Meta is killing its Messenger for Apple Watch app on May 31, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. Apple Watch users who have the app installed are being notified that “after May 31st, Messenger won’t be available as an Apple Watch app, but you can still get Messenger notifications on your watch.”

Although you will still be able to receive notifications for new messages, you won’t be able to respond to them and will instead have to use your iPhone app to do so.

“People can still receive Messenger notifications on their Apple Watch when paired, but starting at the beginning of June they will no longer be able to respond from their watch,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. “But they can continue using Messenger on their iPhone, desktop and the web, where we are working to make their personal messages end-to-end encrypted.”

The Messenger app for Apple Watch offers a lot of convenience for its users, as you can still receive messages on your watch even when your iPhone is not paired with the wearable. Users are already taking to social media to voice their displeasure about the upcoming move.

It’s unknown why Meta has decided to discontinue its Messenger app for watchOS. Messenger joins a list of other platforms that have sunsetted their Apple Watch over the past several years, including Slack, Uber and Twitter.

The change comes as Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp, is working on a native WearOS app. Earlier this week, WhatsApp launched a beta version of its app compatible with Google’s smartwatch platform. People using WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.23.10.10 will be able to link their Wear OS-based smartwatch. Users will be able to check their messages on the smartwatch, and all chats will be end-to-end encrypted. Google said that support for calls and starting conversations will be available when the app is available to all users.

The move also comes as Meta has been introducing some changes around Messenger. A few months ago, the company began testing the ability for users to access their Messenger inbox within the Facebook app. Back in 2016, Facebook removed messaging capabilities from its mobile web application to push people to the Messenger app, in a move that angered many users. Now, the company is testing a reversal of this decision.

Meta is killing the Messenger app for Apple Watch on May 31 by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/meta-killing-messenger-app-apple-watch-may-31/

Image Credits: SLAIT School

Millions of people use sign language, but methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly those for written and spoken languages. SLAIT School aims to change that with an interactive tutor powered by computer vision, letting aspiring ASL speakers practice at their own rate like in any other language learning app.

SLAIT started back in 2021 as the sign language AI translator (hence the name): a real-time video chat and translation tool that could recognize most common signs and help an ASL speaker communicate more easily with someone who doesn’t know the language. But early successes slowed as the team realized they needed more time, money, and data than they were likely to get.

“We got great results in the beginning, but after several attempts we realized that, right now, there just is not enough data to provide full language translation,” explained Evgeny Fomin, CEO and co-founder of SLAIT. “We had no opportunity for investment, no chance to find our supporters, because we were stuck without a product launch — we were in limbo. Capitalism… is hard.”

“But then we thought, what can we do with the tech we’ve got from R&D? We realized we needed to do an education solution, because for education our technology is definitely good enough,” he continued. Not that there are lower standards for people learning, but the fluidity and subtlety of fluent and mature sign language is orders of magnitude more difficult to capture and translate than one or two words at a time.

“We found an extremely talented guy (CTO Nikita Nikitin) who helped us develop a product, and we made SLAIT School. And now we have our first customers and some traction!”

Existing online sign language courses (here’s a solid list if you’re curious) are generally pretty traditional. You have lectures and demonstrations, vocabulary lists, illustrations, and if you pay for it online, you can have someone review your work over video. It’s high quality and much of it is free but it isn’t the kind of interactive experience people have come to expect from apps like Duolingo.

SLAIT School uses an updated version of the gesture recognition tech that powered the translator demo app to provide instant feedback on words and phrases. See it in video form, then try it until you get it. Currently it’s for desktop browsers only but the team is planning a mobile app as well.

“We have some room for improvement, but it’s exactly what we planned to deliver. Students can access the platform, do practice, make signs, interact with the AI tutor, and it costs them same as one hour with an in person tutor,” said Fomin. “The mobile apps we aim to do for free.”

Users can do the first few lessons in order to see that the system works, then it’s $39 monthly, $174 half-yearly, and $228 yearly. The price may seem high compared with large-scale language apps supported by capital and other business models, but Fomin emphasized this is a new and special category, and real-world tutors are their primary competition.

“We actively communicate with users and try to find the best prices and economic model that makes subscription plans affordable. We would really like to make the platform free, but so far we have not found an opportunity for this yet. Because this is a very niche product… we just need to make a stable economic model that will work in general,” he said.

