Apple unveils the A16 Bionic, its most powerful mobile chip yet

At a jam-packed event in Cupertino this morning, Apple revealed details of the chip powering the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max: the A16 Bionic. The successor to the A15 Bionic (which can be found in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus), it packs more transistors — 16 billion, manufactured on a 4nm process — and components specially-designed to accelerate AI and other tasks across smartphone apps and iOS.

Apple says that the A16 Bionic has a multi-core processor with six high-performance and two efficiency cores, a five-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine for performing up to 17 trillion operations per second. The company further claims the high-performance cores use 20% less power compared to the A15 Bionic’s performance cores, while the efficiency cores use a third of the power of unnamed competitor chips.

The GPU has up to 50% more memory bandwidth, and overall, Apple says that A16 Bionic is upwards of 40% faster than rival chipsets.

Other standout features include a custom image signal processor that powers the iPhone 14 Pro’s camera system. The processor, GPU, neural engine and image signal processor in the A16 Bionic work together to support the new camera hardware and perform up to 4 trillion operations per photo. Meanwhile, a new display engine enables 1 Hz refresh rates, high peak brightness, features like always-on display and antialiasing to smooth out rough edges in display graphics.

read more about Apple's fall event, September 7, 2022

Apple unveils the A16 Bionic, its most powerful mobile chip yet by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

The iPhone 14 ditches physical SIM cards for eSIM

Apple’s new iPhones — the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus — won’t have physical SIM cards. The company announced the nugget at its event in Cupertino today, revealing that eSIM will be the only way the iPhone 14 series authenticates with wireless carriers — at least in the U.S.

eSIM lets you change a wireless carrier, data or service plan through software rather than having to swap a physical SIM card. It’s hardly a new technology, but it’s only within the last few years that eSIM has become more common on mainstream mobile devices.

Apple said that major carriers including T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T will provide resources to assist with eSIM-related questions, service upgrades and changes.

read more about Apple's fall event, September 7, 2022

The iPhone 14 ditches physical SIM cards for eSIM by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Varjo, an early mover in building XR headsets and software for enterprises, taps $40M

Applications in the metaverse often feel like more of a marketing gimmick than something that a critical mass of consumers would use, let alone pay for. But turn to the enterprise, and there appears to be a very lucrative opportunity that’s well into finding traction. Today, one of the early movers in building solutions for that market is announcing a round of funding to double down on the opportunity.

Varjo, which builds hardware and integrated software for “professional grade” virtual and augmented reality for industrial and other enterprise applications, has raised $40 million, a Series D that it will be using both to continue R&D for its headsets, as well as to delve further into software applications and tools for the Varjo Reality Cloud, its own streaming platform that it launched earlier this year.

The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland — founded and run by longtime veterans from Nokia cast asunder when that company, once a leading smartphone and mobile maker, went into a tailspin last decade — and its backers in this round include a number of big investors out of the region.

They include EQT Ventures, Atomico, strategic backer Volvo Car Tech Fund, Lifeline Ventures, and Tesi, the Finnish government VC and PE fund; with new backers Mirabaud and Foxconn also participating. Varjo describes the latter two as strategic: it’s not clear how the Swiss finance and banking giant is working with Varjo, but Foxconn is being tapped to help manufacture its devices, CEO Timo Toikkanen said in an interview.

Varjo is not disclosing valuation, but data from PitchBook estimates that its last round in 2020 valued it at $146 million and Toikkanen (who used to lead all of Nokia mobile phones business before and after it was acquired by Microsoft) noted that the new valuation is “very positive.”

In a hardware landscape that is dominated by big tech companies — particularly in VR hardware — Varjo is notable for being an independent player, and not one that’s prone to gobbling lots of cash to stay that way: it’s only raised around $150 million since being founded in 2016. Toikkanen declined to say whether Varjo has been approached by others for acquisition, but given that Nokia background, I’d hazard to say that he and others on the team understand first-hand the value of remaining a smaller company when it comes to innovation.

“We are very fond of what we do at this size,” he said. “There are great benefits to independence. We are fast moving and we have the ability to respond to customer needs.”

Perhaps the independence has also lent the company a greater degree of focus. A number of players in the area of XR have been focusing on headsets and applications for consumers, and some would argue that the quality of those efforts has been variable: Meta was roundly ridiculed when Mark Zuckerberg provided a preview its Horizon Worlds expansion; but others are making efforts to improve the experience.

