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It seems obvious that the best way to advertise a game is to let people play the game itself — and we’ve covered other startups tackling this problem, such as AppOnboard and mNectar.

But Luna Labs co-founder and CEO Steven Chard said that for most developers, the creation of these ads involves outsourcing: “It might take weeks to make an ad, and the quality of the content at the end could be limited.”

The problem, Chard said, is that most games are built on the Unity engine, while the ads need to be in HTML5, which means that developers often have to build playable ads from scratch — hence the outsourcing.

“There’s this huge demand for playables, but the tech hasn’t caught up with it,” he said. “Our view — and I think why it’s really resonating with developers — we’re saying to developers: Use that same [Unity] editor to create a playable ad. You’re going to give the user a playable ad which genuinely feels like the game.”

In fact, while Luna is officially launching its service to developers this week, it’s already been working with a few partners like Kwalee and Voodoo. Luna says that in Kwalee’s case, the results were good enough that the company spent 60% more than they did on other playable ads, and the Luna playables drove more than 250,000 installs per day.

“Luna is solving a real pain point for our studio, and the initial results have been tremendous,” said Kwalee CRO Jason Falcus in a statement. “Integrating the Luna service has allowed us to significantly scale our campaigns by a comfortable margin, to the best results so far.”

Luna’s investors include Ben Holmes (formerly of Index Ventures, backer of King and Playfish) and Chris Lee (who also invested in Space Ape and Hello Games).

Chard said the startup is currently focused on providing tools to developers, rather than getting involved in the ad-buying process. More generally, he said the company has been focused on the technology rather than the business model.

“We’re an early company with a very, very complex piece of technology — it’s taken a lot of time to get where we are,” he said. “We’re not doing it for free, but the focus isn’t on short-term profitability. It is, in the longer term, on creating a scalable product which can be used by developers.”

Chard added that eventually, he’s hoping Luna can become more involved in “at the content creation level.” For example, he suggested that developers could use the technology to test out playable concepts and see what resonates, before building a full game.

You can test it out for yourself on the Luna Labs website.

The AWS DeepRacer is an almost toylike 1/18th scale race car. It comes with all of the sensors and software tools to help developers build machine learning models to drive the car around a course — or really do anything else they want it to do. The $399 DeepRacer launched at AWS’s massive re:Invent show in late 2018.

At the time, it seemed like a bit of a gimmick, but AWS has put a lot of its weight behind it and is currently running a DeepRacer league at its various events around the world. At these events, developers can pit their models against each other and learn more about building a specific kind of machine learning model in the process.

Why bother, though? It’s not like DeepRacer cars are likely to add to AWS’s bottom line anytime soon. DeepRacer, however, is part of a line of hardware products from AWS that started with DeepLens, a smart camera for developers.

“It really comes from the same place,” AWS general manager for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning marketing Ryan Gavin told me. “When you think about the stimulus for something like DeepLens, it was really about how do we put machine learning into the hands of every developer and data scientist. That’s our mission and we’re very consistent about that.”

This morning Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) flipped the 5G switch on four additional cities. Washington DC, Atlanta, Detroit and Indianapolis join Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Providence in getting coverage for the carrier’s growing next-generation network.

All of the usual caveats apply here. While the list of cities continues to grow, coverage varies from city to city to such a point where Verizon currently includes specific neighborhoods in these announcements. Here’s the break down,

In Washington DC, consumers, businesses and government agencies can initially access Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service in areas of Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, Cardozo / U Street, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Le Droit Park, Georgetown Waterfront, Judiciary Square, Shaw, Eckington, NOMA, National Mall and the Smithsonian, Gallery Place / Chinatown, Mt. Vernon Square, Downtown, Penn Quarter, Brentwood, Southwest Waterfront, Navy Yard, and nearby Crystal City, VA, as well as around landmarks such as the Ronald Reagan National Airport, United States Botanical Gardens, Hart Senate Building, National Gallery of Art, Lafayette Square, The White House, Freedom Plaza, Farragut Square, George Washington University, Capital One Arena, Union Station, Howard University Hospital, George Washington University Hospital, and Georgetown Waterfront Park.

In Atlanta, 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in parts of the following neighborhoods: Downtown, Midtown, Tech Square, and around such landmarks as The Fox Theater, Emory University Hospital Midtown, Mercedes Benz Stadium, Home Depot Backyard, Centennial Olympic Park, Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca Cola, and parts of Renaissance Park.

In Detroit, 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in parts of the following areas: Dearborn, Livonia, and Troy, including areas around the Oakland-Troy Airport.

In Indianapolis, 5G Ultra Wideband service is initially available in parts of the following neighborhoods, Arsenal Heights, Bates Hendricks, Castleton, Crown Hill, Fountain Square, Grace Tuxedo Park, Hawthorne, Historic Meridian Park, Lockerbie Square, Ransom Place, Renaissance Place, St. Joseph Historic Neighborhood, Upper Canal and Woodruff Place and around such landmarks and public spaces as Garfield Park, and Indiana University School of Medicine.

The carrier adds that service will be expanded within the above cities “in the months to come.” But hey, the White House is covered, which means even more rapid tweet storms. Verizon is adding a bunch more cities by the end of the year, including Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Des Moines, Houston, Kansas City, Little Rock, Memphis, Phoenix, San Diego and Salt Lake City.

That will bring the total up to 30 for 2019.

The device selection is still limited, too for the moment. Verizon currently offers the LG V50 ThinQ 5G, Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Moto Z, which has an option 5G mod. There’s a 5G MiFi from Inseego available, as well.

A group of sex tech startup founders, employees and supporters gathered outside of Facebook’s NY office in Manhattan to protest its advertising policies with respect to what it classifies as sexual content. The protest, and a companion website detailing their position we reported on Tuesday, are the work of ‘Approved, Not Approved,’ a coalition of sex health companies co-founded by Dame Products and Unbound Babes.

These policies are applied have fallen out of step with “the average person’s views of what should or shouldn’t be approved of ads,” according to Janet Lieberman, co-founder and CTO of Dame Products.