The traction is also a flywheel for the company’s tech and content. By collecting information (with express opt-in consent, which he says the community is quite happy to provide) they can expand and improve the curriculum, and continue to refine their gesture recognition engine.

“We see two directions for growing in,” Fomin said. “The first is to cover more language groups, like British sign language and Japanese sign language. Also we would like to make the curriculum more adaptive, or provide a curriculum for medical and scientific signs. If we have enough investment to grow and scale we can be a leading platform globally to automate talking to doctor in sign language.”

After that, he said, “Maybe we can finally develop a translator. We can break through this barrier!”

SLAIT pivots from translating sign language to AI-powered interactive lessons by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/slait-pivots-from-translating-sign-language-to-ai-powered-interactive-lessons/

Axiom Space’s second private crewed mission to the International Space Station is now scheduled to launch in just ten days, with the four-person crew preparing to conduct more than twenty scientific experiments while in space.

The Ax-2 mission will now launch no earlier than 5:37 PM EST on May 21 from SpaceX’s Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The crew will travel to the station onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule, where they’ll remain for a roughly 10-day stint. This will mark the second fully private crew to visit the ISS; the first mission, also operated by Axiom Space, took place in April 2022.

The crew includes Peggy Whitson, the mission commander and Axiom’s director of human spaceflight; John Shoffner, the pilot; Ali Alqarni, mission specialist; and Rayyanah Barnawi, also a mission specialist. Alqarni and Barnawi are both members of Saudi Arabia’s first astronaut class, and will be the first people from that country to visit the ISS. Shoffner, an Axiom investor, is the only paying customer on the crew.

The foursome will engage in a ton of scientific research while aboard the station. The more than 20 payloads that will travel with the crew, which span the life sciences, biomedicine, and technology demonstrations, are sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory. Experiments include examining the impact of microgravity on stem cell production, studies on bioengineered human tissue, and a project that will help advance detection of a treatment for cancer on Earth. The crew will also undergo a battery of tests to better understand the impact of spaceflight and microgravity on the body.

Private human spaceflight mission is just one part of Axiom’s plan. The company is also among a growing crowd of players aiming to operate a private space station. Their plan involves attaching modules to the ISS, and later operating these modules as a free-flying station once the ISS is decommissioned in 2030. The first module is scheduled to launch in 2025.

Axiom also announced last month that it signed an agreement to establish a joint venture with one of its investors: Korean pharmaceutical firm Boryung, who contributed $50 million in capital last December. The JV was announced last month.

Axiom Space gears up for second private human spaceflight mission to ISS by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/axiom-space-gears-up-for-second-private-human-spaceflight-mission-to-iss/

Video game consultant Rami Ismail was a bit sleepy in an early morning meeting, until his client said something particularly strange: “I’m really just looking for a way to get my game its Bigolas Dickolas moment.”

“I had to absolutely wake up very fast to politely find a way to explain I had no idea what they meant,” Ismail told TechCrunch.

Earlier this week, a fan account for the anime series “Trigun” tweeted emphatically that everyone must immediately buy “This is How You Lose the Time War,” a queer, dystopian time travel novella published in 2019. The tweet garnered 10 million impressions, and enough people took the advice from this anime fan – whose display name is “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” – that the novella shot up the charts to #3 on Amazon’s book list. No, not sci-fi Amazon, or queer time travel romance Amazon. It is the #3 book out of literally every book on Amazon because of an anime fan named “bigolas dickolas.” Per Amazon’s charts, the book is selling better than Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go” and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, the co-authors of the book, sounded downright giddy when we talked on the phone Wednesday afternoon. Their novella was already relatively successful among sci-fi fans, winning the coveted Hugo and Nebula awards when it came out. In El-Mohtar’s words, “it achieved the dream of being a midlist book.” Now, almost four years later, it’s extremely abnormal for a book to get a second wind of sales like this.

“I really think a huge part of why [the tweet] hit the way it did was that there’s no link,” El-Mohtar said. “It’s just the book cover, and the follow up tweet engaged in that kind of stan violence of like, ‘grabbing you by the throat, you must do this thing.”

Among its existing fanbase, “Time War” is beloved for being more like a longform, epistolary poem than a piece of fiction – but El-Mohtar and Gladstone found bigolas dickolas wolfwood’s tweet to be gorgeous in its own right.

“It’s a beautifully written tweet,” Gladstone told TechCrunch. “It’s a grand swell of Twitter rhetoric… the way it’s constructed, the use of cases, the use of stan violence…”

“Yes!” interjected El-Mohtar. “There’s a poetry to it!”