And there are also a number of companies that have also put their money on the B2B opportunity (they include Meta building enterprise applications, HP, and ByteDance-owned Pico), although even in that area, some like Spatial have pivoted away to other aspects of the “metaverse.”

Within that spectrum, Varjo is among those that took a position early on that the first adopters (and perhaps the main ones?) of XR products would be enterprise customers, and it has stuck to it.

”Consumer and corporation expectations towards metaverse are globally high. To meet these expectations, both technology that is easy to use and accurate as well as high-quality software and content are needed. Varjo’s tech – namely, the new XR streaming platform ’Varjo Reality Cloud’ in combination with the company’s XR-3, VR-3 and Aero products – enables professional, fully virtual work in various sectors, anytime and anywhere,” said Keith Bonnici, investment director at Tesi, in a statement. “This then promotes global remote work, boosting efficiency and decreasing CO2 emissions from work travel.”

In terms of its products, Varjo’s focus is on producing premium, business-critical services and devices (read: expensive, but for a customer that is less sensitive on pricing), and to take an approach that virtual and augmented reality would go hand-in-hand as mixed reality. Toikkanen believes that prescience has been integral to its success.

“We have never been a ‘hype’ company,” he said in his understated, Finnish clip. “We have been very consistent in saying that the entry point from the beginning is mixed reality. Eventually everything has worked out to be built that way. We also said that the ultimate incarnation would need to be as good as real life. Pixelated holographic would never be good enough.”

The company currently makes three different headsets — the XR-3, the VR-3 and the Aero, ranging in prices respectively from about $6,500 to $1,500 with additional costs for software subscriptions to use with them (which appear to start at around $1,500 annually), as well as a separate development environments for its Reality Cloud and another next-generation product it calls Teleport that is still in alpha.

Its focus these days is on applications in areas like design and manufacturing, engineering, education, and healthcare, and in addition to Volvo, its customers include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Aston Martin, Kia — in all, about 25% of the Fortune 100, the company said — as well as “various departments across the United States and European Governments.”

With found Urho Konttori, another Nokia alum, on board as Varjo’s CTO, the startup also owns seven patent families related to XR.

“Varjo is very intellectual property-protection oriented,” Toikkanen said, noting that the company has been approached by other tech companies to license that IP, but that it has yet to develop that business. “Today the focus is on building it into our own products and services. That is the way you can can get access.”

 

LG Electronics launches NFT platform that lets users buy and sell digital artwork

LG Electronics said today it has released its non-fungible token (NFT) platform LG Art Lab, which lets users discover, buy, sell and trade NFTs on LG’s smart TVs.

The announcement comes roughly eight months after LG Electronics said at its press conference that it plans to incorporate NFT features into its smart TV. The platform is now available in the U.S. only to those with LG TV running webOS 5.0 or later and is accessible directly from the home screen.

LG Electronics partnered with the Hedera network to offer an app that enables users to purchase NFTs via Wallypto, LG’s crypto wallet for smartphones.

“Wallypto, built on Hedera, has been developing since September 2021,” Chris Jo, senior vice president, head of platform business at LG Electronics home entertainment company, told TechCrunch. “Its beta version of the wallet launched this week in August.”

The partnership between Hedera and LG Electronics was initiated in 2020 when LG joined the Hedera governing council that includes Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom and the Indian Institute of Technology, and more.

“While many people have heard of NFTs and would like to participate in the growing ecosystem, it can be overly complex and difficult to get started,” Jo said. “LG Art Lab is designed to allow millions of users in the U.S. to easily access and display NFTs, without having to interact with code or directly with a blockchain themselves.”

The NFT platform provides a Drops feature that profiles artists and shows their new artwork previews. Its real-time Live Drops feature gives notifications to help users acquire a dropped NFT to ensure they do not miss an opportunity.

LG Art Lab

Image Credits: LG Electronics/ Courtesy of Barry X Ball Studio, Inc.

Jo also said that Hedera allows users to transact for less than $0.0001 cent per transaction (with no high gas fee or hidden costs), meaning that there are no hidden costs associated with the NFT platform.

“The Hedera Network consumes vastly less energy than any other public ledger, making it the ideal choice for sustainable initiatives and meaning that it can meet the ESG of modern businesses and investors,” Jo explained. Users can buy, sell and display NFTs on the Hedera network without worrying about the high energy consumption associated with other public networks, he said, adding that Hedera guarantees a low, predictable fee for users, unlike many other decentralized networks.