“If you look at the history of the sex toy industry, for example, vibrators were sexual health products, until advertising restrictions were put on them in the 1920s and 1930s – and then they became dirty, and that’s how the industry got shady, and that’s why we have negative thoughts towards them,” she told me in an interview at the protest. “They’re moving back towards wellness in people’s minds, but not in advertising policies. There’s a double standard for what is seen as obscene, talking about men’s sexual health versus women’s sexual health and talking about products that aren’t sexual, and using sex to sell them, versus taking sexual products and having completely non-sexual ads for them.”

Credit: TechCrunch

It’s a problem that extends beyond just Facebook and Instagram, Lieberman says. In fact, her company is also suing NYC’s MTA for discrimination for its own ad standards after it refused to run ads for women’s sex toys in their out-of-home advertising inventory. But it also has ramifications beyond just advertising, since in many ways what we see in ads helps define what we see as acceptable in terms of our everyday lives and conversations.

“Some of this stems from society’s inability to separate sexual products from feeling sexual, and that’s a real problem that we see that hurts women more than men, but hurts both genders, in not knowing how to help our sexual health,” Lieberman said. “We can’t talk about it without being sexual, and that we can’t bring things up, without it seeming like we’re bringing up something that is dirty.”

Credit: Unbound / Dame Products

“A lot of the people you see here today have Instagrams that have been shut down, or ads that have been not approved on Facebook,” said Bryony Cole, CEO at Future of Sex in an interview. “Myself, I run Future of Sex, which is a sex tech hackathon, and a podcast focused on sex tech, and my Instagram’s been shut down twice with no warning. It’s often for things that Facebook will say they consider phallic imagery, but they’re not […] and yet if you look at images for something like HIMS [an erectile dysfunction medication startup, examples of their ads here], you’ll see those phallic practice images. So there’s this gross discrepancy, and it’s very frustrating, especially for these companies where a lot of the revenue in their business is around community that are online which is true for sex toys.”

Online ads aren’t just a luxury for many of these startup brands and companies – they’re a necessary ingredient to continued success. Google and Facebook together account for the majority of digital advertising spend in the U.S., according to eMarketer, and it’s hard to grow a business that caters to primarily online customers without fair access to their platforms, Cole argues.

“You see a lot of sex tech or sexual wellness brands having to move off Instagram and find other ways to reach their communities,” she said. “But the majority of people, that’s where they are. And if they’re buying these products, they’re still overcoming a stigma about buying the product, so it’s great to be able to purchase these online. A lot of these companies started either crowdfunding, like Dame Products, or just through ecommerce sites. So the majority of their business is online. It’s not in a store.”

Credit: Unbound / Dame Products

Earlier this year, sex tech company Lora DiCarlo netted a win in getting the Consumer Technology Association to restore its CES award after community outcry. Double standards in advertising is a far more systemic and distributed problem, but these protests will hopefully help open up the conversation and prompt more change.

There’s plenty of reason to be excited for The Irishman. The Netflix-backed film teams Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci for a biopic based on the lives of organied crime-linked union figures Frank Sheeran and Jimmy Hoffa. But it’s the effects that have everyone talking.

Granted, that’s not the kind of phrase you generally hear in the lead up to a Scorsese film (particularly one that unites him with both De Niro and Pacino for the first time), but the involvement of Industrial Light & Magic has piqued the internet’s interest.

Lucasfilm’s special effects wing was tasked with de-aging the leads — in particular De Niro — as the septuagenarian actors play their characters at a range of different ages. The first trailer for the film, which hit this morning, features a notably younger De Niro in the role of Sheeran, the film’s titular Irishman.

The two minute trailer looks to be classic Scorsese: a stylized period piece with high tension and plenty of organized violence. There’s no release date yet for the film, which also stars  Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin and Ray Romano, but it’s expected to appear in select theaters along with the streaming service — similar to Netflix’s award-focused approach with last year’s Oscar-winning Roma.

Leveraging new remote sensing and monitoring technologies and the willingness of corporate insurance programs to provide more preventative treatment to reduce longterm costs, Hello Heart has raised $12 million in new financing to further develop its business.

The money came from Khosla Ventures and previous backer Blue Run Ventures. The company said it will use the financing to expand its business.

Hello Heart tackles high blood pressure and heart disease with early monitoring coming from an at-home sensing system to track blood pressure and an integrated smart phone application providing prompts on behaviors to reduce high blood pressure.

According to a retrospective study paid for by Hello Heart and conducted by researchers at UCLA and Harvard Medical School, 70% of Hello Heart users managed to reduce their blood pressure an average of 22mmHg.

“Delivering clinical outcomes at the scale of population health requires strong patient engagement across a variety of patient types.  Hello Heart’s ability to drive engagement is what led to these unprecedented results,” said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman a Harvard medical school faculty researcher, and the chief medical and innovation officer of Sheba medical center.

The company collects all the data on its patients in a randomized and anonymized fashion in order to provide information on population health, according to a statement. In an interview, Maayan Cohen, the chief executive officer of the company said that Hello Heart did not sell any data to third parties.

“Our mission is to empower patients to understand and improve their health, and we’re very proud to be able to help them do it so effectively in heart health — [the number one] cause of death in the world.”

Snapchat is hoping to attract new advertisers (and make advertising easier for the ones already on the platform) with the launch of a new tool called Instant Create.

Some of these potential advertisers may not be used to creating ads in the smartphone-friendly vertical format that Snapchat has popularized, so Instant Create is to designed to make the process as simple as possible.

Executives at parent organization Snap discussed the tool during last week’s earnings call (in which the company reported that its daily active users increased to 203 million).

“Just this month we started testing our new Instant Create on-boarding flow, which generates ads for businesses in three simple steps from their existing assets, be it their app or their ecommerce storefront,” said CEO Evan Spiegel.

Now the product is moving from testing to availability for all advertisers using Snapchat’s self-serve Ads Manager.

Those three steps that Spiegel mentioned involve identifying the objective of a campaign (website visits, app installs or app visits), entering you website address and finalizing you audience targeting.

You can upload your creative assets if you want, but that’s not required since Instant Create will also import images from your website. And Snap notes that you won’t need to do any real design work, because there’s “a streamlined ad creation flow that leverages our most popular templates and simplified ad detail options, enabling you to publish engaging creative without additional design resources.”