BookTok – a community on TikTok that talks about books – has revolutionized the publishing industry. Madeline Miller, who blurbed “Time War,” published “The Song of Achilles” in 2012 with an initial run of 20,000 copies. The book, a queer retelling of a story from “The Iliad,” went viral on BookTok in 2021, and has now sold more than 2 million copies. Writers like Emily Henry, Colleen Hoover and Taylor Jenkins Reid have experienced similar success, defying the standards of book publishing.

But Twitter is normally not a useful place to sell books.

“When you think of a book going viral, it’s usually on TikTok, and it’s because everyone is talking about it,” said Kelsey Weekman, an internet culture reporter who reads around 400 books per year. “For this book to have immediately blown up because of one single tweet… I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, especially not since BookTok.”

The problem with BookTok is that as authors’ careers have been propelled forward, so have the careers of “bookfluencers,” who make a living by creating content about books. The entire influencer economy is predicated on the belief that people are more likely to buy things when they get a recommendation from a friend (or, a cool person they follow online) – but when paid brand deals with publishers and the constant churn of content creation eclipse the unbridled joy of reading, fans might not see these recommendations as gospel.

Enter: bigolas dickolas wolfwood, an anime account who stopped tweeting about “Trigun” for just one moment to command to their followers, “*grabs you personally by the throat* you will do this. for me. you will go to the counter at barnes and noble. you will buy this. i will be greatly rewarded.” It was such a novel moment on Twitter that even Simon and Schuster’s corporate marketing account engaged with the tweet, which makes the whole situation even more delightful, because we now know that marketing executives at publishing houses are talking about “bigolas dickolas.”

“There’s so many people out there trying to be influencers, whose job it is to recommend books,” Weekman told TechCrunch. “But just seeing genuine enthusiasm from some random person about something makes it seem like a better investment to me. It feels refreshing to get a recommendation from a real person.”

Much like the TikTok For You page, the Amazon bestsellers list works in mysterious ways. Some publishing experts say that the list’s algorithm prioritizes the velocity of sales, rather than the total number – but no matter how you slice it, bigolas dickolas wolfwood is doing more for “Time War” this week than winning a Pulitzer did for “Demon Copperhead,” which sits at #6 on the list.

Unfortunately, due to how publishing works, Gladstone and El-Mohtar told TechCrunch they likely won’t know the extent of how this impacted their sales until next year. For now, they are basking in the glory of it all: how more people will read their book than ever before because of some anime fan with a silly dick joke as their Twitter display name.

“As much as it’s a part of the funniness of the narrative that it’s an anime fan account, there is actually a lot of anime at the heart of the book,” said El-Mohtar. She and Gladstone started writing “Time War” after exchanging their favorite anime, like “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” “Sailor Moon,” and yes, even “Trigun.”

Future royalties aside, Gladstone’s favorite part of the bigolas dickolas saga is that, as the current “main character” on Twitter, this random anime fan is not trying to drop their Soundcloud or sell galaxy lamps.

“The thing that they’re shooting their shot on from this whole absurd experience is tweeting Dark Horse Comics to ask them to reprint the original Trigun,” Gladstone said.

‘Bigolas Dickolas’ is more powerful than the Pulitzer Prize by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/bigolas-dickolas-time-war-booktok/

After the film “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” became a hit, topping $200 million at the worldwide box office, Hasbro wants more. Hasbro-owned production company eOne announced Thursday that it is launching a new free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel dedicated to the widely popular role-playing tabletop game. Variety was the first to cover the announcement.

The Dungeons & Dragons Adventures is a 24-hour FAST channel set to launch this summer. It will feature original programming based on campaigns played by content creators, third-party content from top influencers as well as older stuff like the 1983 animated Dungeons & Dragons series.

Original shows coming to the new channel include:

• Encounter Party: based on the podcast of the same name, the show features six members, including “The Walking Dead” star Khary Payton. The campaign occurs in the Forgotten Realms, a common setting in the game.
• Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!: variety improv show where special guests and celebrities act out as first-level players in battles against high-level monsters and beasts. The series was co-created by actor Matthew Lillard, mainly known for his role as Shaggy in the 2002 live-action “Scooby-Doo” movie.
• Heroes’ Feast: cooking competition/talk show based on the recipes of the bestselling cookbook, Heroes’ Feast. The show is co-hosted by “Insecure” actress Sujata Day and chef and internet personality Mike Haracz.

