Facebook shuts down Hobbi, its experimental app for documenting personal projects

Facebook’s recently launched app, Hobbi, an experiment in short-form content creation around personal projects, hobbies, and other Pinterest-y content, is already shutting down. The app first arrived on iOS in February as one of now several launches from Facebook’s internal R&D group, the NPE Team.

Hobbi users have now been notified by way of push notification that the app is shutting down on July 10, 2020. The app allows users to export their data from its settings.

In the few months it’s been live on the U.S. App Store, Hobbi only gained 7,000 downloads, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. Apptopia also reported the app had under 10K downloads and saw minimal gains during May and June.

Though Hobbi clearly took cues from Pinterest, it was not designed to be a pinboard of inspirational ideas. Instead, Hobbi users would organize photos of their projects — like gardening, cooking, arts & crafts, décor, and more — in a visual diary of sorts. The goal was to photograph the project’s progress over time, adding text to describe the steps, as needed.

The end result would be a highlight reel of all those steps that could be published externally when the project was completed.

But Hobbi was a fairly bare bones app. There was nothing else to do but document your own projects. You couldn’t browse and watch projects other users had created, beyond a few samples, nor could you follow top users across the service. And even the tools for documentation were underdeveloped. Beyond a special “Notes” field for writing down a project’s steps, the app experience felt like a watered-down version of Stories.

Image Credits: Hobbi

Facebook wasn’t alone in pursuing the potential of short-form creative content. Google’s internal R&D group, Area 120, also published its own experiment in this area with the video app Tangi. And Pinterest was recently spotted testing a new version of Story Pins, that would allow users to showcase DIY and creative content in a similar way.

It’s not surprising to see Hobbi wind down so quickly, given its lack of traction. Facebook already said its NPE Team experiments would involve apps that changed very rapidly and would shut down if consumers didn’t find them useful.

In addition to Hobbi, the NPE Team has launched a number of apps since last summer, including meme creator Whale, conversational app Bump, music app Aux, couples app Tuned, Apple Watch app Kit, audio calling app CatchUp, collaborative music app Collab, live event companion Venue, and predictions app Forecast. Before Hobbi, the only one to have shut down was Bump. (Some are not live in the U.S., either.)

Of course, Facebook may not intend to use these experiments to create a set of entirely new social apps built from the ground-up. Instead, it’s likely looking to collect data about what features resonate with users and how different creation tools are used. This is data that can inform Facebook’s development of features for its main set of apps, like Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment but one had not been provided at the time of publication.

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Trump suspended from Twitch, as Reddit bans the ‘The_Donald’ and additional subreddits

Two big new pieces of news today from the ongoing battle between social media and politics. Both Twitch and Reddit have made moves against political content, citing violations of terms of service.

Twitch confirmed today that it has temporarily suspended the president’s account. “Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch,” a spokesperson for the streaming giant told TechCrunch. “In line with our policies, President Trump’s channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed.”

Twitch specifically cites two incidents from campaign rallies, uttered by Trump at rallies four years apart. The first comes from his campaign kickoff, including the now infamous words:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

The second is from the recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his first since COVID-19-related shutdowns ground much of presidential campaigning to a halt. Here’s the pertinent bit from that:

Hey, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the morning and a very tough, I’ve used the word on occasion, hombre, a very tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do. And you call 911 and they say, “I’m sorry, this number’s no longer working.” By the way, you have many cases like that, many, many, many. Whether it’s a young woman, an old woman, a young man or an old man and you’re sleeping.

Twitch tells TechCrunch that it offered the following guidance to Trump’s team when the channel was launched, “Like anyone else, politicians on Twitch must adhere to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. We do not make exceptions for political or newsworthy content, and will take action on content reported to us that violates our rules.”

Going to war with Twitter, Trump threatens critical social media legal protections

That news follows the recent ban of the massive The_Donald subreddit, which sported more than 790,000 users, largely devoted to sharing content about Trump. Reddit confirmed the update to its policy that resulted in the ban, along with 2,000 other subreddits, including one devoted to the hugely popular leftist comedy podcast, Chapo Trap House.

The company cites the following new rules:

• Rule 1 explicitly states that communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
  • There is an expanded definition of what constitutes a violation of this rule, along with specific examples, in our Help Center article.
    
• Rule 2 ties together our previous rules on prohibited behavior with an ask to abide by community rules and post with authentic, personal interest.
  • Debate and creativity are welcome, but spam and malicious attempts to interfere with other communities are not.
    
• The other rules are the same in spirit but have been rewritten for clarity and inclusiveness.
  

It adds:

All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more.

Reddit adds that it banned the smaller Chapo board for “consistently host[ing] rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.”

