (i.e. ‘risky’) IDs to all other devices.

Matching to see whether an app user has been exposed to any of the risky IDs also takes place locally — meaning exposure alerts are not centralized.

The use of this decentralized, privacy-preserving architecture for the NHS COVID-19 app is a major shift vs the original app which was being designed to centralize data with the public health authority.

However the government U-turned after a backlash over privacy and ongoing technical problems linked to trying to hack its way around iOS limits on background access to Bluetooth.

Switching the NHS COVID-19 app to a decentralized architecture has allowed it to plug into coronavirus exposure notification APIs developed by Apple and Google — resolving technical problems related to device detection which caused problems for the earlier version of the app.

In June, the government suggested there were issues with the APIs related to the reliability of estimating distance between devices. Asked about the reliability of the Bluetooth technology the app is used on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, health secretary Matt Hancock said: “What we know for absolute sure is that the app will not tell you to self isolate because you’ve been in close contact with someone unless you have been in close contact. The accuracy with which it does that is increasing all of the time — and we’ve been working very closely with Apple and with Google who’ve done a great job in working to make this happen and to ensure that accuracy is constantly improved.”

The health secretary described the app as “an important tool in addition to all the other tools that we have” — adding that one of the reasons he’d delayed the launch until now was because he didn’t want to release an app that wasn’t effective.

“Everybody who downloads the app will be helping to protect themselves, helping to protect their loves one, helping to protect their community — because the more people who download it the more effective it will be. And it will help to keep us safe,” Hancock went on.

“One of the things that we’ve learnt over the course of the pandemic is where people are likely to have close contacts and in fact the app that we’re launching today will help to find more of those close contacts,” he added.

The England and Wales app does have some of unique quirks — as the government has opted to pack in multiple features, rather than limiting it to only exposure notifications.

These bells & whistles include: risk alerts based on postcode district; a system of QR code check-in at venues (which are now required by law to display a QR code for app users to scan); a COVID-19 symptom checker and test booking feature — including the ability to get results through the app; and a timer for users who have been told to self-isolate to help them keep count of the number of days left before they can come out of quarantine, with pointers offered to “relevant advice”.

“[The app] helps you to easily go to the pub or a restaurant or hospitality venue because you can then click through on the QR code which automatically does the contact tracing that is now mandatory,” said Hancock explaining the thinking behind some of the extra features. “And it helps by explaining what the rules are and the risk in your area for people easily and straightforwardly to be able to answer questions and consult on the rules so it has a whole series of features.”

It remains to be seen whether it was sensible product design to bolt on all these extras — and QR code venue check-ins could carry a risk of confusing users. However the government’s logic appears to be that more features will encourage more people to download the app and thereby increase uptake and utility.

Once widespread, the mandatory venue QR codes will also effectively double as free ads for the app so that could help drive downloads.

More saliently, the Bluetooth exposure notification system depends on an effective testing regime and will therefore be useless in limiting the spread of COVID-19 if the government can’t improve coronavirus test turnaround times — which it has been struggling with in recent weeks, as major backlogs have built up.

Internet law expert, professor Lilian Edwards — who was on an ethics advisory panel for the earlier, now defunct version of the England & Wales app — made this point to BBC Radio 4’s World at One program yesterday.

“My main concern is not the app itself but the interaction with the testing schedule,” she said. The app only sends out proximity warnings to the contacts on upload of a positive test. The whole idea is to catch contacts before they develop symptoms in that seven-day window when they won’t be isolating. If tests are taking five to seven days to get back then by that time the contacts will have developed symptoms and should hopefully be isolating or reporting their symptoms themselves. So if we don’t speed up testing then the app is functionally useless.”


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Best New Apps Of 2020 So Far


The Google Play Store is home to over 2.9 million apps. While some are real gems, others are a dud. Luckily for Android users, we’ve compiled a list of the best new apps released in 2020. There’s news for iOS users, too as most of these apps are also available on the Apple App Store. […]

The post Best New Apps Of 2020 So Far appeared first on ALL TECH BUZZ.


