TRACED Act signed into law, putting robocallers on notice

The Pallone-Thrune TRACED Act, a bipartisan bit of legislation that should make life harder for the villains behind robocalls, was signed into law today by the president. It’s still possible to get things done in D.C. after all!

We’ve covered the TRACED Act several times previously, as robocalls are, in addition to being horribly annoying, a uniquely annoying high-tech threat. Using clever targeting and spoofing technology, scammers are placing millions of calls that at best irritate and at worst take advantage of the vulnerable.

The new law won’t end that practice overnight, but it does add some useful tools to regulators’ toolboxes. Here’s how I summarized the bill’s provisions earlier this month:

• Extends FCC’s statute of limitations on robocall offenses and increases potential fines
• Requires an FCC rulemaking helping protect consumers from spam calls and texts (this is already underway)
• Requires annual FCC report on robocall enforcement and allows for it to formally recommend legislation
• Requires adoption on a reasonable timeline of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for preventing call spoofing
• Prevents carriers from charging for the above service, and shields them from liability for reasonable mistakes
• Requires the attorney general to convene an interagency task force to look at prosecution of offenders
• Opens the door to Justice Department prosecution of offenders
• Establishes a handful of specific cutouts and studies to make sure the rules work and interested parties are giving feedback

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was effusive in his praise in a statement:

I applaud Congress for working in a bipartisan manner to combat illegal robocalls and malicious caller ID spoofing.  And I thank the President and Congress for the additional tools and flexibility that this law affords us.  Specifically, I am glad that the agency now has a longer statute of limitations during which we can pursue scammers and I welcome the removal of a previously-required warning we had to give to unlawful robocallers before imposing tough penalties.

And I thank the American people for never letting us forget how fed up they are with scam, spoofed robocalls.  It’s their voices that power our never-ceasing push to fight back against the scourge of robocalls and malicious spoofing.

The FCC is limited in what it can do, and even major fines like this $120 million one have had a negligible effect on the nefarious industry. “Like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon,” said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at the time.

Here’s hoping the TRACED Act amounts to more than a bigger spoon. We’ll find out as regulators and the mobile industry grow into their new capabilities and begin the long process of actually applying them to the problem. It may take months or more to see any real abatement, but at least we’re taking concrete steps.

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Google Pixel 4A renders include a headphone jack and hole-punch display

It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget might could potentially possibly conceivably look like.

Per renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, a vision of the Pixel  4A has appeared — or, a render, rather. The handset will no doubt be an important one for Google. After all, the 3A (pictured at top) helped the company recover from some lackluster sales last year. A couple of pieces jump out at first glance. The display appears to finally buck the company’s longtime notch dependency, in favor of a hole punch camera on the front.

Perhaps even more compelling, the device seems to hold the torch for the headphone jack. In 2020, that could well be a standout feature even among mid-range handsets. As the company eloquently put it around the time of the 3A’s release, “a lot of people have headphones.”

And here comes my last late #Christmas gift in form of your very first and early look at the #Google #Pixel4a!
360° video + gorgeous 5K renders + dimensions, on behalf of my Friends over @91mobiles -> https://t.co/rsvRkjVOln pic.twitter.com/sqG6J5knSR

— Steve H.McFly (@OnLeaks) December 28, 2019

Other notable features on the forthcoming devices include the addition of the squircle phone bump on the rear, a design element borrowed from the Pixel 4. Likely the handset will stick to a single camera, instead of adopting the flagship’s truly excellent dual-camera set up. Even so, Google’s been able to accomplish some solid imaging technology with just the one sensor, courtesy of clever ML software.

The display, too, will be slightly larger than its predecessor, bumping up one or two tenths of an inch. The handset is reportedly dropping around May, probably just in time for I/O 2020.

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Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show

Snapchat’s most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It’s a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories where they were being squandered to date.