The goal is to make Snapchat advertisers accessible to smaller advertisers who may not have the time or resources to try to understand new ad formats. After all, on that same earnings call, Chief Business Officer Jeremi Gorman said, “We believe the single biggest driver for our revenue in the short to medium term will be increasing the number of active advertisers using Snapchat.”

Instant Create is currently focused Snapchat’s main ad format, Snap Ads. You can read more in the company’s blog post.

New gear from DJI will equip you with everything you need to become the best first-person drone racer that’s ever graced the Earth – you’ll be the Anakin Skywalker of FPV drone races. The company is launching a new suite of products specifically to make the most of Digital First Person Viewing (FPV) when operating drones, with a wide range of compatibility.

The DJI Digital FPV Ecosystem includes a set of FPV goggles, a transmission unit that you attach to your drone of choice, a camera that also attaches to the transmitter unit and the drone body, and an FPV controller. Together, they provide the “first low latency HD video transmission signal” according to DJI, with total end-to-end latency of just 28 milliseconds per the specs, and the ability to transmit 720p footage at 120fps with that low lag transmission.

There are a few key ingredients here that are tuned specifically to the needs of drone racers here: low-latency is important because you want the video feed to be as real-time as possible when you’re racing high-speed drones around courses with tight turns and a field of airborne competitors you can potentially run into. And high-quality speed, with a high refresh rate for the video, is important for similar reasons – you need to ‘see’ accurately from the perspective of the drone in order to race it effectively.

The system can also transmit at a distance of up to 2.5 miles, and there are eight channels of 5.8GHz wireless frequency supported by the Air Unit so that you can fly as many as eight drones at the same time connected to a single system. Users can even change feeds on the fly when multiple units are in use, letting them take a look at the competition or just watch the race rom an FPV perspective if they don’t actually have a drone in the running.

As for the camera, it offers a 150-degree field of view, and while the feed is optimized for action at 720p 120fps as mentioned, you can export video at either 1080p 60 or 720p 120 depending on your editing needs. The live video transmission also optimizes by first pixellating around the edges and keeping the center clear when it needs to increase broadcast efficiency under heavy load and in sub-optimal connection conditions, so that the important part of the action remains in focus for racers.

DJI will be selling these in two packages, including a ‘Fly More Combo’ that retails for $929 and an ‘Experience Combo’ that will be $819, with the main difference being that you get the Remote controller in the mix with the ‘Fly More’ version.

Once again, the rumors proved to be true, with Samsung going straight from the S4 to S6 for its premium tier. Vaguely confusing naming conventions aside (there’s also the lower cost S5E), the company’s got another solid entry on its hands, going after the same slice of creatives targeted by the iPad Pro and various Surface devices.

The company buried the lede a bit here. The top level feature is almost certainly the addition of the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The 855 marks a nice bump the S4’s 835 (and even more so the S5E’s 670) — good news as the company is no doubt hoping the product will do double duty, inhabiting that increasingly blurry space between tablet and laptop. The 7,040mAh battery, meanwhile, promises up to 15 hours of life on a charge.

The S Pen comes standard — a nice touch, especially for the $649 price point. Mind you, that’s already a few hundred bucks cheaper than the entry level iPad Pro. The stylus charges wireless, attaching magnetically to the rear of the device, so you’re less likely to misplace it. And, more importantly, won’t accidentally break the whole thing by sticking it in backwards — truly the most humiliating of defeats.

The magnetic connection is pretty weak, compared to the iPad Pro’s sides. Though the new case has a clever concave slot for the S Pen, helping it stay in place while on. I also didn’t love the feel of the S4’s keyboard, so I’m happy to see what’s new there.

The S Pen does your standard array of stylus things, and as with the Note line, Samsung is working to make it more of a kitchen sink productivity accessory. That includes the ability to use it as a kind of bluetooth remote for advancing slide presentations and snapping videos and taking selfies. According to Samsung, people taking photos with tablets is very much a thing, and you might as well get used to it.

In fact, the rear camera actually gets an overhaul here. Samsung’s gone dual camera with a wide lens — noting that the S6 is its first tablet to offer that functionality. The wide angle lens offers a 123 degree angle — roughly the equivalent of what the human eye offers. As with other mobile devices from the company, AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure you get better shots, offering scene optimization with the built-in Neural Processing Unit.

One thing the S6 offers that the iPad Pro (and for that matter, the iPhone) doesn’t is an on-screen fingerprint reader. It’s an optical scanner, however, instead of the ultrasonic offered on the Galaxy S10 (and, one assumes, the forthcoming Note 10). Samsung says the less advanced scanner was a matter of space issues — an odd concern, given the much larger real estate we’re dealing with here.

Speaking of real estate, that’s a 10.5 inch Super AMOLED display and a fairly slim 5.7 millimeter body — thinner and lighter than the S4. The multimedia offering is filled out with a quartet of Dolby Atmos speakers tuned by Samsung’s own AKG.

Samsung continues to push DeX as a key part of its workflow. In fact, there’s now a DeX function key right on the case’s keyboard. DeX offers a more desktop like software experience on the table for improved multitasking. Now you can do stuff like opening multiple windows from the same app — bringing it more inline with what Apple is trying to do with iPadOS.

The company’s also partnered with Discord for an exclusive desktop Game Launcher — not doubt in a bid to offer something inline with Apple’s forthcoming Arcade. The Discord dealie is coming to Samsung tablets next month.

Preorders on the WiFi unit start August 23, starting at $649 for a unit with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Another $80 will get you a version with 8GB of RAM and double the storage. Early preorders will get the keyboard cover for half off when bundled with the tablet. There’s also an LTE model coming later this year.

An exposed database at automotive giant Honda allowed anyone to see which systems on its network were vulnerable to unpatched security flaws, potentially giving hackers insider knowledge of the company’s weak points.

The server contained 134 million rows of employee systems data from the company’s endpoint security service, containing technical details of each computer and device connected to the internal network.

There was no password on the database, allowing anyone to access and read the data.

The data included which operating system a user was running, its unique network identifiers and IP address, the status of the endpoint protection, and which patches were installed. That could allow an attacker to figure out which systems are at risk of certain vulnerabilities, or tailor attacks towards machines of interest using exploits known to target vulnerable devices. (We’re not naming the endpoint provider as it could prove useful for an attacker.)