Adobe’s ‘Liquid Mode’ uses AI to automatically redesign PDFs for mobile devices


We’ve probably all been there: You’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it… aaaand it’s a 50-page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your way through a document that’s clearly not meant for a screen that fits in your hand.

Given that the file format is approaching its 30th birthday, it makes sense that PDFs aren’t exactly built for modern mobile devices. But neither PDFs nor smartphones are going away anytime soon, so Adobe has been working on a way to make them play nicely together.

This morning Adobe is launching a feature it calls “Liquid Mode.” Liquid Mode taps Adobe’s AI engine, Sensei, to analyze a PDF and automatically rebuild it for mobile devices. It uses machine learning to chew through the PDF and try to work out what’s what — like the font changes that indicate a new section is starting, or how data is being displayed in a table — and reflow it all for smaller screens.

After a few months of quiet testing, Liquid Mode is being publicly rolled out in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader app for iOS and Android today, with plans to bring it to desktops later. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also tells me they’ve been working on an API that’ll allow similar functionality to be rolled into non-Adobe apps down the road.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, the app will try to determine if it’ll work with Liquid Mode; if so, the Liquid Mode button lights up. Tap the button and the file is sent to Adobe’s Document Cloud for processing. Once complete, users can tweak to their liking things like the font size and line spacing. Liquid Mode will use the headers/structure it detects to build a tappable table of contents where none existed before, allowing you to quickly hop from section to section. The whole thing is non-destructive, so nothing actually changes about the original PDF. Step back out of Liquid Mode and you’re back at the original, unmodified PDF. 

Image Credits: Adobe

We first heard about Adobe’s efforts here earlier this year; in an Extra Crunch interview back in January, Parasnis outlined Adobe’s plans to bring AI and machine learning into just about everything the company does. Parasnis tells me that Liquid Mode is just the first step in giving Sensei an understanding of documents. Later, he notes, they want users to be able to hand Sensei a 30-page PDF and have it return a summary just a few pages long.


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Japanese startup Nature launches Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the US and Canada


Nature, a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch of Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control with their smartphones or smart speakers multiple appliances that use an infrared remote, including air conditioners, TVs, robot vacuum cleaners and fans.

Nature claims that its Remo series is Japan’s top smart remote, with more than 200,000 units sold so far. The Remo 3, designed to be mounted on a wall, also has sensors for temperature, humidity, lighting and movement, allowing users to create customized settings for when they want devices to turn on or shut off. Remo 3’s app also has a GPS location feature, so appliances can turn on automatically as users get closer to their homes.

As COVID-19 forces people to spend more time at home than usual, many are embarking on home improvement projects.

Even though people may be reluctant to purchase new appliances because of the economic downturn, relatively inexpensive products like the Remo 3 may still attract buyers because it can help reduce energy consumed by devices they already own. The Remo 3 also adds another layer of functionality to smart speakers and before the pandemic, global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year, with 146.9 million units shipped. The Remo 3 is compatible with Amazon smart speakers like the Echo Dot, as well as Google Home and Apple HomePod speakers.

Nature founder and chief executive Haruumi Shiode told TechCrunch that Nature conducted a pilot with Kansai Electric, one of the largest utility providers in Japan, to prove that it can lower the amount of electricity used by air conditioners. He added that the pandemic actually accelerated sales of Nature Remo devices in Japan and prompted the company’s decision to launch in the U.S.

The COVID-19 pandemic made mass-producing the Remo 3 more challenging because Nature’s team was no longer able to make monthly trips to Shenzhen, Shiode said. But the Remo 3 is the sixth product Nature has launched so far, so it was able to figure out how to work with factories remotely on production and quality assurance.

“I read that since the pandemic started, 70% of Americans are tackling home improvement projects,” Shiode added. “Similarly, people around the world have been looking for ways to make their shelter-in-place less mundane and more convenient. With the Nature Remo 3, we hope to offer the same convenience and efficiencies to the American market as we have in Japan.”