Trump in particular has found himself waging war on social media sites. After Twitter played whack-a-mole with problematic tweets around mail-in voting and other issues, he signed an executive order taking aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects sites from being sued for content posted by users.

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Cities are wrestling with a potential new exodus in the COVID-19 era, but Urban-X still believes in their future

Embodying the tensions that cities across the world face as they wrestle with controlling a pandemic in dense, urban environments, Urban-X, the accelerator for technology startups focused on the problems cities face, has launched its eighth, fully remote, cohort.

While the accelerator program backed by the BMW-owned Mini Cooper automaker and the venture capital firm Urban Us is based in Brooklyn, it’s conducting its latest program virtually, with participating startups coming from Atlanta, Sydney, San Francisco, Boston, Burlington, and Los Angeles, according to a statement.

“Long term, we are bullish on cities. I think that COVID and climate change share some things in common. If we think that COVID is disruptive, and not only a threat to economic livelihood but human life, climate change, is certainly a much larger threat,” said Micah Kotch, the managing director of Urban-X. “I think that cities have withstood pandemics previously. I think that we will moving forward. The clear things that we need are really good political leadership. We need to heed science and to act quickly based on the best possible science and we need collective action. And that’s where I see a lot of overlap between covid and climate.”

The latest batch of companies that Urban-X will work with includes:

• Adiona: a machine learning-based service to optimize hourly workforces in logistics and supply chain management. 
• Aquagenuity: a company providing search information about water quality for consumers
• Climate Robotics: a manufacturer of robots that produce carbon-sequestering and soil-improving biochar
• Mobilyze: the developer of a data analytics service for electric vehicle charging station site optimization
• Resonant Link: the creator of a wireless charging service to power robots and electric vehicles.
• Xtelligent: a company rethinking traffic signal technology

“Not everyone can afford to move out to the suburbs and not everyone wants to. Cities are going to continue to be the epicenters of creativity and innovation,” said Kotch. “While these last three-and-a-half to four months have been a real challenge, particularly here in the U.S. we are deep believers in the vibrancy and necessity of cities.”

Later stage investors think that the Urban-X thesis can create viable businesses, with about 85 percent of the accelerator’s companies going on to raise additional rounds of funding. Some of the most successful companies (in terms of capital raised) include Bowery Farming, Starcity, Mark43, One Concern, Future Motion, Skycatch, Seamlessdocs, Revivn, BRCK and Rachio.

“Technology, investment and mentorship have the power to advance the low carbon, resilient and high density future we need for our cities,” said Shaun Abrahamson, URBAN-X Investment Committee and Managing Partner at Urban Us. “We are thrilled to have this new group of founders join URBAN-X to build creative solutions that tackle climate change and the biggest issues facing our cities.”

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Amazon and Valentino team up in joint lawsuit against New York counterfeiter over Rockstud knock-offs

Amazon is ramping up its efforts to tackle counterfeiting on its platform by aiming for the higher end of the fashion market. Today the e-commerce giant announced that it has jointly filed a lawsuit with Italian luxury brand Valentino against Buffalo, New York-based Kaitlyn Pan Group, LLC and New York resident Hao Pan for copying a famous Valentino shoe style — the Garavani Rockstud, pictured above — and subsequently selling those products on Amazon and Kaitlyn Pan’s own site, “in violation of Amazon’s policies and Valentino’s intellectual property rights.”

Amazon said that any proceeds that result from the suit will go straight to Valentino itself. We’ve asked how much the companies are seeking in damages and will update this post with more information as we get it. We are embedding the suit below the article.

Notably, this is the first time that Amazon has teamed up with a luxury brand to go after counterfeiters in the courts, although it has partnered with other brands in the past. As with those previous cases, it’s important for Amazon to work with the brands to show it’s a friend to legitimate commerce by working actively to stop illicit sales.

Alongside that, however, Amazon has been making huge efforts to raise its game in fashion, and so it’s extremely important that it fights against the image that its a fertile ground for selling and buying illegal knock-off items of famous brands.

Getting off on the right foot — so to speak — with Valentino is part of that. The Garavani Rockstud (“Garavani” comes from Valentino’s full name, Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani) is one of Valentino’s most iconic styles, with its metallic lines of studs making an appearance on a range of Valentino footwear including sandals, heels and flats. They were first introduced in 2010 and Valentino has design patents on the style.

Kaitlyn Pan currently sells a number of models that riff on that basic concept. Typically, authentic Valentino Rockstud shoes retail for between $425 and $1,100, while the Pan versions sell for significantly less, around $100.

You can see where the problem lies.

