Smartphone shipments jumped 27% globally in Q1

More good news from a smartphone market currently rebounding from the far reaching impacts of the pandemic. New numbers from Canalys put global shipments for Q1 2021 at 27% above where they were the same time last year.

The industry was hit early and hit hard by Covid-19. The first quarter saw company running into serious supply chain issues as the pandemic first hit China and parts of Asia where most manufacturing occurs. Following that, demand began to slow, as fewer people were interested in buying mobile devices, coupled with broader economic and job impacts.

Image Credits: Canalys

Samsung continued to lead the way globally, with 76.5 million, up from 59.6 million, representing a 28% jump, year-over-year. In all, the company controls around 22% of global shipments (same as a year prior).

In second place, Apple represented the biggest jump of the quarter, with a 41% increase from 37.1 million to 52.4 million. That no doubt owes substantially to the big upgrades that arrived toward to the end of last year. Huawei’s struggles, meanwhile, have knocked the company out of the top five.

“Xiaomi is in pole position to be the new Huawei,” said Canalys’ Ben Stanton said in a release. “Its competitors offer superior channel margin, but Xiaomi’s sheer volume actually gives distributors a better opportunity to make money than rival brands. But the race is not over. Oppo and Vivo are hot on its heels, and are positioning in the mid-range in many regions to box Xiaomi in at the low end.”

The study also notes that LG’s exit from the category should mix things up a bit, as well, particularly in the Americas region, which accounted for 80% of the company’s sales last year.

Apple sales bounce back in China as Huawei loses smartphone crown

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Alchemy raises $80M at a $505M valuation to be the ‘AWS for blockchain’

Blockchain developer platform Alchemy announced today it has raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding led by Coatue and Addition, Lee Fixel’s new fund. The company previously raised a total of $15.5 million, so the latest financing brings its total raised to $95.5 million since it launched in 2017.

The latest round caught our attention for a few reasons.

First, the company, which describes itself as the backend technology behind the blockchain industry, went from public launch to a $505 million valuation in a matter of just eight months. During that time, Alchemy says it powered over $30 billion in transactions for tens of millions of users all over the world. Second, the startup says it also already powering the majority of the NFT industry.

And finally, its investors in the round include a high-profile mix of institutions and individuals such as DFJ Growth, K5 Global, the Chainsmokers, actor Jared Leto and the Glazer family (owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Manchester United). They joined existing backers including Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, Pantera Capital, Coinbase, SignalFire, Samsung, Stanford University, Google chairman and Stanford University President John L. Hennessy, Charles Schwab, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others.

Sources with inside knowledge of Alchemy’s operations tell TechCrunch that the company has already grown its business more than eightfold since it signed the Series B term sheet. They also said Alchemy had over $300 million of investor demand wanting to enter the round and is being inbounded to do another financing at “many times” the current valuation.

TechCrunch talked with Alchemy co-founders Nikil Viswanathan (CEO) and Joe Lau (CTO) about the raise and their passion for the startup’s mission was clear. As is its explosive growth.

“We realized that in order for space to thrive and build to its full potential, we needed to build a developer platform layer for blockchain,” Viswanathan told TechCrunch.

Alchemy’s goal is to be the starting place for developers considering to build a product on top of a blockchain or mainstream blockchain applications. Its developer platform aims to remove the complexity and costs of building infrastructure while improving applications through “necessary” developer tools.

The startup powers a range of transactions across nearly every blockchain vertical, including financial institutions, exchanges, billion-dollar decentralized finance projects and multinational organizations such as UNICEF. It has also quickly become the technology behind every major NFT platform, including Makersplace, OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare and CryptoPunks.  

“Every time you open DoorDash, you’re using Amazon’s infrastructure,” Lau said. “Every time you interact with an NFT, you’re using Alchemy. It’s being powered by Alchemy underneath the hood.”

While the pair would not provide hard revenue figures, the company – which operates as a SaaS business – says it increased its revenue by 600% in 2020.

For inside players, Alchemy’s efforts are paving the way for the whole industry. 

“The cryptoeconomy is innovating faster than any technological movement that came before it, and Alchemy has been a key driver of that,” said Coinbase President and COO Emilie Choi. “Alchemy enables developers to build the rich ecosystem of applications necessary for mainstream blockchain adoption.”

Pantera Capital’s Paul Veradittakit describes Alchemy as “the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of the blockchain industry” that is “enabling the vision of a decentralized web.”

“While in Web 2.0, Microsoft, Apple and AWS are three of the most valuable companies in the world because they are the developer platform powering the computer and internet industries, Alchemy is primed to do the same for the blockchain,” he said.