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Top 20 iOS homescreen customization apps reach 5.7M installs after iOS 14 release


The iOS 14 homescreen customization trend is driving a new set of apps to the top of the App Store charts, and delivering record downloads for sources of inspiration, like Pinterest. According to new data from app store market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, installs of the top 20 homescreen customization apps reached 5.7 million total downloads worldwide in the first four days following the release of iOS 14 on September 16.

Remarkably, the three most-downloaded apps — Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, and Photo Widget — account for 95% of these 5.7 million downloads. That indicates that the rest of the app customization market today is much smaller. But this could still change over time if more apps embrace the trend and expand to include innovative and unique features.

Sensor Tower’s study on the homescreen customization market only focused on those apps that were used to create homescreen widgets or existed primarily to service them, like calendars, clocks, memos, and others.

To determine if the app offered homescreen customization tools, Sensor Tower analyzed the app metadata of all the apps that ranked at any point on the App Store after September 16, then manually reviewed those apps to confirm their functionality was homescreen customization related.

The report’s focus was also more on widget apps, rather than apps than helped users make custom icons or existing apps that added widget functionality, as Sensor Tower decided it wouldn’t be able to determine how many had done so based on their metadata. It’s also difficult to determine, in some cases, if an app with a larger purpose beyond widgets is moving up the charts simply because it has now added widgets.

The top 20 list, in order, includes the following:

Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, Photo Widget, Photobox Widget, MemoWidget, Home Photo Widget, Motivation Widget, Ermine, Date Today, Hey Weather, TimeDeck, Widgeridoo, Glimpse 2, Widget Wizard, Widget Web, Locket, ItemMemo, OMDZ, Clock Widget for Home Screen, and Photo Widgets.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Combined, the group has generated a collective $400,000 in consumer spending in four days — from September 17 through September 20. Widgetsmith dominated the group, accounting for $370,000 of that total, followed by an app called Date Today with close to $20,000, per Sensor Tower estimates. (We should note Widgetsmith’s figure comes in a bit lower than some of the other estimates that were floating around.)

Though Sensor Tower’s study had a narrower focus, there are signals that plenty of apps have benefitted from the customization craze beyond the widget makers themselves.

Design inspiration resource Pinterest, as noted above, saw record daily downloads. TuneTrack, now the No. 18 free (non-game) app on the U.S. App Store appears to be gathering steam in the absence of an official Spotify widget. Its app offers both Apple Music and Spotify widgets for showing off favorite music on your homescreen.

Sensor Tower says TuneTrack saw 552,000 installs between Sept. 17 and 20, for example — a figure up 1,840% from the prior week (9/10-9/13). The Motivation widget saw 431,000 installs, up 798%.

Meanwhile, design tool Procreate Pocket is now the No. 2 paid (non-game) app in the U.S., and PicsArt is No. 31 free app. An app that simplifies icon changing, Icon Changer+, is No. 40 on the Top Free Apps charts in the U.S., followed by an app called Shortcuts, which is not the same Shortcuts app from Apple. (And surprisingly being allowed to use the same name!)

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Because there’s not a specific category for homescreen customization tools, some of the new apps can be found in the Productivity category, while others categorized themselves as Utility apps or something else entirely. This makes it more difficult for a consumer who wants to compare the rankings of all top apps offering homescreen customization functionality in one place.

Given that iOS 14 has effectively created an entire new category of apps, it’s possible that Apple would consider adding a customization category to the App Store in the future, if the trend continues long-term.

For now, however, Apple is addressing the discoverability issues with new App Store editorial content. A featured story on the App Store’s “Today” page, for example, is titled “How to Set Up Widgets,” and recommends a number of apps that have added widgets — like Todoist, Carrot Weather, Timepage, Apollo, Spark Mail, and others, in addition to Widgetsmith.

There are new widgets still arriving, as well, as developers roll out their iOS 14 updates. Fantastical, for example, just launched 12 homescreen widgets today.

What’s unfortunate is that Apple didn’t give its developer community enough time to prepare for launch day. The company announced iOS 14’s release with less than 24 hours’ notice and without the final version of Xcode available to developers. As a result, when users began to customize their homescreens, they may not have found all the widgets they would have wanted.

 

 

 

 


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