Creating original in-house shows for its Discover section that can’t be copied could help Snapchat differentiate from the plethora of short-form video platforms out there ranging from YouTube to Facebook Watch to TikTok. Bitmoji TV could also up the quality of Discover, which still feels like a tabloid magazine rack full of scantly clad women, gross-out imagery, and other shocking content merely meant to catch the eye and draw a click.

With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly-scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceship to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies. The trailer Snapchat released previews an animation style reminiscent of Netflix’s Big Mouth.

TechCrunch asked Snap for more details, including how long episodes will be, how often they’ll be released, whether they’ll include ads, and if the company acquired anyone or brought on famous talent to produce the series. A Snap spokesperson declined to provide more details, but sent over this statement: “Bitmoji TV isn’t available in your network yet, but stay tuned for the global premiere soon!”

The Snapchat Show page for Bitmoji TV notes it is coming in February 2020. Users can visit here on mobile to subscribe to Bitmoji TV so it shows up prominently on their Discover page, or turn on notifications about its new content.

Snap realizes Bitmoji’s value

Snap has had a tough few years as many of its core features have been ruthlessly copied by the Facebook family of apps. Instagram Stories killed Snap’s growth for years and effectively stole the broadcast medium from its inventor. Facebook also ramped up it augmented reality selfie filters, added more ephemeral messaging features, and launched Watch as a competitor to Snapchat Discover.

Two years ago I wrote that Facebook was crazy not to be competing with Bitmoji too. Six months later we were first to report Facebook Avatars was in the works, and this year they launched as Messenger chat stickers in Australia with plans for a global release in 2019 or early 2020. But Facebook’s slow movement here, Google’s half-assed entry, and Twitter’s lack of an attempt have given Snapchat’s Bitmoji a massive headstart. And now Snap is finally leveraging it.

“TV” is actually a return to Bitmoji’s roots. The startup Bitstrips originally offered an app for customizing the face, hair, clothes, and more of your avatar and then creating comic strips for them to appear in. Snap acquired Bitstrips back in 2016 for just $64.2 million — a steal not far off from Facebook snatching Instagram for under a billion. The standalone Bitmoji app blew up as soon as Snapchat began offering the avatars as chat stickers. It had over 330 million downloads as of April according to Sensor Tower despite Snapchat now letting you create your avatar in its main app.

Eventually, Snap began expanding Bitmoji’s uses. In 2017 Bitmoji went 3D and you could start overlaying them as augmented reality characters on your Snaps. The next year Snap improved their graphics, then launched the Snap Kit developer platform and Bitmoji Kit. This allows apps to build atop Snapchat login and use your Bitmoji as a profile pic. Soon they were appearing as Fitbit smart watch faces, alongside your Venmo transaction, and on Snapchat-sold merchandise from t-shirts to mugs. It’s part of a wise strategy to beat copycats by allowing allies to use real thing rather than building their own knock-off. That’s fueled the “Snapback” comeback which has seen Snap’s share price climb out of the gutter at $5.79 at the start of 2019 to $16.09 now.

To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself

One of Snap smartest innovations was Bitmoji Stories — the ancestor to Bitmoji TV. These daily Stories let you tap frame-by-frame through short comic strip-style interactions starring your avatar. Occasionally Bitmoji Stories would include rudimentary animation, but most frames were still images with text bubbles. Bitmoji could once again drive a narrative, rather than just being a communication tool. Still, they seem underutilized.

In 2019, Snapchat wised up. Bitmoji have become nearly ubiquitous amongst teens and Snapchat’s 210 million daily users. They’re the Google or Kleenex of cartoonish personalized avatars. Their goofy nature is also a perfect fit for Snapchat, and a reason they’re tough for stiffer and older tech giants to convincingly copy.

In April, Snap announced its new games platform inside its messaging feature that let you play as your Bitmoji against friends’ avatars in games ranging from Mario Party ripoff Bitmoji Party to tennis, shoot-em ups, and cooking competitions. Snap injects ads into the games, making Bitmoji key to its efforts to monetize its central messaging use case. Last month it launched custom and branded clothing for Bitmoji, which could open opportunities to earn money selling premium outfits or showing off brand sponsorships.