South Korea’s IT and entertainment companies are jumping into the non-fungible token (NFT) industry. In January, LG’s rival Samsung unveiled its new smart TV-based NFT marketplace plan. Samsung said it will add NFT features on Samsung TVs like MICRO LED and Neo QLED.

Nvidia the latest collateral damage in US-China tech war

Nvidia, the world’s largest maker of artificial intelligence chips, is at the heart of a new round of U.S. tech sanctions targeting China.

Nvidia noted in an SEC filing that the U.S. government had imposed new export restrictions on two of its most advanced AI chips to China, its second-largest market after Taiwan making up 26% of its revenues in 2021.

The ban could cost Nvidia as much as $400 million in potential sales to China in the third quarter, the firm said.

The export control also bars Nvidia from shipping the chips to Russia, though the company said it doesn’t currently sell to the country.

The U.S. government said the move “will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia.” But the ban is in practice crimping a wide array of businesses and organizations using the silicons beyond military uses.

The two chips in question are the Nvidia A100 and H100 graphic processing units. A100 is designed to provide high-performance computing, storage, and networking capabilities for industries spanning healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, explains Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant Alibaba, a user of A100.

H100 is the firm’s upcoming enterprise AI chip that is expected to ship by the end of this year and has part of its production done in China.

Nvidia’s engagement with China won’t be completely severed. The U.S. government has granted permission for Nvidia to keep manufacturing H100 in China, Nvidia said in another filing, though access by Chinese customers will still be restricted.

The ban is “sci-tech hegemony”, snapped China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin in a regular press conference on Thursday. “The US seeks to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries.”

The U.S.’s move to bar China’s access to its high-end technologies has in turn accelerated the latter’s pursuit of independence. Huawei has been doubling down on smartphone chip development ever since Washington put it on an export blacklist over national security concerns in 2019. A swathe of domestic semiconductor startups is netting hefty investments from VCs and government-guided funds.

While China may still be a generation behind in producing the most sophisticated chips, the country is gradually sharpening its edge in lower-end, specialized semiconductors, such as neural processing units that give phone cameras a boost. It remains to be seen what ripple effect the Nvidia ban will create.

An experimental new attack can steal data from air-gapped computers using a phone’s gyroscope

A security researcher known for devising inventive ways to siphon data from computers that are disconnected from the internet has found a new exploit able to exfiltrate data to a nearby smartphone.

Air-gapped systems are physically segregated and incapable of connecting wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices. You’ll find them in places where network security is paramount, like critical infrastructure. While uncommon, some techniques developed in recent years can defeat air-gap isolation, like the Mosquito attack, which uses a nearby smartphone’s microphone to receive data. Since then, Apple and Google have introduced permissions settings in iOS and Android that block apps from accessing a device’s microphone, and both operating systems use visual indicators when the microphone is active.

But unlike microphones, gyroscopes — found as standard in most modern smartphones — don’t have the same protections. Gyroscopes are used to detect the rate of rotation of the smartphone, and are widely considered a safer sensor, since neither iOS or Android indicate when they are used or given the option to block access altogether.

Now, the creator of the Mosquito attack has a new technique that uses a smartphone’s gyroscope to pick up inaudible nearby soundwaves and doesn’t rely on using the microphone.

Mordechai Guri, the head of research and development at the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben Gurion University, said in his latest research paper that this new attack, which he calls “Gairoscope,” can exfiltrate sensitive information from air-gapped computers just “a few meters away.”

Like other exploits against air-gapped systems, Guri’s “Gairoscope” proof-of-concept requires close proximity to the air-gapped system. But from there, an attacker could collect passwords or login credentials by listening for sound waves generated from the speakers of an air-gapped system and picked up from the gyroscope of a nearby smartphone.

Guri says these inaudible frequencies produce “tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone’s gyroscope,” which can be converted into readable data. He added that an attacker could execute the exploit using a mobile browser, since phone gyroscopes can be accessed using JavaScript.

While the method is still experimental, Guri and his team have recommended some countermeasures aimed at limiting the impact of the new malware, such as eliminating loudspeakers to create an audio-less networking environment and filtering out the resonance frequencies generated by the audio hardware using an audio filter.

