Can Fitbit outrun the fad? It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH MONDAY, AUGUST 29 2016 By Darrell Etherington The Daily Crunch 08/29/16 Fitbit forges on, mattresses clog up the mail and if you're not ready to bring a self-driving car to market, then what's wrong with you? All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 29, 2016. And I've got a surefire investment guarantee to pay you back tenfold, just hit me up on Instagram. 1. Last wearable co. standing? The wearable hype cycle has mostly deflated in the last year or so, and a lot of consolidation means there are relatively few big-name players dedicated to wearable hardware anymore. Fitbit remains, however, and it debuted two new devices today. These induce the Charge 2 and an all-new Flex, both of which are modular for flexibility in wear options. Brian took the Fitbit Charge 2 for a ride, judging it a decent upgrade, though not revolutionary. The question is, are dedicated wearables at the stage where all they have to do is tread water between generations to survive? 2. The Mattressing Will mattress stores even exist in 10 years? A new mail-order mattress startup has raised a decent Series A round to build its shippable foam hybrid mattress business, helping it play catch-up with industry leader Casper. But it's now just one in a crowd – a crowd which includes legacy follow-ons like Sealy, which introduced its Cocoon product specifically to take on the trend. Soon, mattresses with actual springs could become an endangered species – maybe I'll buy up a horde and sell them at a 300 percent markup when the mattresspocalypse comes. 3. Instascammers Where there are lots of people combined with ease of access, scammers will flock. Instagram has its fair share of rubes, and a particular type of scam, called "money flipping," has taken root. The scam involves scammers trying to get people to put money into so-called special investments with "guaranteed" large multiple returns. Scam as old as time, but a new platform to exploit, and one where you can use pictures of riches and excess as an additional hook for the gullible. SPONSORED CONTENT: Check Out The Disrupt SF 2016 Agenda We're excited to share the full agenda for TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Pokemon Go creator, John Hanke, HBO Silicon Valley's Mike Judge and Hyperloop One's Shervin Pishevar plus many more are set to speak! Get your tickets now! Learn More… 4. At the inclination point of the self-driving hype curve It's almost like a bell sounded somewhere – companies are busting out of the self-driving starting gate with surprising speed, and that includes Yandex (the Google of Russia), Baidu (the Google of China), and Google (the Google of Google). Google's new executive team behind its self-driving car subsidiary means business, which indicates it's edging closer to the consumer market, and both Baidu and Yandex are trying to follow their North American predecessor as closely as possible. 5. Is the smart home finally getting truly smart? The early days of the smart home were kind of brutal; complicated setup, complicated operation and complicated versions of devices that used to be simple. But there are signs that sanity is coming to this space, and Philips' new motion sensor is one. Another is the Logitech Pop, and both share a common goal: take away complexity by making control of smart things either dead simple or automatic. The key is reduced mental load, which is what smart homes are supposed to provide to begin with. 6. Signal is the Clinton campaign's comms platform of choice What do you do when Trump tells Russia to try to hack your campaign? For Hilary Clinton and her cohorts, the answer was Signal, a messaging app that the Clinton campaign adopted en masse following the DNC email archive hack. Signal is an iOS/Android messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption which is endorsed frequently by Edward Snowden as his personal messaging platform of choice. It's probably never happened, but the idea of Snowden sending Clinton an upside-down smiley emoji on Signal is wonderful to contemplate. 7. Square turns former foes into friends Square's business model is changing, and its go-to-market tactics are changing, too. The tech commerce company is partnering with Vend and TouchBistro, two POS platform providers that at one time would've been direct competitors for Square. Now, though, Square is going to be selling hardware, payment processing and credit capital products to TouchBistro and Vend customers –showing that a slight change in perspective can turn competitors into collaborators pretty quickly. Get more stories at techcrunch.com  Newest Jobs From CrunchBoard: UI/UX Designer at FilmFreeway (Anywhere / Remote / Vancouver) Senior Programmer/Analyst #40387BR at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States) Web Developer #40389BR at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, United States) Director of Engineering @ Sauce Labs at Sauce Labs (San Francisco, CA, United States) Electrical Engineer at Piaggio Fast Forward (Boston, MA, United States) SEE MORE JOBS ON CRUNCHBOARD Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month View this email online in your browser If you do not want to receive this email or you would like to update your preferences click here. 410 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 © 2016 AOL Inc. All rights reserved.   Privacy Policy   Terms of Service