To truly take advantage of Bitmoji’s unique popularity, though, Snap needed to build longer-form experiences with the avatars at the center that . Stickers and Stories and games were fun, but none felt like must-see content. With Bitmoji TV, Snap may have found a way to get users to drag their friends into the app. Since everyone sees their own Bitmoji as the star, the cartoons could be more compelling then ones with impersonal characters you might find elsewhere around the web.

But Bitmoji TV’s success will depend largely on the quality of the writing. If your avatar is constantly getting into funny, meme-worthy situations, you’ll keep coming back to watch. But Snap’s teen audience has a keen nose for inauthentic bullsh*t. If the Shows feel forced, too childish, or boring, Bitmoji TV will flop. Snap would be savvy to invest in great Hollywood talent to produce the episodes.

High quality Bitmoji TV shorts could rescue Snapchat Discover from its own mediocrity. There are a few strong brands like ESPN SportsCenter on the platform, and Snap has several original Shows with over 25 million unique viewers. It’s also greenlit additional seasons of Shows like Dead Girls Detective Agency and new biopic clips from Serena Williams and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Still, a scroll through the Discover and Shows sections reveals plenty of trashy clickbait that surely scares away premium advertisers.

Bitmoji TV could offer video that’s not only fun and snackable, but out of reach for competitors who don’t have a scaled avatar platform of their own. As with the recent launch of Snapchat Cameos, the company has realized that the most addictive experiences center on its users’ own faces. Snapchat turned the selfie into the future of communication. Bitmoji TV could make an animated recreation of your selfie into the future of content.

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Huawei reportedly got by with a lot of help from the Chinese government

For those following Huawei’s substantial rise over the past several years, it’ll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an important role in fostering the hardware maker. Even so, the actual numbers behind the ascent are still a bit jaw dropping. Huawei reportedly had “access to as much as $75 billion in state support,” according to a piece published by The Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day.

That massive figure is culled from poring over various forms, including grants and tax breaks. Huawei, for its part, isn’t denying any government support, but said in response that those it received were “small and non-material,” in line with the usual variety of grants awarded to tech startups and companies.

Per WSJ’s accounting of public records, Huawei got around $46 billion in loans and other support, coupled with $25 billion in tax cuts used to accelerate tech advances. There’s also a billion or two here and there for things like land discounts and grants. At very least, it seems China had a vested interest in the rise of a hardware company that could go head to head with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Certainly it’s not unheard of that a government would foster some growth in the form of grants, but there’s a clear question of how much. 

The phone maker’s alleged close ties to its government have been a major sticking point in its swift international expansion. Such notions have raised flags in the United States, where the company has been barred from provided mobile hardware for government bodies. Many leaders have also raised concerns over use of Huawei telecom equipment, as the company looks to be a linchpin in a global 5G rollout.

Due to such perception and central role in U.S./China trade tensions, it’s no surprise the company was quick to deny any such ties. Huawei has, of course, been hampered by a U.S. trade ban that has barred the use of U.S. originated hardware and software. A domestic push and patriotic ad campaign, however, have helped its sales figures in China, even as it has struggled to expand in other parts of the world.

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Cosmo and Google create a mobile Watch Party for the new season of ‘You’

The second season of the Penn Badgley romantic murder drama “You” launches on Netflix today — and along with it, a new project called Cosmopolitan Watch Party.

You can hit play on the Watch Party website at the same time as you hit play on each episode, kicking off an experience that runs alongside the show. Watch Party will show you content from Cosmo that’s tied to what you’re seeing on-screen, and it’s often drawn from interviews with the cast and crew.

Cosmopolitan Editor in Chief Jessica Pels said her publication created Watch Party with Google News Lab, a team that collaborates with newsrooms to create new experiences as part of the larger Google News Initiative. The idea was to respond to broader shifts in TV viewing, where “binge viewing is the thing, appointment viewing is not.”