Oppo stays ‘committed’ to Europe despite sales suspension in Germany

Chinese smartphone titan Oppo will keep Germany as its main operational hub for its European business despite recently withdrawing sales from the country, Billy Zhang, the firm’s vice president of overseas sales and services, said told media on Monday.

Oppo halted sales in Germany this month after losing a patent lawsuit to the Finnish telecoms giant Nokia, which alleged that Oppo’s use of certain 4G and 5G signaling technologies had infringed on its patents.

OnePlus, which was folded into Oppo as a sub-brand last year, has also suspended sales in Germany.

Realme, a young phone brand associated with the Chinese electronics behemoth BBK, which is also credited for spawning Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, said it is “closely monitoring the situation” of Oppo’s patent challenges in Germany, Madhav Sheth, president of Realme’s international business group, said on a press call in early August.

Germany is a popular regional base for Chinese tech companies’ Europe expedition. Huawei’s European head office is in Düsseldorf. Autonomous driving unicorn Momenta picked Stuttgart as its first overseas stop to be close to its automaking partners.

Back in 2020, Oppo opened its European headquarters in Düsseldorf.

“Our long-term commitment to the European and German markets stays the same,” Zhang said on the call. “There isn’t an impact on our choice of office location, and the German office, where our European hub is located, will operate as usual.”

The smartphone maker accounted for 5% of Europe’s smartphone shipments in the second quarter, putting it in fourth place, according to research firm Counterpoint. Oppo is able to keep serving its existing customers in Germany, Zhang reassured, though some products have been put on hold over Oppo-owned channels in the country.

Though Oppo isn’t shaking up its German office, it’s making broader changes across the continent. Starting in August, the company will integrate certain resources from Central and Eastern Europe with those of Western Europe, Zhang said.

Such internal reorg can potentially cut costs and comes as no surprise amid global economic headwinds. Smartphone shipment worldwide fell 9% in Q2, according to research from Canalys, with Oppo and its rivals Xiaomi and Vivo posting double-digit declines in their home market China.

It remains to be seen how rivalry plays out between China’s smartphone darlings overseas. Realme has rapidly grown its piece of the pie in Europe, finishing Q2 in the fifth place by shipment volume.

“We have big aspirations in Europe for sure. We will continue to grow, and we would like to be in the top three or five in a lot of countries,” said Sheth.

Facebook is losing its grip as a ‘Top 10’ app as BeReal and TikTok grow

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer social networking experiences like TikTok and now BeReal, the tech giant’s big blue app has lost traction in the App Store’s Top Charts.

Last year, for instance, Facebook only fell out of the Top 10 free iPhone apps in the U.S. seven times. But in 2022, that figure has already soared to 97 — an indication that Facebook may be losing ground as new apps push their way into the App Store’s top rankings.

For a more direct comparison, Facebook’s app fell out of the App Store’s Top 10 apps just six times during the first half of 2021. In the first half of 2022, however, it has dropped out of this grouping a total of 59 times, per data provided to TechCrunch by app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

It even once stayed out of the Top 10 as long as 37 consecutive days in 2022, the firm noted, up from just two consecutive days in 2021.

Additional analysis provided by another App Store data provider, data.ai (previously App Annie), also supported this conclusion. It found Facebook’s drop-off times this year were mainly concentrated in April, May and June. April was Facebook’s worst month so far, as the app’s rank fell into the 30s on April 18, and then reached as low as No. 44 on April 21. Notably, this was around the time that BeReal was climbing the App Store’s Top Charts, breaking into the Top 5. Today, BeReal is the No. 1 non-gaming app on the U.S. App Store.

To what extent this trend should be concerning for Facebook is less clear.

The company hasn’t consistently held onto a strong position in the Top 10 in prior years, either. Plus, a ranking in Top 10 Apps is only one means of measuring an app’s success — it’s an indicator of a company’s ability to attract new users, but not its ability to maintain traction with existing ones. On that front, Facebook hasn’t yet conceded. It’s still the top app by monthly active users as of the most recent quarter, per data.ai’s analysis.

That said, when Facebook is losing its Top 10 position to newcomers in social networking — like the current No. 1 app BeReal — it’s more problematic than if it were losing its rank due to growth from COVID-era necessities, like Zoom.

Image Credits: Maskot (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

A failure to inspire a new generation of users is something the company is concerned about and a topic Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken candidly about before.