In some cases the database would reveal the endpoint security status — including if a device was unprotected.

Security researcher Justin Paine found the exposed database earlier this month. He wrote up his findings and shared them exclusively with TechCrunch. The database was shut down hours after he made contact with the company.

“I thought this was a likely to be just a single Honda dealership,” Paine told TechCrunch. “The odds of that seemed far more likely than a database containing information related to all of Honda’s global network of employee machines.”

The database contained records on multiple Honda offices around the world, including Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S., said Paine.

He also found the chief executive’s computer in the logs, including which operating system he uses, the patches installed, and more. The records also included his email address and the last time he logged on.

“What makes this data particularly dangerous in the hands of an attacker is that it shows you exactly where the soft spots are,” said Paine. “This data contained enough identifiable information to make it extremely simple to locate specific high value employees and in the hands of an attacker this leaked data could be used to silently monitor for ways to launch very targeted attacks on those executives,” he said.

When reached prior to publication, Honda spokesperson Marcos Frommer did not comment.

It’s the latest find by Paine in recent months. Earlier this year he found a huge database of call logs and SMS messages exposed on the internet, and also the viewing habits of a library and university streaming service.

Read more:

• Another huge database exposed millions of call logs and SMS text messages
• Streaming site Kanopy exposed viewing habits of users, researcher says
• Capital One hacked, over 100 million customers affected
• An exposed password let a hacker access internal Comodo files
• Cryptocurrency loan site YouHodler exposed unencrypted user credit cards and transactions
• FormGet security lapse exposed thousands of sensitive user-uploaded documents

Middle school teachers became students in Mansi Srivastava’s lab earlier this month, as the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology led an educational workshop on DNA and evolution titled “Real Science: Untangling Evolutionary Trees.” Srivastava, in collaboration with students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Museum of Natural History education office, gave lessons and hands-on lab work in the three days of classes with funding from her National Science Foundation’s CAREER award.

Monique Harrington, a middle school substitute teacher in the Needham Public Schools, found the material “incredibly valuable and relevant.”

“I was very impressed with the quick understanding of DNA sequencing that I was able to acquire. The attention to detail and the multistep learning process involved in lab work was very interesting and rewarding,” she said. “The work of drawing trees and finding connections between all life forms would also support tactile learning styles that integrate art and visual mathematical concepts. This opportunity would transform classroom teaching into a much-needed multidisciplinary approach.”

Srivastava said she sought out middle school educators “to bring these experiences to [the students] before they make up their minds.” She noted that the “equipment needed to produce the experiments has become more affordable and portable,” making evolution — a topic sometimes hard to make tangible — feel more accessible.

“Content-wise, students do learn about DNA in their curriculum already, but this workshop allows them to work with it directly,” she said. “Scientists study the world in an experimental framework — we generate hypotheses about something, do an experiment to test it, and then we assess whether the results support our hypothesis or reject it. Science textbooks teach students about the results or inferences we make, but don’t always communicate how we got to the answer. This workshop included hands-on experience in the doing of science.”

Porsche Digital, the subsidiary of carmaker Porsche, is opening its second U.S. location, after launching its first in 2017 in Silicon Valley. The second North American office for this software and digital product-focused wing of Porsche will open in Atlanta, which is also the seat of Porsche’s North American cars business. Porsche Digital cited proximity to their auto business headquarters as one reason why they picked Atlanta, but also pointed to Atlanta’s “local tech talent” and “robust and constantly growing startup and tech sector” as key factors in its selection.

The need for a second office is specifically about serving the U.S. market, Porsche Digital notes and the company expects to have 45 employees total in the U.S. across both offices within the next year. The subsidiary overall has 120 employees worldwide, with offices in Berlin, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv as well as the U.S.

Porsche Digital does focus on creating software and digital products for the automaker’s customers, but it’s actually probably more valuable to its parent company as a sort of distributed tech talent scouting and business development arm of the company. Its offices definitely occupy global hotspots when it comes to startup tech companies, and having a permanent presence in this locations has got to come in handy when looking to attract engineering talent and potential acquisitions of complimentary early-stage companies.

Jamf has been widely known as an enterprise Mac deployment and management tool company, but it has been looking for ways to expand beyond those core capabilities. One thing it heard from customers was that there was a dearth of native Mac security tools. It checked that box today, announcing it has acquired Digita Security, a startup with a native Mac security suite. The two companies did not reveal the purchase price.

Digita, a two-year old startup, was founded by a team of security experts led by Patrick Wardle, whose background includes a decade as a Mac security researcher, seeking out vulnerabilities on the Mac, and time at the NSA where he honed his security research skills.

Wardle says that because of the relatively low Mac marketshare, many traditional security vendors haven’t paid close attention, which can lead to trouble. “Mac marketshare is somewhat limited, maybe around 10%. So the average company is not going to spend a lot of time and resources developing Mac-specific capabilities,” he said.

“From the hacker’s point of view, this is great news, because their backdoor implants are generally not going to be detected by traditional tools. What I’ve been working on the last few years, and then most recently at Digita Security, is creating a system that is Mac specific, that leverages Mac-specific and Apple-specific frameworks and technologies,” he added.

The Digita Suite consists of three main tools. It takes advantage of and enhances XProtect, the Mac’s built-in malware detection system with a tool called UXProtect, that provides a valuable missing front end to the tool. It also offers a Mac laptop security tool called Do Not Disturb that sends you message if someone tries to access your laptop without permission, and finally it offers a tool called Gameplan, a heuristic-based malware detection system.

Jamf plans to continue to market the Digita toolset as a set of stand-alone package for the time being, while taking advantage of the Jamf policy engine when it makes sense, according to company CEO Dean Hagar. “With Digita, we’re going to be able to bring a whole solution to our customers, In addition to leaving Digita as a solution that can be offered on its own, we will be able to complete that journey for our customers by being able to monitor and hunt for threats and apply security policy,” Hagar told TechCrunch.

The deal has closed and the five Digita Security employees are now part of the Jamf security team. Having a security tool like this in the fold could help make companies more comfortable deploying Macs by giving security teams the tools they need to monitor and defend them, which could in turn expand Mac usage in the enterprise.