She added, “As a viewer, if you don’t catch it in that moment, you feel like you’re left out of that conversation. That’s why we’re bringing the conversation to you.”

Pels was hesitant about revealing too many details about Watch Party content, since so much of it is tied to the twists and turns of the new season. But as an example, she said Watch Party could reveal that Badgley described “a certain song that he listens to when he’s trying to get into the headspace of this murderer, in order to get into this scene.”

Not everyone will embrace the idea of constantly looking at their phone while they watch Netflix, but Pels said Cosmopolitan’s traffic data suggests that plenty of viewers are doing it already. She also emphasized that it’s “all flat content” consisting of text and graphics, with no video or sound.

“You don’t want to be annoyingly distracted from the show,” she said, describing it as “true companion content” that you can check when you want and ignore otherwise.

Simon Rogers, data lead at Google News Lab, told me that Pels and her team were given access to exclusive Google Trends data for additional insight into which characters and cast members viewers were responding to. The News Lab also built a built custom content management system for Watch Party that could be used for similar experiences in the future.

Not that Pels has necessarily decided what the next Watch Party will be.

“I kind of want to leave ourselves open to the right partnership or the right next opportunity for how best to execute round two,” she said.

Original Content podcast: ‘You’ gives us obnoxious millennials and their creepy stalkers

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Daily Crunch: Travis Kalanick is leaving Uber’s board

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Uber founder Travis Kalanick is leaving the company’s board of directors

Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick will officially resign from the board as of December 31, to “focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors,” according to a company press release.

Kalanick, who was forced out as Uber CEO and eventually replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi, has been in the process of selling off his considerable ownership stake in the company. In fact, it looks like Kalanick has now sold all his remaining stock.

2. Plenty of Fish app was leaking users’ hidden names and postal codes

Dating app Plenty of Fish has pushed out a fix for its app after a security researcher found it was leaking information that users had set to “private” on their profiles. Before the fix, the app was silently returning users’ first names and postal ZIP codes, according to The App Analyst.

3. As DraftKings finds an exit, a reminder of what could have been

DraftKings, a betting service focused on fantasy sports, will go public via a reverse merger. Not too long ago DraftKings and its erstwhile rival FanDuel were ubiquitous on television; now the two companies are fractions of what they once were. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Gift Guide: 13 last-minute subscription gifts for the people you totally didn’t forget

It’s too late to order things online, and brick-and-mortar stores are either closed for the week or absolutely slammed. So what can you do? Subscriptions!

5. Fyre Festival meets Mr. Bone Saw

Connie Loizos looks at the controversy around the three-day-long MDL Beast Festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The event, promoted by a number of celebrities and social media influencers, aimed to promote the efforts of its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS).

6. A false start for foldables in 2019

A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Micro-angelo? This 3D-printed ‘David’ is just one millimeter tall

3D printing has proven itself useful in so many industries that it’s no longer necessary to show off, but some people just can’t help themselves. Case in point: this millimeter-tall rendition of Michelangelo’s famous “David” printed with copper using a newly developed technique.

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A false start for foldables in 2019

A year from now, this is likely to have all blown over. A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category.

How history remembers this particular debacle will depend on a number of different factors, the ultimate success of the category chief among them. If foldables do takeoff, the Galaxy Fold’s very public false start will be remembered as little more than a blip. There’s plenty of reasons to root for this — devices have seemingly hit the upper threshold of product footprint. If the trend toward larger screens continues, it’s going to take a clever form factor like this to accommodate that need. 

If foldables are relegated to the dustbin of history, however, the Fold misfire will take much of the heat. It’s clear that a trail of broken units will have little impact on Samsung’s bottom line. Two Galaxy Note 7 recalls were a testament to the hardware giant’s resilience in the public eye, after serving as a rounding error in the company’s bottom line that year. Sending some half-baked models to a handful of reviews wasn’t nearly as major of a mistake, but the category, much like the Fold itself, is in a fragile state.