Last fall, the exec told investors the company has been “retooling” its teams to make serving young adults its north star, rather than “optimizing for the larger number of older people” using its apps. He admitted this sort of shift could take years, not months, to accomplish. Unspoken was whether the company would be successful marketing Facebook to a new generation — especially at a time when the company was betting billions on the so-called metaverse.

But Meta has been well aware of its teen issues long before we saw the signs reflected in the Top Charts.

Last October, Bloomberg reported Facebook had been compiling internal reports showing the “time spent” metric for U.S. teenagers on Facebook was down 16% year over year as of March 2021. Young adults in the U.S. were spending 5% less time on Facebook, the data showed, and the number of new teen signups was declining, too. (The report was one of the hundreds released by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.)

This year, Meta announced another concerning metric.

In February 2022, the company reported to investors Facebook had lost daily active users for the first time in its history and its monthly active users remained flat. While the daily active users grew slightly in subsequent quarters, the platform lost more monthly actives after a ban in Russia — a signal that a single market loss could dampen Facebook’s growth.

As of the most recent quarter, Facebook’s daily active users had climbed back up from the 1.929 billion reported in February, when the figure had dropped, to now 1.97 billion.

Sizable numbers like these, combined with the slight upward tick, can make Facebook’s issues difficult to spot. It’s not dead yet, after all! And the flagship app is not the only arrow in the company’s quiver.

Last year, Meta-owned apps scored all four of the top spots in terms of monthly active users worldwide, led by Facebook at No. 1, per data.ai’s “State of Mobile” annual report. It was followed by WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram — well ahead of TikTok at No. 6. This past quarter still sees Facebook at No. 1, but is now followed by Messenger, Amazon, then Instagram. TikTok has moved up to No. 5.

What these figures mask, however, is that Meta’s apps — and particularly Facebook — are boosted by older adults combined with strong usage in both large and emerging internet markets. India has the highest number of Facebook users due to its large population, for instance. This clouds the picture as to where Facebook may be headed in the long term. After all, it’s the upcoming generation of social networking users who will drive the platforms of the future.

To forecast where that market could be headed, it helps to keep an eye on the App Store’s Top Charts. These charts are largely a window into new app installations, combined with the velocity of installations and other factors. U.S. data is also important to examine as it’s one of the largest markets for social networking apps, and one that — perhaps more critically — helps drive significant revenues.

The downloads fueling the Top Charts include people installing an app for the first time — a metric that can skew younger as, today, it represents the Gen Alpha demographic and tail end of Gen Z — groups who may be getting their first smartphones, such as kids, tweens or teens. In 2022, those people are not downloading Facebook in large enough numbers for the app to easily maintain its Top 10 position. Instead, newer apps like TikTok, BeReal and perennial Gen Z favorite Snapchat, are dominating the Top Charts.

Other third-party research also suggests Facebook is losing its ability to reach a new generation of U.S. users. A recent Pew Research Center study, published this month, found that only 32% of U.S. teens aged 13-17 said they use Facebook, while a previous survey from 2014-2015 saw that figure at 71%. But Pew’s studies, while relevant, are based on what users say they are doing, while the App Store’s charts are an indication of what people are actually doing.

And for now, it seems, what people are doing is seeking out Facebook alternatives in the form of novel social networking experiences driven by recommendation engines, like TikTok, or by real-world friendships, like BeReal and Snapchat.

Guesty books $170M to double down on property management tools for Airbnb and other rental platforms

Platforms like Airbnb have boomed with more consumers (and business users) than ever before keen stay in private properties when traveling or working away from their usual home base. That’s also meant a boom for startups building technology to help those renting out properties to manage the process. Guesty — which has built a platform to manage property listings across multiple sites like Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia and Booking.com — is today announcing that it has raised $170 million, an all-equity round that it will be using to continue fueling its growth, and to tap deeper into providing tools to address our changing habits as consumers.

“With the ways people live, work, socialize and travel having shifted, the lines between traditional hotels and rental accomodations continue to blur,” co-founder and CEO Amiad Soto told me in an interview. “Hospitality operators — everyone from hosts to property managers to hotel brands — are continuing to adapt to this new reality. The last few years brought new customer personas to the short-term rental market, including classic hotel-goers who have higher demands for guest experiences and services.”

Apax Digital Funds, MSD Partners and Sixth Street Growth co-led the round for Tel Aviv-based Guesty, with previous backers Viola Growth and Flashpoint also participating — motivated in part by that vision of a changing travel and living landscape.