Ahead of Apple launching its big video streaming initiative Apple TV+ this autumn, a integration is going live today that brings Apple closer to working with third-party TV makers and making its services available on a wider array of devices. Today Vizio said it would start to roll out support for AirPlay2 and HomeKit to its SmartCast TV sets, making it possible to stream video and other media from Apple devices to its TVs and control the sets using Apple’s Home app and through its Siri voice assistant.

The support is coming by way of an over-the-air update to SmartCast 3.0, the system that underpins Vizio’s smart TVs. Notably, using the Apple services will not necessarily mean buying new Vizio TVs: the service is backwards compatible to TVs dating back to 2016. New sets range in prices from $259.99 to $3,499.99.

“SmartCast 3.0 is full of added value for VIZIO customers. With both AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support, users can now share movies, TV shows, music and more from their favorite apps, including the Apple TV app, directly to SmartCast TVs, and enable TV controls through the Home app and Siri,” said Bill Baxter, Chief Technology Officer, VIZIO. “We are thrilled to offer an even more compelling value proposition to our users with a smart TV experience that supports all three major voice assistants. This broad range of compatibility enables VIZIO SmartCast to seamlessly integrate into any household with Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa – giving users more ways to sit back and enjoy the entertainment they love.” Vizio still appears to be the only smart TV maker that’s offering support on its sets for all of the major voice assistants.

Vizio’s integration for Apple’s media services was first announced in January at CES, when Vizio said it would be getting actually rolled out later in the year.

The news was notable at the time for a couple of reasons. First, it underscored how Vizio was stepping up its growth efforts after a tough couple of years involving lawsuits, regulatory investigations and a failed M&A attempt.

Second, it was part of a bigger theme of Apple branching out into a wider consumer electronics ecosystem for its push into the world of TV and video. The latter still stands in stark contrast to Apple’s approach around smartphones, computers and watches, where it has spent years building hardware, operating systems and walled gardens.

That’s a story that is still playing out. The timing of the Vizio news is notable given that it’s just one day after Apple’s quarterly earnings report, where the company revealed a solid quarter that beat analyst expectations but also continued to show slowing growth, largely on the back of an ongoing decline in unit sales for the iPhone (amid a similar, bigger market trend for smarphones overall). To offset that story, Apple has been working hard to build new product categories in newer hardware areas like wearables (the Apple Watch) and smart home hubs (HomePod), and Services, which includes Apple’s efforts in areas like video and music (

Services came in at $11.455 billion — missing analysts expections but still growing 13% on a year ago. The promise — or perhaps more accurately, the hope — is that adding TV and gaming into the mix later in the year will boost that even more. This is where integrations such as the one getting announced today with Vizio will fit in: they will help expand the number of people who might be using the services, and of course the number of screens where the content can be consumed.

Vizio does not specify how many sets it currently has in the market — last number it gave me earlier in the year was “millions” — but it generally is behind Samsung, which currently leads in the smart TV category.

It notes that the service will work by way of tapping an AirPlay icon within SmartCast to be able to stream 4K and Dolby VisionTM HDR movies and TV shows from Apple TV, along with other AirPlay-compatible video apps. Mirroring (which you can also do with non-smart TVs) will also be supported. AirPlay 2 also lets users play content across multiple rooms (provided you have the sets, HomePods or other AirPlay 2 speakers installed).

Spotify added 8 million subscribers in the quarter that ended in June, slightly below the estimated 8.5 million figure, the streaming giant reported today.

The top music streamer said it had amassed 232 million monthly active users and 108 million paying subscribers at the end of June, up from 217 million users and 100 million subscribers in the quarter that ended in March. Monthly active users include paying subscribers and non-paying users.

“We missed on subs… That’s on us,” the company said.

Paying subscribers count includes users who are trying the 30-day trial Spotify offers. Additionally, Spotify recently kickstarted a biannual campaign, which offered customers access to the premium service for $1. This, among other factors, pushed its average revenue per user for the premium business to fall under 1%, the company said, adding that it expects the decline to continue in the low single digits for the rest of the year.

In comparison, Apple Music had 60 million paying subscribers as of June this year. (This also includes users who are part of Apple Music’s three-month free trial.)

On the business side, Spotify said its quarterly revenue rose 31% to $1.86 billion, while operating expenses increased 4%. Its operating loss narrowed to $3.34 million, the company said — better than estimations of analysts who expected Spotify to lose about $62 million on sales of $1.83 billion.

Additionally, Spotify revealed that it has reached an agreement with two of four major record labels for licenses and is in active talks with the other two. It did not identify the labels.

Spotify’s future profits will depend on how its existing margins change with the music labels. Bulk of the revenue Spotify generates, it has to pay them to music labels. Every few years, the company has to renew its agreements with them.

The music streaming service, which has ramped up its podcast offerings with the acquisition of Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast, said its podcast audience is up 50% since the last quarter. Barry McCarthy, CFO of Spotify, said the company is still open to acquiring more podcasting businesses.

Globally, millions of cameras are in deployed by companies and organizations every year. All you have to do is look up. Yes, there they are! But the petabytes of data collected by these cameras really only become useful after something untoward has occurred. They can very rarely influence an action in “real-time”.

Trueface is a US-based computer vision company that turns camera data into so-called ‘actionable data’ using machine learning and AI by employing partners who can perform facial recognition, threat detection, age and ethnicity detection, license plate recognition, emotion analysis as well as object detection. That means, for instance, recognising a gun, as it’s pulled in a dime store. Yes folks, welcome to your brave new world.

The company has now raised $3.7M from Lavrock Ventures, Scout Ventures, and Advantage Ventures to scale the team growing partnerships and market share.

Trueface claims it can identify enterprises’ employees for access to a building, detect a weapon as it’s being wielded, or stop fraudulent spoofing attempts. Quite some claims.

However, it’s good enough for the US Air Force as it recently partnered with them to enhance base security.

Originally embedded in a hardware access control device, Trueface’s computer vision software inside one of the first ‘intelligent doorbell’, Chui which was covered by TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha in 2014.

Trueface has multiple solutions to run on an array of clients’ infrastructures including a dockerized container, SDKs that partners can use to build their own solutions with, and a plug and play solution that requires no code to get up and running.