Is rising usage driving crypto’s recent price boom?

The company believes the comparison to AWS is fair, noting that: “Just as AWS provides the platform that powers Uber, Netflix and much of the technology industry, Alchemy powers infrastructure for many large players in the blockchain industry.”

Alchemy plans to use its new capital to expand its developer platform to new blockchains, fuel global expansion and to open new offices in the U.S. and globally. The startup is based in San Francisco and is planning to open an office in New York.  

“We are going to use the funds to support new chains with our developer platform,” Viswanathan said. “We also expect to 5x the team this year.”

But to be clear, Alchemy prides itself on being lean and mean.

“We just went from 14 to 22 employees,” Lau said. “We have intentionally wanted to keep the team as small as possible.”

The blockchain space has been the subject of increased investor interest as of late.

In March, BlockFi, which describes itself a financial services company for crypto market investors, announced it had closed on a massive $350 million Series D funding that valued it at $3 billion. Also last month, Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, revealed the close of $100 million in Series D financing, which doubled its valuation to over $2 billion.

Crypto boom continues as Chainalysis raises $100M, doubles valuation to over $2B

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Here’s Samsung’s new flagship laptop series, the Galaxy Book Pro

Following the customary weeks of leaks, Samsung just announced a couple of new additions to its laptop line. The Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 joined the hardware giant’s wide range of devices toward the high end — offering what can reasonably be categorized as the company’s take on the MacBook Pro.

The Windows machines continue the company’s push to blur some of the productivity lines between its Galaxy PC and mobile offerings, including a number of cross-device software offerings and, naturally, the inclusion of the S-Pen, which ships in the box with the Pro 360. As the name implies, the 360’s lid hinges in either direction, so it can double as a writing surface.

The thin and light design is probably the headline feature for Samsung. The Pro and Pro 360 measure 11.2 and 11.9 millimeters, respectively. Both feature an option of a 13.3 and 15.6-inch Super AMOLEDs. With a 1920 x 1080 resolution. That’s all powered by either a Core i5 or i7 11th-gen Intel processor, 8 or 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage (512GB max on the Pro).

Image Credits: Samsung

There are also options for LTE and 5G versions (depending on market availability). That will almost certainly have a direct impact on the battery, which the company rates as “all-day.” Both models sport 65W fast charging by way of the USB-C port. The keyboard mechanisms have been upgraded over previous models and the track pad is now 23% larger.

The systems go up for preorder today and start shipping May 14. The 13 and 15-inch versions of the Pro start at $1,000 and $1,100, respectively and the 360 runs $1,200 and $1,300.

Extra Crunch members save money with Partner Perks and event discounts

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Samsung opens beta on Galaxy Upcycling to breathe new life into old phones

Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K.

It’s a pretty novel program, in a world where consumers are encouraged to scrap their old devices every two to three years for something shiny and new. The program is designed to breathe new life into handsets that might otherwise be tossed in a landfill or stashed away in a drawer.

Image Credits: Samsung

“We are rethinking how we use existing resources, and we believe the key to upcycling is to enable solutions that transform old technology into something new by adding value,” VP Sung-Koo Kim said in a release tied to the news. “We are committed to integrating sustainable practices into our day-to-day lives, and through Galaxy Upcycling at Home, users can join our journey toward a more sustainable future.”

Specifically, the products can be revamped into smart home devices, like childcare and pet monitors.

The feature can be accessed within the SmartThings Labs feature found in Samsung’s SmartThings App. When enabled, the product can send alerts when things like a crying baby or barking dog are detected. The recorded sound will be sent as part of the alert. Another feature uses built-in sensors to turn on a room’s lights when things get dark. The service will optimize device battery so it can operate for an extended period while detecting these inputs.

Samsung’s upcycling program is designed to give new life to old tech

Giving EV batteries a second life for sustainability and profit

 

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Deepfake video app Avatarify, which process on-phone, plans digital watermark for videos

Making deepfake videos used to be hard. Now all you need is a smartphone. Avatarify, a startup that allows people to make deepfake videos directly on their phone rather than in the cloud, is soaring up the app charts after being used by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham.

However, the problem with many deepfake videos is that there is no digital watermark to determine that the video has been tampered with. So Avatarify says it will soon launch a digital watermark to prevent this from happening.

Run out of Moscow but with a U.S. HQ, Avatarify launched in July 2020 and since then has been downloaded millions of times. The founders say that 140 million deepfake videos were created with Avatarify this year alone. There are now 125 million views of videos with the hashtag #avatarify on TikTok. While its competitors include the well-funded Reface, Snapchat, Wombo.ai, Mug Life and Xpression, Avatarify has yet to raise any money beyond an angel round.