“As alternative property management operations become more complex, Guesty is paving the way for the next generation of digital hospitality services,” said Dave Evans, a partner at Apax Digital, in a statement. “Their track record of success and innovation, along with their platform’s growing suite of tools and intuitive user experience has Guesty positioned to define and consolidate its category, working with hosting businesses of all sizes. We are excited to continue partnering with the company as it continues to transform the industry.”

This is an all-equity Series E, Soto said in our interview (via email, because, coincidentally, I happen to be traveling myself). Soto didn’t say at which valuation, but he told me that the figure had tripled since its last round (a $50 million injection in 2021). PitchBook notes that last round was at a $230 million valuation; if that’s accurate it would put today’s round at $690 million. (We’ll update as and when we learn more.) The company is not yet profitable, Soto said, but it’s aiming for it next year, when it is also on course to surpass $100 million in ARR in the first six months.

The size of the round is big, but perhaps especially notable given the constraints that fundraising has been under in general this year. It’s also a measure of where Guesty is today, and where it’s going.

Soto and Guesty are not disclosing how many properties managed using its platform but directionally say the numbers are growing. “We expect our revenue and listings under management to continue to double year-over-year, both in 2022 and 2023,” Soto told me. (For a point of reference, the last time we reported the number was at the time of a $35 million funding round in 2019, when it noted that it had over 100,000 across 70 countries.)

His explanation for moving away from disclosing property numbers is not to do with the inevitable disruption that Covid-19 brought to the industry (and Guesty’s users in particular), but because Guesty itself has changed as a business, expanding both the kinds of properties that are managed, and the uses of those properties.

“Since our inventory has grown to include more than just short-term rental listings and include more flexible accommodations, such as co-living spaces, aparthotels, glamping and more, the key metrics that demonstrate our growth are our revenue and profitability,” Soto said, adding that Guesty has seen 100% growth year on year and expect this to continue. The startup’s team now numbers 585 employees, which has also doubled in size in the last year.

“We expect these numbers to continue growing even faster,” he noted.

To that end, Guesty is also rapidly expanding in terms of what kinds of tools it’s offering to its users, and thus how the platform generates revenues. There are a lot of travel startups out in the wild, including a huge swathe of those dedicated to property management technology and services, and Guesty has been positioning itself as something of a consolidator. The company’s acquisitions have included MyVR (like Guesty, an alum of Y Combinator) and Your Porter respectively to tap into deeper multimedia tools for its users, and to provide more tools for hosts that work across properties owned by third parties.

The plan is to use some of this funding to continue picking up more businesses that complement Guesty’s strategy, and to continue taking it beyond simply providing tools to manage properties, but to provide other services, and for its users, to give them an end-to-end, one-stop platform to manage their own work as a business. Features today number about 18, including not just calendar management and ways to manage across multiple booking portals, but also channels to manage guest-host communications, analytics and accounting tools, payment tools and more.

“Hospitality operators are now expected to provide more amenities, real-time responses, have more availability for ongoing customer communications and provide an overall elevated guest experience,” Soto said. “The trend of merging of accommodation types will continue, and the ever-growing consumer expectations will push property and hospitality managers to provide increasingly flexible levels of service and accommodations. Guesty’s platform is tailored to meet this need. For example, our technology enables hospitality providers to enhance guest communications by incorporating automation, making guest interactions faster, more intuitive, and providing smartphone tools and options which are most guests’ preferred method of communication.”

One area of investment will also be building more automation into the the product, he said, which likely is aimed at working with customers that manage larger amounts of properties and may have more repeatable, repetitive tasks.

“We are working hard to increase the levels of automation within our product as well as enhance AI-based communication tools,” Soto continued. “Guesty’s product provides tools for different types of properties, including multi-unit buildings and multi-location properties, but as our customers evolve, they come with additional needs for different types of guests. With that, we will be enhancing our product to provide hospitality providers with the tools they need to address everything from monthly stays and living-as-a-service, tailored for various types of accommodations – from glamping to more traditional hotel-like properties. To accomplish this, the product must be extremely flexible and accommodate hybrid solutions.”

Lastly, a third area where it’s likely to be investing more efforts is in the financial services it provides to its users. “To boost the value we offer, we will be looking to add to and enhance our fintech offerings, allowing our customers to bill more efficiently, create credit lines and take loans to grow their business, manage risk, and offer more advanced analytics for customers to make informed decisions about growing their business and managing additional aspects of their operations,” he added. Acquisitions that it might make to grow all of that inorganically will be made both across product lines and geographies, said Soto. It will also be by way of integrations. Today these number about 130 with other third-party tools.