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Robocall-crushing TRACED act passes Senate and heads to Oval Office

Somehow during all the partisan furor of the last few days, the Senate found a moment to vote some bipartisan legislation into law — presuming, of course, it survives the president’s desk. The TRACED act pushes carriers to kill robocalls before they ring, and gives the FCC some extra juice to pursue the wicked ones perpetrating them.

“We’re delighted the Senate acted quickly to pass this legislation to shutdown illegal robocalls,” wrote the bill’s co-sponsors in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement. “We’re working hard to help the American people get real relief from these relentless and illegal calls. We look forward to the President signing this overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation into law very soon.”

The House and Senate finally agree on something: Robocalls

Unlike many things called bipartisan, this one really is. Two different versions of the bill originated in the House and Senate and were passed individually with overwhelming majorities. The pertinent committees put their heads together and created a unified version of the bill they could both live with. Amazingly, that was just last month, and now the bill is off to the White House for the Executive signature.

You can read a summary of what the bill does here, but I’ll summarize further:

• Extends FCC’s statute of limitations on robocall offenses and increases potential fines
• Requires an FCC rulemaking helping protect consumers from spam calls and texts (this is already underway)
• Requires annual FCC report on robocall enforcement and allows for it to formally recommend legislation
• Requires adoption on a reasonable timeline of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for preventing call spoofing
• Prevents carriers from charging for the above service, and shields them from liability for reasonable mistakes
• Requires the Attorney General to convene an interagency task force to look at prosecution of offenders
• Opens the door to Justice Department prosecution of offenders
• Establishes a handful of specific cutouts and studies to make sure the rules work and interested parties are giving feedback

Overall it seems like a good bill and quite focused on this specific issue — no weird pork attached. Here’s hoping the TRACED act is signed into law quickly.

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Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or it augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath.

“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us” says Facebook’s VP of hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

Eye OS

By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of its gadgets. Facebook tells TechCrunch the focus of this work is on what’s needed for AR glasses. It’s exploring all the options right now including potentially partnering with other companies or building a custom OS specifically for augmented reality.

One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.

Facebook has always been sore about not owning an operating system and having to depend on the courtesy of some of its biggest rivals. Those include Apple, who’s CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly thrown jabs at Facebook and its chief Mark Zuckerberg over privacy and data collection. In a previous hedge against the power of the mobile operating systems, Facebook worked on a secret project codenamed Oxygen circa 2013 that would help it distribute Android apps from outside the Google Play store if necessary, Vox’s Kurt Wagner reported.

That said, its last attempt to wrestle more control of mobile away from the OS giants in 2013 went down in flames. The Facebook phone, built with HTC hardware, ran a forked version of Android and the Facebook Home user interface. But drowning the experience in friends’ photos and Messenger chat bubbles proved wildly unpopular and both the HTC First and Facebook Home were shelved.

Investing In Tomorrow Tech

Now Facebook is hoping to learn from past mistakes as it ramps up its hardware efforts with a new office for the AR/VR team in Burlingame, 15 miles north of the company’s headquarters. The 70,000-square-foot space is designed to house roughly 4,000 employees. Facebook tells TechCrunch the team will move there in the second half of 2020 to make use of its labs, prototype space, and testing areas. The AR/VR team will still have members at other offices across California, Washington, New York, and abroad.

Interested in potentially controlling more of the hardware stack, Facebook held acquisition talks with $4.5 billion market cap semiconductor company Cirrus Logic, which makes audio chips for Apple and more, The Information reports. That deal never happened, and it’s unclear how far the talks went given tech giants constantly keep their M&A teams open to discussions. But it shows how serious Facebook is taking hardware, even if Portal and Oculus sales have been slow to date. Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

That could start to change next year, though, as flagship virtual reality experiences hit the market. I got a press preview of the upcoming Medal Of Honor first-person shooter that will launch on the Oculus Quest in 2020. An hour of playing the World War 2 game flew by, and it was one of the first VR games that felt like you could enjoy it week after week rather than being just a tech demo. Medal Of Honor could prove to be the killer app that convinces gamers they have to get a Quest.