Despite taking only $120,000 in angel funding, the company has yet to accept any venture capital and says it has bootstrapped its way from zero to almost 10 million downloads and claims to have a $10 million annual run rate with a team of less than 10 people.

It’s not hard to see why. Avatarify has a freemium subscription model. They offer a 7-day free trial and a 12-month subscription for $34.99 or a weekly plan for $2.49. Without a subscription, they offer the core features of the app for free, but videos then carry a visible watermark.

The founders also say the app protects privacy, because the videos are processed directly on the phone, rather than in the cloud where they could be hacked.

Avatarify processes user’s photos and turns them into short videos by animating faces, using machine learning algorithms and adding sounds. The user chooses a picture they want to animate, chooses the effects and music, and then taps to animate the picture. This short video can then be posted on Instagram or TikTok.

The Avatarify videos are taking off on TikTok because teens no longer need to learn a dance or be much more creative than finding a photo of a celebrity to animate to.

Avartify says you can’t use their app to impersonate someone, but there is of course no way to police this.

Co-founders Ali Aliev and Karim Iskakov wrote the app during the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. Ali spent two hours writing a program in Python to transfer his facial expressions to the other person’s face and use a filter in Zoom. The result was a real-time video, which could be streamed to Zoom. He joined a call with Elon Mask’s face and everyone on the call was shocked. The team posted the video, which then went viral.

They posted the code on Github and immediately saw the number of downloads grow. The repository was published on 6 April 2020, and as of 19 March 2021 had been downloaded 50,000 times.

Ali left his job at Samsung AI Centre and devoted himself to the app. After Avatarify’s iOS app was released on 28 June 2020, viral videos on TikTok, created with the app, led it to App Store’s top charts without paid acquisition. In February 2021, Avatarify was ranked first among Top Free Apps worldwide. Between February and March, the app 2021 generated more than $1 million in revenue (Source: AppMagic).

However, despite Avartify’s success, the ongoing problems with deepfake videos remain, such as using these apps to make nonconsensual porn, using the faces of innocent people.

Deep science: AI is in the air, water, soil and steel

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Samsung’s AirTags rival, the Galaxy SmartTag+, arrives to help you find lost items via AR

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag+, the company’s competitor to Apple’s forthcoming lost-item finder known as AirTags, has now arrived. Samsung had first announced its Tile competitor known as the Galaxy SmartTag, a Bluetooth-powered locator, during its press event in January. At the time, it teased that a ultra-wideband (UWB) powered version called the Galaxy SmartTag+ would arrive sometime later in the year, without giving a specific time frame.

Now it’s here. The newly launched iteration will offer support for both Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and UWB, and can be attached to the everyday items you want to keep track of — like backpacks or keychains, for example.

Like Apple’s rumored (and accidentally confirmed) AirTags, the SmartTag+ for Samsung device owners offers more precise finding capabilities because of its use of UWB technology, which the recently launched Galaxy SmartTag doesn’t include.

Samsung unveils its newest Tile competitor, the Galaxy SmartTag

When items go missing, SmartTag+ users will be able to use AR technology to help locate the tags more easily using their Samsung phone, because of its spatial awareness capabilities. As you get closer to the tag’s location, you can also opt to have it make a loud ring — which can help if it’s fallen under something, like a sofa cushion.

Like Tile’s UWB device, SmartTag+ also supports a sort of community find type of feature where any nearby Galaxy device that’s opted in will be able to help locate lost items and notify their owners through the SmartThings Find network. Samsung says this data is encrypted so the tag’s location is only known to its owner.

But unlike the earlier SmartTag, which has expanded to include tags that come in pink and green, the SmartTag+ comes only in black and gray at launch.

Because the new beacons rely on UWB, Samsung says they will only work with Galaxy devices that include UWB technology, including the Galaxy Note20 Ultra, Galaxy S21+, Galaxy S21 Ultra, and Galaxy Z Fold2.

Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags

The SmartTag+’s arrival comes at a time when the lost item beacon market is poised for a shakeup.

Apple’s plans to enter this space, where today businesses like Tile dominate, could be fairly disruptive. Apple’s AirTags will leverage UWB to capture spatial and directional data, which will make finding lost items with the tags attached easier and more accurate. But AirTags will also integrate with Apple’s Find My app, which has now opened up to third-party manufacturers as of this week, including the makers of earbuds and e-bikes, among others.

Notably absent from that early lineup is Tile, which also has its own UWB tracker on the way. Tile doesn’t want to give up the customer relationship it has already established via its own app and hand that over to Apple instead, we understand. Instead, it plans to offer its own UWB tracker and AR finding features through its own iOS app.