The solution can be deployed in various scenarios such as fintech, healthcare, retail to humanitarian aid, age verification, digital identity verification and threat detection. Shaun Moore and Nezare Chafni are the cofounders and CEO and CTO, respectively.

The computer vision market was valued at USD 9.28 billion in 2017 and is now set to reach a valuation of USD 48.32 billion by the end of 2023.

Facial recognition was banned by agency use in the city of San Francisco recently. There are daily news stories about privacy concerns of facial recognition, especially in regards to how China is using computer vision technology.

However, Truface is only deployed ‘on-premise’ and includes features like ‘fleeting data’ and blurring for people who have not opted-in. It’s good to see a company building in such controls, from the word go.

However, it’s then it’s up to the company you work for not to require you to sign a statement saying you are happy to have your face recognized. Interesting times, huh?

And if you want that job, well, that’s a whole other story, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners.

The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the U.S. without an investment commitment, but with a pre-defined list of partners that will help new financial services startups launch more quickly, the company said.

Chiefly, the process makes it easier to integrate with Visa. It’s an attempt to put the payment processor’s network, VisaNet, at the center of a vast array of services ranging from payroll to business to business payments and online banking, online lending, and even digital wallets.

“There’s about $17 trillion in cash and checks today that hasn’t gone digital and $20 trillion in business to business that’s happening over wires and check… those are all opportunities for Visa,” says Terry Angelos, a former fintech entrepreneur who now serves as an senior vice president at Visa and the company’s global head of fintech. 

“To some degree Visa has been the original fintech,” says Angelos. “Today, you would  pitch it as a SAAS platform for payment and commerce.”

For its new service, Visa has come up with a list of partners to provide the array of compliance services and infrastructure that a startup in the financial services space would need to get up and running quickly.

“These are vetted partners that are providing a fast track process and a concierge service so we can track the companies in the program,” says Angelos. 

What the program won’t include, Angelos said, is a commitment to invest in startups in the U.S. that would be equivalent to the $100 million investment fund the company has carved out for European investments as part of the fast track program there.

“We have investments that are happening that are in parallel,” Angelos says. “We don’t have a separate fund.”

Companies that are partnering with Visa on this program represent a different service offering for the ecosystem including: Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2, and Very Good Security. The company said its debit processing service will support some of the partners’ participation in the program.   

Last year, fintech companies raised $39.5 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year, according to data provided by Visa. And as part of their outreach to this startup community, Visa is pre-qualifying portfolio companies from investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures for its program. 

“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, Managing Partner, Nyca Ventures, in a statement. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”

Many of the firms’ portfolio companies are already partnering with Visa in some capacity. The company has already announced agreements (of an undefined and undisclosed nature) with startups like Currencycloud, Flutterwave, Ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly. 

Visa has also invested in startups. In 2019 alone, the company added Anchorage, Bankable, Branch, Finix, Minna Technologies and Paymate to its stable of startups. 

The main thing that startups would get from the Visa Fast Track program is mentorship and access to the company’s experts in payments and fintech. And its effort to tie itself more closely to a financial services ecosystem comes as Visa finds itself under threat from some of the very startup technologies that the company may look to co-opt.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies offer the possibility of alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on the traditional money transfer systems developed decades ago by companies like Visa and Mastercard and can offer potentially faster transaction times and charge lower fees.

To combat that threat, Visa has been aligning with some of the largest technology companies to head off challengers at the pass. The company (along with its largest rival, Mastercard) is collaborating with Facebook on its controversial proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, in an effort to head off any challengers with a new transaction system of its own.

Angelos insists that there’s nothing nefarious in Visa’s efforts to engage with startups and says that the company is merely another actor supporting the movement of trillions of dollars into a digital economy.

“If you look at what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem… Fintechs are reducing friction and adding consumers that are underbanked,” Angelos says. “They can work on any payment rails they choose. [But] all those fintechs… are choosing to build at least part of their products on top of the rails that we built… if you look around the world, fintechs are probably leveraging the existing payment  rails to provide a lot of innovation and remove friction.”

Facetune, a photo editing app that empowers users to cover their gray hairs, refine their jaw lines, and reshape their noses, was first introduced around six years ago, and it quickly climbed to the top of the download charts, becoming Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017. Despite stiff competition, it has remaining highly popular, too.

That staying power hasn’t been lost Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Insight Partners or ClalTech, which just gave Facetune’s parent company, Lightricks, $135 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of $1 billion.

The investment firms — two of which led a $60 million round in the company less than a year ago —  are getting much more than Facetune in the deal.

Lightricks, based in Tel Aviv, has 260 employees supporting six products across three divisions, including Facetune, whose second version was rolled out this year; Enlight, a line of mobile photography and editing tools that aims to make photo editing more accessible to amateurs; and the startup’s newest, enterprise-focused brand, Swish, a marketing video editor that helps companies tell their story with video ads.

The separate divisions each come with meaningful mind share. According to cofounder and CEO Zeev Farbman, Lightricks has seen 180 million downloads across it paid apps, which generally cost $3.99 to download. Since the company began offering subscription layers to users who want premium bells and whistles in 2017, it has amassed a respectable number of subscribers, as well. According to Farbman, Facetune now has more than 1 million subscribers; Enlight has roughly 1 million subscribers, and Swish’s subscribers brings the total to roughly 3 million subscribers altogether.

More subscription-based content-creation apps are on the way, says Farbman, who hints they may be coming shortly. (Other developments might take a while, he adds, explaining that Lightworks, originally founded by five PhDs, is “constantly working on things that will be out two or three years down the line.”)

Reshaping features

If it it has been mostly smooth sailing for the company, there have been headwinds from time to time.

Facetune has been accused of taking photo brushing too far, for example, with celebrity model Chrissy Teigen tweeting about the app last year, “I don’t know what real skin looks like anymore . . . everyone looks like an oil painting.”

Asked what he thought of the body image debate the app had prompted, Farbman says the company sees itself as “democratizing retouching, and [educating users about] how powerful image processing can be.

“If you go back 10 years,” he notes, before mobile image processing software was available to everyone, “people didn’t understand that the people they were seeing on magazine covers had undergone the photoshopping process.”