Social Hardware

Facebook has also been working on hardware experiences for the enterprise. Facebook Workplace video calls can now run on Portal, with its smart camera auto-zooming to keep everyone in the board room in frame or focus on the action. The Information reports Facebook is also prototyping a VR videoconferencing system that Boz has been testing with his team. Facebook tells TechCrunch that Boz hosted two internal events where he videoconferenced through VR to about 100 of his team leaders using virtual Q&A software Facebook is prototyping internally. It’s hoping to learn what would be necessary to offer VR meeting software as a product.

The hardware initiatives meanwhile feed back into Facebook’s core ad business. It’s now using some data about what people do on their Oculus or Portal to target them with ads. From playing certain games to accessing kid-focused experiences to virtually teleporting to vacation destinations, there’s plenty of lucrative data for Facebook to potentially mine.

Facebook tells TechCrunch that Portal currently takes data like if you log in, make calls, or use certain features to inform ad targeting. For example, it could should you ads related to video calling if you do that a lot. With Oculus, if you connect your Facebook account, then data about apps you use or events you join could be used to tune its algorithms or target ads.

Facebook even wants to know what’s on our mind before we act on it. The Information reports that Facebook’s brain-computer interface hardware for controlling interfaces by employing sensors to recognize a word a user is thinking has been shrunk down. It’s gone from the size of a refridgerator to something hand-held but still far from ready for integration into a phone. Facebook tells TechCrunch it’s making progress, improving the word error rate significantly up the state-of-the-art research and expanding the dictionary of words that can be recognized. Facebook can now decode brain activity in real-time, and it’s working on an intermediary system for identifying single words as it pushes towards 100 word-per-minute brain typing.

Selling Oculus headsets, Portal screens, and mind-readers might never generate the billions in profits Facebook earns from its efficient ads business. But they could ensure the social network isn’t locked out of the next waves of computing. Whether those are fully immersive like virtual reality, convenient complements to our phones like smart displays, or minimally-invasive sensors, Facebook wants them to be social. If it can bring your friends along to your new gadgets, Facebook will find some way to squeeze out revenue while keeing these devices from making us more isolated and less human.

Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing

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Extra Crunch members get 25% off Otter.ai voice meeting notes

Extra Crunch community perks have a new offer from voice meeting notes service, Otter.ai. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members can receive 25% off an annual plan for Otter Premium or Otter for Teams.

Otter.ai is an AI-powered assistant that generates rich notes from meetings, interviews, lectures and other voice conversations. You can record, review, search and edit the notes in real time, and organize the conversations from any device. We also use Otter.ai regularly here at TechCrunch to produce transcripts and voice notes from panels at our events, and it’s a great way to easily organize and search the conversations. Learn more about Otter.ai here. 

To qualify for the Otter.ai community perk from Extra Crunch, you must be an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member. The 25% discount only applies to annual plans with Otter.ai, but it can be used for either the Premium or Teams plan. You can learn more about the pricing for Otter.ai here, and you can sign up for Extra Crunch here.

Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features how-tos and interviews on company building, intelligence on the most disruptive opportunities for startups, an experience on TechCrunch.com that’s free of banner ads, discounts on TechCrunch events and several community perks like the one mentioned in this article. Our goal is to democratize information about startups, and we’d love to have you join our community.

You can sign up for Extra Crunch here.

After signing up for an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to sign up for Otter.ai and claim the discount. Otter.ai offers a free plan with capped minutes, and if you are interested in unlocking the full potential, you can purchase the annual plan with the 25% discount.