Hasbro said the Dungeons & Dragons Adventures FAST channel will live on several platforms, but the company hasn’t established any deals yet for which specifically, reported Variety.

Dungeons & Dragons made a massive comeback in recent years and is more mainstream nowadays. This is thanks to the many content creators that host livestreams featuring creative storytelling and impressive dice rolls.

For instance, “Critical Role,” a weekly show featuring a group of voice actors, has gone on to make millions, signing multiyear deals with Amazon to produce TV series based on its two campaigns, “Vox Machina” and “Mighty Nein.”

It’s nice to see more content creators — like “Encounter Party,” which arguably has less recognition than a high-paying channel like “Critical Role”– get a platform to showcase their collaborative stories. However, we’re curious whether the shows will draw a large audience.

The FAST market may be booming, but viewers mainly use the services to watch old movies and shows like episodes of “The Twilight Zone” or “Teen Mom.” Is the FAST space an optimal place for Dungeons & Dragons content? We’re not sure.

Also, it will be interesting to see what other content creators appear on the new channel, given the backlash from fans earlier this year.

In January, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) received backlash for updating its Open Gaming License, which appeared to threaten creators’ livelihoods.

Shortly after the protests, however, WoTC announced that it is licensing the game’s core mechanics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, allowing everyone to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons. (Hooray!)

While the issue has been resolved, content creators may still be wary of partnering with WoTC.

Either way, the Dungeons & Dragons Adventures FAST channel is certainly a fascinating move on WoTC’s part, yet it might be a pleasant surprise for fans.

Or it could flop. Who knows?

Dungeons & Dragons gets its very own streaming channel by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/dungeons-dragons-gets-its-very-own-streaming-channel/

Just two months ago, NFT trading platform Tensor raised $3 million in a seed round. Fast forward to today, and it is close to regaining its position as the biggest Solana-based NFT marketplace based on market share.

“A lot of momentum came from the announcement,” Tensor co-founder Richard Wu said, speaking about the seed round, which TechCrunch covered exclusively in March. “When it comes to a marketplace, liquidity is key to attract users, and it had a snowball effect on itself.”

Tensor last week reached 45% of Solana’s NFT market share, surpassing Solana-centric NFT marketplace Magic Eden’s 44% share over a seven-day period, according to data collected by Tiexo. While the 1% difference may seem nominal, it’s a huge jump for a fairly new platform up against a giant with almost 200x the users.

Tensor launched a private beta in June 2022 and opened to the public the following month. In March, it had over 30,000 monthly active users, and by April, its MAU was up about 317% to over 125,000, co-founder Ilja Moisejevs said.

Compared to Magic Eden, which has 22 million unique monthly visitors, that makes its share of the market is substantial.

Magic Eden has since regained the top slot for Solana-based NFT volume over the past seven days with 44.2% share, per Tiexo data, and Tensor isn’t far behind at 40.5%. But market share is “not the top priority” for Tensor, Wu said. “For us, market share is a proxy for what we’re building, but at the end of the day, our goal is to grow Solana 10x.”

“I think a lot of people on Twitter like to dramatize things,” Moisejevs said. “They want to see a battle of marketplaces. There’s healthy competition between us [and Magic Eden], but the point we want to drive home is we’re not here to win 80% of a non-existent market. We want us to win, Solana to win, and we will be a bigger business if Solana as a chain does well.”

Solana is the third-largest blockchain for NFTs by sales volume, with over $3.96 billion in all-time sales, according to data from NFT aggregator CryptoSlam. In the past 30 days, Solana NFT sales volume decreased about 24.4% to $73.3 million, the data showed.

In general, the Solana ecosystem is getting stronger, at least compared to six months ago, Wu said. One prime example of that is the people and projects like Mad Lads, he said, adding that at one point, it was a top collection by volume ahead of some Ethereum blue chip collections. “What they’ve done and demonstrated with their launch on Solana is incredible.”

Tensor is climbing to the top of the Solana NFT marketplace totem pole by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/tensor-solana-nft-market-share/

Peloton is recalling roughly 2.2 million exercise bikes over safety concerns, several outlets reported this morning.

The reason is a faulty assembly, according to a release by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The bike — Bike Model PL01 — can “break during use, posing fall and injury hazards to the user,” the agency says, citing the over-two-dozen reports Peloton has received about the seat post breaking and detaching during use.