                                                           

WhatsApp, Uber and the user as a product: The TechCrunch Sunday Snapshot

THE DAILY CRUNCH SUNDAY, AUGUST 28 2016 By Darrell Etherington Sunday Snapshot 08/28/16 Sunday's daily email newsletter from TechCrunch zooms in on what's really important with an analysis of two or three key tech news stories from the past week. Please enjoy, and let us know what you think of the new format. How far will the "if you're not paying for it, then you're the product?" maxim extend? It's a question worth asking this week, as companies in very different industries made moves to productize their user base. WhatsApp finally let the other shoe drop, announcing it would begin sharing user data with Facebook and allowing businesses more positioning on the platform. And a startup called Spiri emerged out of stealth, offering free carpooling access to anyone who signs up to drive their fellow service users around. The WhatsApp example is novel only in that it flies against some of the core company principles set out by founder Jan Koum, who penned a blog post post-Facebook acquisition articulating how the messaging app's new owner wouldn't affect its stance on personal privacy. Koum was also one of the most outspoken supporters of Apple's encryption battle with the FBI, and WhatsApp was early to turn on end-to-end encryption for every message sent via its service. But the larger trend among free social services like WhatsApp is to monetize its users by selling their usage and identity data, either directly or indirectly via targeting, to advertisers – that's the primary source of revenue for parent co. Facebook, after all. Hence, the product for FB is the network platform on one end, but also the user data on the other – and the user data is the more directly lucrative of the two. Even the example of carpooling startup Spiri isn't entirely unheard of. Siri will be using service members as its core labor force – essentially, when it launches in 2017, Spiri will be running an UberPOOL equivalent where a percentage of the passengers actually drive the cars themselves, so it's more an evolution of an existing model where the compensation is essentially free access to vehicles, instead of actual monetary compensation. But Spiri told me one more key thing about their service – they're making their own electric cars specifically for the startup's use, and using human drivers is only the first step: Eventually, Spiri hopes to automate the vehicles, resulting in a driverless network of carpool vehicles. And this is where the "you're the product" adage takes on even more potential significance. With Uber, Ford, Google, GM, Spiri and who knows how many other companies all aggressively pursuing plans to field fleets of driverless vehicles that can provide on-demand rides, there's no question that there will be downward price pressure. Uber is already saying its self-driving car rides will be lower cost than those with human drivers, and Spiri claims prices in line with bus fares for its eventual offering. SPONSORED CONTENT: Pokemon Go's John Hanke At Disrupt SF 2016 We're proud to announce that John Hanke will be joining us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 to tell us all about it. How it came together, what it was like to suddenly have the biggest mobile game in the world in your hands, and where it's going from here. Learn More… The list of companies working on self-driving fleets designed for use as a service is big and growing, and includes companies like Google who are essentially the reason for the existence of the 'user as product' maxim to begin with. There's reason to believe they're already looking at the particulars of an eventual business model, too – a hire just last week makes it seem like they've hit the point where they need business acumen over technical expertise at the top of the org. Self-driving taxi networks aren't here yet, but you already see companies competing on price, or eat least anticipating the need to do so. And autonomous cars also provide a medium similar to Facebook in terms of captive attention for advertising. Since you're literally contained within and surround by it, and just killing time en route to somewhere else, it's almost like a physical manifestation of Facebook, in fact. It's hard not to see a future where we're paying little to nothing for getting around – but there's no getting around the fact that we'll still be paying, one way or another. Get the context: Ford's self-driving car plan detailed You're not just the product, you're the ads Uber's self-driving cars will give cheaper rides than human drivers The Facebook Epoch Get more stories at techcrunch.com  Newest Jobs From CrunchBoard: UI/UX Designer at FilmFreeway (Anywhere / Remote / Vancouver) Senior Programmer/Analyst #40387BR at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States) Web Developer #40389BR at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, United States) Director of Engineering @ Sauce Labs at Sauce Labs (San Francisco, CA, United States) Electrical Engineer at Piaggio Fast Forward (Boston, MA, United States) SEE MORE JOBS ON CRUNCHBOARD Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month View this email online in your browser If you do not want to receive this email or you would like to update your preferences click here. 410 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 © 2016 AOL Inc. 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