While the shoes are not being sold as Valentino and do not use the Rockstud branding, they could easily be mistaken for them (and may have even been promoted using that keyword when they were still being sold on Amazon):

One thing that isn’t really covered in the Amazon/Valentino suit, but you have to wonder about, is the role that other play in enabling the illicit sales of the items. In the case of Kaitlyn Pan, the site is powered by none other than Shopify, for example.

“The vast majority of sellers in our store are honest entrepreneurs but we do not hesitate to take aggressive action to protect customers, brands, and our store from counterfeiters,” said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president, Customer Trust and Partner Support, in a statement. “Amazon and Valentino are holding this company accountable in a court of law and we appreciate Valentino’s collaboration throughout this investigation.”

Amazon said that it shut down Kaitlyn Pan’s seller account in September 2019, and it did not specify how many pairs of Pan’s shoes were sold via Amazon before then. As of today, the Pan models are still being sold directly on Kaitlyn Pan.

And rather audaciously, despite getting forced out of Amazon’s marketplace and being slapped with cease and desist orders from Valentino, Kaitlyn Pan has applied to the USPTO to trademark the style.

Valentino, like other expensive luxury brands, regularly gets copied and counterfeited, and that has been the case for decades. But arguably, the rise of e-commerce, where it can be harder to trace sellers and products have a higher chance of being disseminated more widely, has compounded that problem.

So the company has made a more concerted effort to fight back. In the past three years, it’s worked with US Customs to seize more than 2,000 counterfeit products and work on a surveillance system to detect counterfeit products on sale in the US market, leading to the removal of more than 7,000 listings across multiple marketplaces, 360 websites and more than 1,000 social media accounts.

“The Maison Valentino is one of the main protagonists of International fashion and plays a major role in the luxury division by sustaining Made in Italy,” Valentino said in a statement. “The brand represents in the global market, one of the Italian excellences in the execution of the industrial process in Italy and of the artisanal and handmade workmanship that are entirely produced in the historic Atelier of Piazza Mignanelli in Rome. We consider Made in Italy to be a fundamental value to be fully endorsed, respected and at the forefront of our business and creations. Valentino is an Italian brand operating globally and is a mirror of society. One of our core missions is to safeguard our brand and protect the Valentino Community by celebrating inclusivity and with creativity at the heart of everything we do. We feel this connection with Amazon will highlight the importance also in fashion for greater awareness, knowledge and understanding by shielding the brand online and its resources.”

Amazon’s role in creating an avenue for counterfeit items to be sold has been a problematic one for the company for years: it has invested in building technology to tackle the problem — in 2019, it said that it had invested over $500 million and dedicated 8,000 employees working on fraud and abuse (which includes IP infringement and counterfeit goods) — and it works with law enforcement and collaborates with authorities to build cases against infringing companies and people. But its critics continue to call out the company and its track record, saying it still has not done enough to address the issue — which of course still results in sales, and thus revenues — on its platform.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

View this document on Scribd

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Snap lets you play as your Bitmoji in third-party games

Snap is announcing at its Snap Partner Summit that the first games that will take advantage of Bitmoji will roll out soon. The feature has already been announced last year, and it looks like developers can finally take advantage of that SDK. You’ll be able to play a game with you as the hero — or at least the Bitmoji representation of you.

While this feature is reminiscent of Xbox Avatars or Nintendo’s Mii on the Wii, 3DS and Wii U, Bitmoji for Games is a cross-platform solution, from mobile games to console games and PC games. The issue with console-specific avatars are that you can’t support Xbox Avatars on PlayStation consoles for instance — that could be the reason why console manufacturers have been slowly phasing out those avatars. Bitmoji for Games could potentially solve that issue.

Having said that, the initial list of partners only includes mobile games on iOS and Android. Games include Super Brawl Universe from Nickelodeon and Playsoft, Uno from Mattel, Scrabble GO from Scopely and a soon-to-be-announced game from French startup Voodoo.

Let’s hope that Snap will be able to expand its list of partners beyond board games and casual mobile games. For instance, I would totally see Bitmoji for Games in Just Dance.

Here’s a concept video presenting the feature. As you can see, you just have to connect with your Snapchat account to import your Bitmoji to third-party games:

In other news, Snap is adding more games to Snapchat. There are already more than a dozen games that you can play with your friends when you’re chatting with them. Some of them are built in-house while others are developed by third-party game makers.

According to the company, 100 million Snapchat users have played a game since the feature launched last year. On average, users who choose to play Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-inspired game that lets you compete with your friends in mini-games, spend 20 minutes in the game in a given day.

There’s a direct correlation between engagement and monetization as Snap doesn’t rely on micro-transactions and in-app purchases with Snap Games. The company monetizes this feature with video ads.