The company appears still to have a lot of runway left as a standalone business. While Soto would not comment on whether it’s been approached as an acquisition target — either by other companies that build tools to manage businesses or customer service, or by some of those other online travel booking giants — he was unequivocal in saying that Guesty was not looking to get acquired, but to play the consolidator itself.

“Guesty is not looking for an exit,” he said. “We are strong believers that the industry is fragmented and ripe for consolidation and have already made multiple acquisitions both in-market and vertical expansion to enhance our offering and position. We are proud to have the highest level of business and technology partnerships with all the large travel platforms including Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia and more, and are able to provide value to the entire ecosystem, which benefits everyone.”

That said, the tethering that it has to certain platforms — Soto notes that Airbnb “is still very popular” among its customers and in terms of activity, although “booking.com may be more popular in Europe and have actually grown in the short-term rental (STR) sector [with booking.com’s expansion into STR] now accounting for around 30% of their business. VRBO (from the Expedia Group) also remains a very popular option in certain areas in the US, especially for family-oriented properties in more rural vacation areas — does seem to imply a natural pool of companies that might be interested in it longer term, as they too look for more ways of diversifying their own revenues and expanding their reach.

Other more direct competitors today include the likes of TravelNest, Hostaway and Lodgify, among many others.

That competitive landscape doesn’t deter investors, though.

“In a largely specialized and localized industry, there is a huge opportunity to bring a global standard of service and excellence to hospitality operators of all shapes and sizes,” added Dan Bitar, MD and co-head of MSD Growth. “Guesty’s robust product offerings, strong R&D team, and proven ability to scale the business across geographies make it the ideal platform to consolidate the currently fragmented market.”

“The tech-enabled real estate ecosystem continues to grow and mature, and we look forward to joining Guesty on its journey to democratize and further professionalize the property management space,” said Michael McGinn, partner and co-head of Sixth Street Growth, in a statement. “With Guesty’s strong management team, long-term vision, product innovation, and marquee customers and partners, we have full confidence in the company’s ability to further cement its leadership in the world of hospitality and property management.”

Xiaomi’s new foldable is thinner than Samsung’s and only available in China

A day after Samsung announced a pair of foldable devices, Xiaomi launched its second-gen foldable, Mix Fold 2, in China. The new phone sports a 6.56-inch outer display, 8.02-inch inner display and a Leica-powered camera system. The phone is China-only for now for the base price of RMB 8,999 (~$1,335) for a version with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage — much cheaper than the Samsung Fold 4 priced at $1,800.

Xiaomi bests Samsung’s foldable in a number of key specs. For instance, both the outer display (6.56-inch v 6.2-inch) and the inner display (8.02-inch v 7.6-inch display) are larger than that of Fold 4.

The Chinese tech firm has included a Leica-powered 50-megapixel main sensor, 13-megapixel ultrawide sensor and 8-megapixel telephoto sensor with 2x optical zoom. The setup can record footage in 8K resolution with support for Dolby Vision HDR standard. Xiaomi said the Leica partnership extends to photographic styles — Vibrant look and Authentic look — which sound more like branding exercises than anything.

The company has managed to fit the internals in a sleek frame that’s 5.4mm unfolded and 11.2mm folded. For comparison, the Samsung Fold 4 is 6.3mm unfolded and 15.8mm folded. Though Xiaomi also has an extreme camera bump to show for it. Like the Galaxy Fold, the Mix Fold 2 is powered by Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.

While the phone sounds exciting on paper, it’s limited to the China market for now, so it’s not going to be a threat to other players like Samsung. While the broader global smartphone market is seeing a growth decline, analysts project an upward curve for foldables. A report from Counterpoint predicts that companies will ship 16 million foldable this year, and that number will go up to 26 million next year. Xiaomi has the opportunity to make a mark in the market, but in the short term, Samsung still has a significant head start.

“Samsung has led the market since the beginning, and we think its dominance will continue for some time. Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo are all introducing new foldables but they are mostly limited to the Chinese market. Motorola may be the only contender in markets like the USA for now,” Counterpoint Senior Analyst Jene Park said.

The Mix Fold 2 is up for pre-order in China starting today and starts shipping October 16.