If you are already an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point over the next 24 hours. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

This is one of several community perks we’ve launched for Extra Crunch annual members. Other community perks include a 20% discount on TechCrunch events, 100,000 Brex rewards points upon credit card sign up and an opportunity to claim $1,000 in AWS credits. For a full list of perks from partners, head here.

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Huawei set to debut a new, improved Mate X

When we met up with Huawei at their Shenzhen headquarters earlier this year, details on the Mate X were hazy, at best. We did have the opportunity to play around with the forthcoming handset a bit over lunch, but the unit looked largely unchanged from what we’d seen at MWC earlier in the year. Release plans, too, were vague.

There was surely a bit of strategery happening behind the scenes on this one, as the company figured precisely how to tackle a post-Galaxy Fold market. At an event for French press in China this week, however, consumer CEO Richard Yu seemingly confirmed that the foldable is set for a first quarter launch in Europe next year following its November launch in China.

Details aren’t clear, the device arriving in that market appears to be the already debuted version, while a new and improved version of the device is set to be announced next year. That model will have a stronger hinge and display and an updated chipset. Word is it’s set to debut at Mobile World Congress in February.

That seems like as good a reason to holdout on purchasing the extremely pricey device as any. Though, it should be noted that Huawei’s first swipe at the form factor was nearly universally regarded as a step up from Samsung when it was unveiled last February. Even so, the company understandably went back to the drawing board in the wake of fallout from Samsung’s own foldable woes.

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Snackpass snags $21M to let you earn friends free takeout

“We were in the back washing blenders so they could keep taking Snackpass orders” recalls co-founder and CEO Kevin Tan. The team from order-ahead food startup Snackpass was willing to get their hands dirty to keep up with demand at one of their first restaurant partners, Tropical Smoothie Cafe on the Yale college campus.

Why were people so eager to pay for takeout through Snackpass? Because it lets them earn loyalty points to redeem for free food — both for themselves and as gifts for their friends. Sending people Snackpass rewards became a new way to flirt or show gratitude at Yale. And through the Venmo-esque Snackpass social feed, users could keep up with a fresh form of gossip while discovering restaurants.

“Anywhere someone is standing in line to order something, we can solve that with Snackpass” says Tan. “Consumer spending will be social in the future.”

That future is already taking hold. Two years after launch, Snackpass is on 11 college campuses across the US, often boasting a 75% penetration rate amongst students within 6 months. It takes a cut of every order and keeps margins high since users pick up the food themselves rather than waiting for delivery. While other food ordering startups battle to offer discounts as marauding users deal-hop between apps, Snackpass keeps users coming back through its loyalty program.

Its momentum, retention, and opportunity to expand from colleges to dense cities has now won Snackpass a $21 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen. The round was joined by other heavy hitters like Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Inspired Capital, and First Round plus angels including musician Nas, NFL star Larry Fitzgerald, and legendary talent agent Michael Ovitz. Building on Snackpass’ $2.7 million seed, the cash will go towards hiring up with the goal of reaching 100 campuses in 2 years.

“Takeout is an important market because it’s huge — also in the hundreds of billions — and fragmented” writes Chen. “The opportunity complements the food delivery market in a big way: For the average restaurant, there are 6 takeout orders for every delivery order!”

“Its Own Language”

Like many of the best startup ideas, Snackpass was born out of the founders’ own needs at Yale. Slow and expensive food delivery services didn’t make sense for smaller orders like a coffee, ice cream, or a pepperoni slice on campuses small enough for customers to walk or bike to the restaurant. Tan says “I was dabbling in several side projects, including helping a friend who managed a local pizza shop build a website to help better reach the local student community.” He realized how tough it was for restaurants around colleges to retain and reward customers, especially as regulars graduated.

Tan joined up with neuroscience student and Thiel Fellow Jamie Marshall, who became Snackpass’ COO. “I had grown up calling in every order” Marshall tells me. “Waiting in line didn’t make sense for me. I used every order-ahead platform and thought this was the future.” Jonathan Cameron, a serial entrepreneur who’d built his own order-ahead app called Happy Hour, rounded out the founding team.