“We took a look at the state of mobile gaming a few years back and observed that so many successful games on mobile didn’t have your friends that deeply integrated into the experience,” Director of Product Will Wu told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of games you just play solo on the bus or on the airplane or something like that. For us, we were really looking to recreate that experience that we may have had growing up, sitting side by side with our friends playing a game on a couch together. You’re actually looking at the same screen.”

The most interesting new game that the company will release in the coming months is Bitmoji Paint. This game is a sort of casual Minecraft-inspired creativity game. Users play together on the same planet and can paint tiles on the ground. It lets you create pixel art and look at other creations.

Other new games include Bumped Out (Zynga), Friend Quizzes (Game Closure), Ready Set Golf! (PikPok) and Sling Racers (Madbox). They will be released over the coming months.

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Pinterest has begun testing a new version of stories, called Story Pins, with U.S. creators

The “Stories” format popularized by Snapchat is now commonly used across social platforms. Today, there are Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, and YouTube Stories. for example. Even Twitter and Spotify are testing the concept. Last year, Pinterest also joined in by experimenting with a feature called “Story Pins” which allowed creators to share their ideas in a Stories-like format. These Story Pins could contain multiple pages of text, images, video, and links, but the new format never launched to the public. As it turns out, the product has not been scrapped. It’s been revised.

Pinterest in April invited an expanded group of U.S. creators to test a new, second version of Story Pins, this time focused on offering “inspirational content” to uplift Pinterest users amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In a message shared with testers, Pinterest explained that people were “looking for positive messages and inspiration” and how creators, now more than ever, could help deliver that content.

Unlike Stories on other platforms, which are often self-focused snippets from someone’s life, Pinterest Stories Pins are designed as clickable content focused on sharing ideas.

For example, Story Pins could offer a step-by-step guide to cooking a recipe or creating a craft project. A Story Pin could also offer ideas around how to reorganize your home office, keeping the kids entertained, beauty tutorials, and more.

This sort of content has been popular on Pinterest while U.S. consumers were stuck at home under coronavirus government lockdowns. Pinterest said in April searches for “home office” had spiked 70% over the past few weeks, for instance. And searches for recipes, baking ideas, kids’ education, crafts, gardening, and more have also regularly trended.

Pinterest isn’t alone in understanding consumer demand for this sort of content. Both Google and Facebook launched apps in recent weeks dedicated to creating content around crafting and DIY projects with the launch of Google’s Tangi and Facebook’s Hobbi, from the companies’ respective R&D divisions. TikTok, meanwhile, is continuing to capture users’ attention — including in areas like arts and crafts, DIY projects, cooking, and more that had previously been Pinterest’s territory.

Though Pinterest had tested its Story Pins feature in 2019 in markets like the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere, the new version being trialed in closed U.S. beta has seen some changes.

The current version now offers a native experience where all the content will live within the Story Pin itself instead of linking off-platform. This is in response to early feedback from Pinners who said they didn’t want to have to leave the Pinterest app to complete a project.

The Story Pin is also paired with a revamped ecosystem designed around Story Pin discovery, allowing Pinterest users to find the Pins in new places like Pinterest’s Today tab, for example.

In addition, the latest version has added more creative editing and publishing features, like topic tagging, color customization, and support for video.

These changes are notable as Story Pins now create first-party content for Pinterest itself. They fall somewhere in between longer-form blog posts and the shorter, ephemeral content found on other companies’ Story platforms.

One tester, @whimchic on Twitter, was among the first to publish screenshots of the updated experience back in April, after receiving an invite to closed beta test following their participation in user research surveys.

(See below).

#PinterestCreators #contentcreation #storypins feature from . @Pinterest. Smart new #visualstorytelling tool! pic.twitter.com/2vTbtkgsiB

— whimchic (@whimchic) April 24, 2020

 

 

Look at this… https://t.co/pGLmwSYDdP

— whimchic (@whimchic) June 9, 2020

Pinterest confirmed to TechCrunch that version 2 of Story Pins began testing with more U.S. creators starting in April, but notes the product is still not generally available. Creators cannot ask to join the beta, either — they’re only allowed in if Pinterest directly invites them.

“Content creators are the heart of Pinterest and have always been a core part of the platform, as they provide the inspiration that millions engage with every day. We’re always testing new ways to respond to creator feedback and give them more tools to bring their ideas to a growing audience,” a Pinterest spokesperson said.

“As such, we’ve been testing a new Pin format, Story Pins, that enables creators to develop longer-form content with videos, images, and text. Story Pins give creators new editing and publishing capabilities, as well as options to include how-to instructions for ideas like recipes, DIY projects and beauty tutorials, that Pinners can then discover and save to their own boards,” they added.

Pinterest says the test with U.S. creators is ongoing and it will have more to share around Story Pins’ availability in the coming months.

(Images provided by @whimchic on Twitter.) 

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