The bike model impacted by the recall was manufactured in Taiwan and sold in the U.S. between January 2018 and May 2023 at Peloton, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Amazon. It can be identified by a label on the inside front fork, near its flywheel or non-swivel display, or by the red “P” logo and Peloton brand name in white on the frame.

The CPSC says that there’s been 13 reports of injuries on the bike so far, including a fractured wrist, lacerations and bruises.

“Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled exercise bikes and contact Peloton for a free repair,” the CPSC release said. “Peloton is offering consumers a free seat post that can be self-installed.”

The recall comes just over a year after Peloton began outsourcing the production of its bikes and treadmills following its decision to pull the plug on a $400 million manufacturing facility. It’s the company’s second recall in the past several years, after a child’s death and other problems forced it to recall 125,000 of its Tread and Tread+ treadmills. (Initially, Peloton called the CPSC’s findings “inaccurate and misleading,” but changed its tune in light of the high-profile accidents.)

The recalls have been quite damaging for Peloton, which has struggled to maintain sales momentum after pandemic-era business tapered off. The company estimated that the Tread and Tread+ recalls cost it approximately $165 million, including $105 million for ending deliveries on the impacted products and $50 million for full refunds.

Peloton recalls millions of exercise bikes after reports of injuries by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/peloton-recalls-millions-of-exercise-bikes-after-reports-of-injuries/

AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks to an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. That’s up from $91 million when the round closed in November.

The extended Series C, which saw participation investors including Congruent Ventures and Wellington Management (who co-led), Blue Earth Capital, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Tao Capital Partners, XN, Sequoia Capital, GV, Range Ventures and Valor Equity Partners, brings AMP’s total raised to around $178 million.

“The capital is helping us scale our operations, including deploying technology solutions to retrofit existing recycling infrastructure and expanding new infrastructure based on our application of AI-powered automation,” founder and CEO Matanya Horowitz told TechCrunch via email.

Horowitz founded AMP in 2014 after earning his Ph.D. from Caltech. While pursuing his doctorate, he says he saw how powerful computer vision was becoming, and began exploring different areas where the technology could be most useful — including recycling.

“After visiting a recycling facility and seeing not only how demanding conditions were, but how challenging of a working environment it could be, I recognized this industry was a compelling opportunity for robotics,” Horowitz said. “The convergence of machine learning and robotics offered compelling opportunities to automate what had historically been tasks that were labor intensive, high cost, inconsistent and limiting.”

It’s also lucrative. The recycling industry contributes nearly $117 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, and the industry processes 130 million metric tons of valuable commodities annually.

Horowitz asserts that landfilled plastics represent significant losses to the U.S. economy — an average of around $7.2 billion in 2019, per the Department of Energy (DoE). Of the estimated 44 million metric tons of plastic waste managed domestically in 2019, approximately 86% was landfilled, 9% was combusted and 5% was recycled, according to the DoE.

The recovery of U.S. plastic packaging and food-service plastic alone could represent a pool of earnings of $2 billion to $4 billion per year, Horowitz estimates.

AMP’s primary customers are recycling facilities, who use the startup’s flagship product, a robotic sorting system called AMP Cortex, to sort, pick and reclaim plastics, cardboard, paper, cans, cartons and other containers and packaging types. AMP claims that Cortex can perform 80 to 120 picks per minute while remaining accurate with respect to what it’s sorting where.

Recently, AMP, which employs a team of around 200 people, unveiled a more compact solution dubbed AMP Cortex-C alongside an integrated, standalone facility offering for waste management companies. Horowitz says that the company’s robotic fleet of around 275 is now deployed in over 100 centers including several owned by Waste Connections, its largest customer, and that AMP’s AI platform has identified over 75 billion objects to date.

“Our broad product suite directly deals with the core challenges of operating recycling facilities, and we have some other amazing technology soon to come,” Horowitz added. “We have a number of larger opportunities in front of us, from opportunities in Europe and across the world, to large, fleet-wide deployments of robots and deployment of fully automated sorting facilities. The capital helps us build the technologies and team to support these opportunities.”

On the subject, AMP plans to grow its secondary sortation business in the U.S. across its three production facilities in the Denver, Atlanta and Cleveland metro areas. In addition to providing robotics infrastructure and software to customers, AMP resells recyclable commodities like bespoke chemical and polymer blends to end-market buyers.

AMP Robotics attracts investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/amp-robotics-attracts-investment-from-microsofts-climate-innovation-fund/