Snackpass founders (from left): Jamie Marshall and Kevin Tan

Snackpass offers users a list of nearby restaurants they can order ahead from, with special tags for ones offering deals. Menu items include counts of how many people have ordered them and how many rewards points you’ll earn buying them. You pay in the app, skip the line at the restaurant, and grab your order from the counter. Each restaurant can configure their own rewards system with how much items earn and cost, such as giving you a free coffee for every 10 you buy.

Users can then spend their points to get themselves free menu items, or send a virtual Snackpass gift card to any of their phone contacts or people they find via search. This gives Snackpass a way to grow virally that most food apps lack. Thankfully, you can block people on Snackpass if they get creepy showering you with gifts.

Each purchase and gift on Snackpass shows up in its social feed unless you make it private. “That’s become its own language. People use it to flirt with each other, or bond and connect with someone new” Tan tells me. “There’s some drama or intrigue there seeing who’s sending gifts to who. People even look at the feed in the way they look at someone’s Instagram to see what’s going on with them.”

Snackpass has also done some integration work specifically for the college market that sets it apart from other order-ahead and delivery services. It can sync with students’ campus meal plans so they can spend them through the app. And student groups from clubs to fraternities can pre-load and replenish accounts for their members. Snackpass works with the same organizations to launch on new campuses. “We host parties, sponsor tailgates, and make it feel like a student-led effort so it grows organically across campus communities” Tan explains. “These efforts, combined with the social feed which would give anyone FOMO if they’re not in the app.”

Network Effect Commerce

With all the competition in the space, restaurants can be inundated with apps to manage, some of which just exacerbate spikes in demand that overwhelm kitchens. “There is certainly a risk that local restaurants will start to get platform fatigue, finding that using some apps will take too big of a bite out of their margins” says Tan. That’s why Snackpass built features that let restaurants batch orders and control how many come in at a certain time so dine-in patients and non-app users aren’t stuck with unreasonable delays.

Snackpass has recruited talent from Uber Eats and an advisor from Yelp’s executive team to help it navigate the tricky SMB sales process. One ace up its sleeve is that it can offer to send push notifications to announce recently signed partners or specials they’re launching, driving the new customers restaurants are desperate for. Tan says his startup is considering if it could charge for this kind of promotion down the line. Most customers who walk into restaurants are effectively in incognito mode, but Snackpass provides its partners with analytics to help them improve their own businesses.

“At the surface level there is a lot of competition in this space” Tan admits. “The social aspect of the app has been the key differentiator for us. Other companies have been focused on creating the fastest, cheapest, most efficient delivery service, but it’s really hard to make those margins work and consumers are trained to shop around on different apps to get
the best deal or fastest delivery time … Eating food is supposed to be fun and social,
and our generation grew up online and in social networks. We’re combining the social aspect of eating with the utility of order ahead, which has helped us build loyalty and enable retention
amongst our users.”

It will still be a battle to overtake long-running competitors like Allset, Level Up, and Ritual, plus incumbents that offer takeout pickup like Uber and Grubhub. Logistics is a cut-throat business, and plenty of startups have already failed in the restaurant loyalty space.

Having Andreessen Horowitz’s support could give Snackpass some extra fire power. “A16z has better support and services for their portfolio companies than any other VC we’ve come across and they’ve delivered” Tan tells me. “We knew that Andrew Chen understands growth and marketplaces from his blog and his Twitter.” That’s critical in a crowded space where such a precise balance of customer acquisition and lifetime value is necessary.

Snapchat, TikTok, and Fortnite have all tapped into the youth market with a lighthearted nature that keeps users coming back until they develop network effect. Snackpass is managing to do the same not with a messaging app or game, but a commerce platform. “We play up creativity, silliness and delight in areas where most companies focus on utility and convenience” Tan concludes. “We built Snackpass for ourselves and our friends. We’ve carried on this philosophy: if something makes us laugh, we put it in the app.”

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