Samsung, however, doesn’t have that issue as its first-party trackers are designed for its own devices. This SmartTag+ is basically the AirTag for Samsung owners, and if and when Apple launches its own beacons, the demand for the Android version could be impacted.

E-bikes and earbuds among the first third-party hardware to support Apple’s Find My tracking

The company will begin to sell the new SmartTag+ on April 16th.

Samsung’s earlier Galaxy SmartTags cost $29.99. The new SmartTag+ are $10 more at $39.99 in the U.S.

 

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Fueled by pandemic, contactless mobile payments to surpass half of all smartphone users in US by 2025

Among other technology trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of contactless mobile payments boomed in 2020. According to a recent report by analyst firm eMarketer, in-store mobile payments usage grew 29% last year in the U.S., as the pandemic pushed consumers to swap out cash and credit cards for the presumably safer mobile payments option at point-of-sale.

Last year, 92.3 million U.S. consumers age 14 or older used proximity-based mobile payments at least one time during a six-month period in 2020 — a figure the firm expects to grow to reach 101.2 million this year. And that usage is now on track to surpass half of all smartphone users by 2025, eMarketer forecasts.

Image Credits: eMarketer

Adoption last year was largest among younger consumers, including Gen Z and millennials. The former is expected to account for more than 4 million of the total 6.5 million new mobile wallet users per year from 2021 to 2025. Millennials, meanwhile, will continue to account for around four in 10 mobile wallet users.

Several industry reports had already noted the pandemic impacts on the mobile wallet industry in general, with one from earlier this month by finance and investment company Finaria estimating that the industry would grow 24% from last year to reach $2.4 trillion in 2021. It had said that while Asian markets and particularly China had been leading the way in mobile payments adoption, the U.S. had earlier struggled due to the slow rollout of mobile payment technologies by retail stores. But now, the U.S. has grown to become the second-largest market with $465.1 billion worth of mobile payment transactions, which will grow to $698 billion in 2023.

The pandemic had pushed lagging retailers to finally get on board with mobile payments. A mid-year survey published in 2020 by the National Retail Federation and Forrester found that no-touch payments had increased for 69% of retailers, and that 67% now accept some form of contactless payment, including both mobile payments and contactless cards.

Image Credits: eMarketer

As a result of the industry changes, eMarketer reports that not only has mobile wallet usage increased, the average annual spend per user is increasing, as well. The firm predicts that figure will grow 23.6% from ~$1,973.70 in 2020 to $2,439.68 in 2021, and will surpass $3,000 by 2023.

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

In the U.S., Apple Pay remains the top mobile payment player, with 43.9 million users in 2021, growing by 14.4 million between 2020 and 2025 — more than its competitors. Starbucks will remain the No. 2 player with 31.2 million users, followed by Google Pay, which will add 10.2 million users during that time frame. Samsung Pay, meanwhile, is seeing stagnant growth, adding just 2 million more users between 2020 and 2025.

Image Credits: eMarketer

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LG is shutting down its smartphone business worldwide

LG said on Monday it will close its loss-making mobile phone business worldwide as the once pioneer brand looks to focus its resources in “growth areas” such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, AI and B2B solutions, and platforms and services.

The South Korean firm said in a statement that its board of directors approved the decision today. The unsurprising move follows the company’s statement from January when it said it was reviewing the direction of its smartphone business.

LG, which maintained No. 3 spot in the smartphone market in the U.S. for a long time, said it will continue to sell handsets until the inventory lasts, and will provide software support for existing lineup of smartphones for a certain period of time that would vary by region.

The company said the status of its employees of phone business will be determined at the local level. In January, reports emerged that said LG was looking to sell its smartphone business. In the same month, the company said it would launch a rollable phone this year. But it appears all the efforts to keep the business stay afloat failed.

“Moving forward, LG will continue to leverage its mobile expertise and develop mobility-related technologies such as 6G to help further strengthen competitiveness in other business areas. Core technologies developed during the two decades of LG’s mobile business operations will also be retained and applied to existing and future products,” it said in a statement.

The poor financial performance of LG’s smartphone business has been public information for several years. Like countless other Android smartphone vendors, LG has struggled to turn things around.

LG focused on mid-range and high-end smartphones, two segments of the market that have become increasingly competitive in the past decade thanks to the rise of Chinese phonemakers such as Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo and Vivo that are launching better value-for-money models every few months. (Once a rival, HTC has been struggling, too.)

Several phonemakers today rely heavily on software services such as mobile payments to make money. While LG launched a mobile payments service in 2017, two years after Samsung launched Samsung Pay, LG’s portfolio of services remained thin throughout the years.

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