Facetune users have also long grumbled about the second release of the app, not realizing that when they update the app, they lose some of the features that were previously available to them. (You have to subscribe in order to continue using them.)

Clearly, Lightricks and its backers — and one million users — think the company’s products are worth the monthly expense, which ranges depending on the features a user wants to unlock.

A team that includes experts across a number of relevant domains is the reason, says Farbman, who himself previously spent most of his time in academia, studying computer graphics, computer vision, and computational photography.

After the photo editing app Snapseed made its debut and was quickly scooped up by Google, he and four PhD friends “realized that nobody is becoming a great platform for content creation.” They quickly got to work developing their first product — Facetune — and by 2015, the bootstrapped company, which had also by then introduced Enlight, was seeing $10 million in annual revenue.

Still, we “thought we could do better,” says Farbman. Toward that end, Lightricks raised money, and we “started to grow way faster as a company,” he recalls.

It also began rolling out its subscription offerings, and despite continued complaints from some corners (Facetune 2 came out in 2016), Farbman says more people are signing up — and agreeing to pay more — than he initially imagined would be the case.

It makes sense to him now, he suggests. “Our founding team includes PhDs who were at the top of their fields, which allowed us to attract a strong team at the beginning. And once you’re hiring the best people, you’re probably going to build the best software. And if you’re building the best software, you can charge premium prices for that.”

Lightricks’s latest financing brings its total funding to $205 million to date. The new funding will be used to crate more tools, says Farbman. He adds that his team also plans to begin acquiring companies strategically.

Station F is the world’s biggest startup campus and it’s based in Paris. Director Roxanne Varza first unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Station F director Roxanne Varza is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to give us an update and tell us about future plans.

If you aren’t familiar with Station F, it starts with a beautiful building. Originally built in 1929, it is now classified as a historical monument. But now, it’s also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem.

Varza has managed to create a community of entrepreneurs, VC funds and big tech companies that work, share knowledge and collaborate. In addition to Station F’s own Founders Program and Fighters Program, you can become a Station F member by joining a partner program.

Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and plenty of others all run their own incubator from Station F. And it’s been working really well as there are over one thousand startups based at Station F.

Station F is also a great signal for the international tech community. If you head over to its Instagram account, you can see that plenty of head of states and major tech CEOs come to Station F whenever they visit Paris, from Jack Dorsey to newly elected president of Ukraine Vlodomyr Zelensky. Around one third of Station F startups come from abroad and 600 members don’t even speak French.

More recently, Station F unveiled Flatmates, a co-living space for Station F members. Station F is creating a lifestyle and has become a cultural phenomenon for Paris. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Roxanne Varza is Director of STATION F, the biggest startup campus in the world with more than 1.000 startups, located in Paris. She is originally from Silicon Valley. Before joining STATION F, she led Microsoft Ventures Paris and TechCrunch France. She also worked for several London-based startups and cofounded StarHer, Tech.eu and Failcon France.

Prior to her current role, Roxanne was the lead for Microsoft’s start-up activities in France, running both Bizspark and Microsoft Ventures programs for 3 years. She was also Editor of TechCrunch France from 2010-2011 and has written for several publications including Business Insider and The Telegraph. In April 2013, Business Insider listed her as one of the top 30 women under 30 in tech. She has also been listed in additional rankings by Business Insider, Vanity Fair and Le Figaro, The Evening Standard and more.

Roxanne also co-founded StartHer (ex Girls in Tech Paris) and is the co-organizer of the Failcon Paris conference. More recently, she co-founded Tech.eu, a European tech media backed by Dave McClure, Adeo Ressi, Daniel Waterhouse and more.

Prior to TechCrunch, Roxanne worked for the French government’s foreign direct investment agency helping fast-growing startups develop their activities in France. Roxanne has spoken, moderated, mentored and judged numerous startup events and programs throughout Europe and also helps European startups with content and communications. Roxanne is trilingual and holds degrees from UCLA, Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She is also an epilepsy advocate.

Nairobi based internet hardware and service startup BRCK and Egyptian ride-hail venture Swvl are partnering to bring WiFI and online entertainment to on-demand bus service in Kenya.

BRCK will install its routers on Swvl vehicles in Kenya and run its Moja service, which offers free public WiFi—internet, music, and entertainment—subsidized by commercial partners.

Founded in Cairo in 2017, Swvl is a mass transit service that has positioned itself as an Uber for shared buses. “Think ride hailing, but with a bus…and instead of the vehicle coming to you…you go to the bus, and the bus picks you up at a certain point and time,” Swvl’s general manager for Kenya, Shivachi Muleji, told TechCrunch via email.

The company raised a $42 million Series B round in June, with intent to expand in Africa, Swvl CEO Mostafa Kandil said in an interview.

In Kenya, BRCK has installed 15 of its units in Swvl buses and looks to offer its Moja WiFi service in 700 by 2020, BRCK’s chief operating officer Nivi Sharma told TechCrunch.  Swvl pays a monthly fee for the routers and for maintenance of the routers, Swvl confirmed.

Both BRCK and Swvl see a solid fit in pairing up their product offerings. “SWVL’s objectives to provide an alternative in the transportation industry line up nicely with BRCK’s objectives of providing connectivity to commuters,” said BRCK COO Nivi Sharma.

Backed by $10 million from investors including Steve Case’s Revolution VC fund, BRCK built its platform around providing internet solutions in East Africa. Founder Erik Hersman has described Africa’s internet challenges—mainly the lowest penetration rates in the world—as shifting toward more of an affordability than availability problem.

“The demand on internet in Africa is largely driven by the 10 to 15 percent who can afford it. The real massive opportunity is trying to connect the 70 to 80 percent of the people who can’t,” Hersman told TechCrunch in 2017.

To that end, BRCK paired up its Africa specific WiFi routers to its Moja service to offer free internet and content supported by commercial partners. Users can access Moja on their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops on public transportation or in public areas. They earn points from their browsing to apply to faster connectivity or premium content.

In 2018, BRCK began offering SupaBRCK devices to drivers of Nairobi’s highly-used Matatu buses for Kenyan commuters to access Moja. In February, the startup acquired Nairobi based internet provide Surf and its network of hotspots.

BRCK currently has 445,000 unique monthly active users on its Matatu based Moja mobile network in Kenya and Rwanda and 150,000 unique monthly active users on its fixed network—including users connecting at cafes, barbershops, and marketplaces, according to company data.

BRCK and Swvl wouldn’t confirm plans on expanding their mobile internet partnership to additional countries outside of Kenya.

Ride-hail markets in Africa have become an active sector for VC investment and global and local startups. The big players such as Uber  and Bolt are competing in Kampala and Nairobi—where in addition to car-service—they offer rickshaw taxis.

On-demand motorcycle startups are multiplying and piloting EVs with funds from international partners. And many ride-hail companies in Africa are adapting unique product solutions to local transit needs. The collective startup activity is making the continent home to a number of fresh mobility use-cases, including the BRCK and Svl WiFi partnership.

As it forecast earlier this month, Samsung reported a steep drop in its second-quarter earnings due to lower market demand for chips and smartphones. The company said its second-quarter operating profit fell 55.6% year-over-year to 6.6 trillion won (about $5.6 billion), on consolidated revenue of 56.13 trillion won, slightly above the guidance it issued three weeks ago.

Last quarter, Samsung also reported that its operating profit had dropped by more than half. The same issues that hit its earnings during the first quarter of this year have continued, including lower memory prices as major datacenter customers adjust their inventory, meaning they are currently buying less chips (the weak market also impacted competing semiconductor maker SK Hynix’s quarterly earnings).

Samsung reported that its chip business saw second-quarter operating profit drop 71% year-over-year to 3.4 trillion won, on consolidated revenue of 16.09 trillion won. In the second half of the year, the company expects to continue dealing with market uncertainty, but says demand for chips will increase “on strong seasonality and adoption of higher-density products.”

Meanwhile, Samsung’s mobile business reported a 42% drop in operating profit from a year ago to 1.56 trillion won, on 25.86 trillion won in consolidated revenue. The company said its smartphone shipments increased quarter-over-quarter thanks to strong sales of its budget Galaxy A series. But sales of flagship models fell, due to “weak sales momentum for the Galaxy S10 and stagnant demand for premium products.”

Samsung expects the mobile market to remain lackluster, but it will continue adding to both its flagship and mass-market lineups. It is expected to unveil the Note 10 next month and a new release date for the delayed Galaxy Fold, along with new A series models in the second half of the year.

“The company will promptly respond to the changing business environment, and step up efforts to secure profitability by enhancing efficiency across development, manufacturing and marketing operations,” Samsung said in its earnings release.

It’s not just market demand that’s impacting Samsung’s earnings. Along with other tech companies, Samsung is steeling itself for the long-term impact of a trade dispute between Japan and South Korea. Last month, Japan announced that it is placing export restrictions on some materials used in chips and smartphones. Samsung said it still has stores of those materials, but it is also looking for alternatives since it is unclear how long the dispute between the two countries may last (and it could last for a long time).

There’s a double standard when it comes to the sexualities of men versus women, trans and gender non-conforming folks. Unbound and Dame Products, two sex tech startups, have teamed up to bring attention to the issue.

By launching a website, “Approved, Not Approved” and staging a protest outside Facebook’s NYC headquarters, the two startups hope to bring more awareness to the company’s advertising guidelines that seem to favor products that cater to cisgender men. The point of the digital campaign is to show how ads for sex toys and products geared toward men are more likely to be approved than those for women, trans or gender non-conforming people.

“For so long, advertisements have been how we continue to reinforce the status quo of what we view as societally desirable and validating,” Dame Products CEO Alexandra Fine told TechCrunch. “Since we’re in a category that’s often denied, we wanted to create an experience that illuminates the disparity.”

On Facebook, for example, it’s prohibitive to promote the sale or use of adult products or services except for ads that pertain to family planning and contraception. The policy also requires that ads for contraceptives cannot focus on sexual pleasure or sexual enhancement, and have to be targeted to people 18 years or older.

“They’re never going to view sexual pleasure as necessary — only functionality as necessary,” Fine said. “And since the functioning only matters for one sex, then we’re just encouraging shitty sex or at least one-sided sex. Healthy sex should be pleasurable sex. That’s really what I think is important.”

Facebook, however, clearly disagrees since it explicitly bans ads relating to sexual pleasure.

“We have had open lines of communication with both companies about our policies and are always taking feedback,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are working to further clarify our policies in this space in the near future.”

Unfortunately, there is no telling if and when Facebook and other platforms will change their advertising policies to enable companies like Dame Products and Unbound to reach potential customers through ads.

“I think a lot of us feel like we’ve been silenced by these platforms and they control so much,” Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez told TechCrunch. “Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest — these are the channels startups live and die by. Not being able to advertise on them is a big deal because, in addition to the policies being biased and genders, it prevents those founders from being able to reach potential customers.”

Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez. The startup was a finalist at TC Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield finalist in 2018.

In addition to missing out on potential customers, an inability to advertise can have a detrimental effect on a business in terms of raising venture funding.

“I think one of the most frustrating things is trying to raise a round and getting pushback around where you’ll spend the money,” Rodriguez said. “It’s just tough because it’s this vicious cycle where we could be growing at the same rate as a Him or a Roman. It’s definitely in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of foregone profits.”

In addition to the protest, Fine is suing New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority alleging it’s in violation of Dame’s First Amendment rights, the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and the state’s constitutional rights regarding freedom of speech. The lawsuit came in light of the MTA preventing Dame from running its ads on the subway.

Still, despite efforts to squash it, sex tech may finally be getting its moment in the sun. Earlier this month, the sex tech industry had a big win when the organizer of the Consumer Electronics Show finally decided to allow sex tech companies to exhibit and participate in its competition. That came after the Consumer Technology Association, the organizer of CES, royally messed up with sex tech company Lora DiCarlo last year. The CTA revoked an innovation award from the company, which is developing a hands-free device that uses biomimicry and robotics to help women achieve a blended orgasm by simultaneously stimulating the G-spot and the clitoris. In May, CTA re-awarded the company and apologized.

“It’s so rare you see a victory like that and it was because of the press,” Rodriguez said. “It was because it takes. It’s unfortunate these companies don’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. They do the right thing when enough people speak out about it.”