Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

Greetings from sunny San Jose. Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference officially kicks off this morning at the McEnery Convention Center with a big keynote. While the rest of the week is focused on developers, today’s show is all about what’s the come from the company, and after relatively low key events from Google and Microsoft, Apple’s looking to make a splash this year.

We’ve already seen a fair share of rumors and leaks — you can read about those here. The list includes system-wide dark mode for iOS 13, a focus on health and perhaps even the long awaited return of of the Mac Pro.

The show kicks off at at 10AM PT/1PM ET, so grab a snack and get comfy, because we’re going liveblogging below.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Live from WWDC 2019

Ditch those generic emoji. Facebook’s new Avatars feature lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in chat and comments. Once you personalize your Avatar’s face, hair, and clothes, they’ll star in a range of frequently updated stickers conveying common emotions and phrases. From Likes to Reactions to Avatars, you could see this as the natural progression of self-expression on Facebook…or as a ruthless clone of Snapchat’s wildly popular Bitmoji selfie stickers.

Facebook Avatars launches today in Australia for use in Messenger and News Feed comments before coming to the rest of the world in late 2019 or early 2020. The feature could make Facebook feel more fun, youthful, and visually communicative at a time when the 15-year-old social network increasingly seems drab and uncool. Avatars aren’t quite as cute or hip to modern slang as Bitmoji. But they could still become a popular way to add some flare to replies without resorting to cookie-cutter emoticons or cliche GIFs.

“There’s been a ton of work put in to this from the product and design perspective to find out, with how many people on Facebook, how to make this as representative as possible” says Facebook Avatars communication manager Jimmy Raimo. From offering religious clothing like hijabs to a rainbow of skin colors and hair styles, Facebook didn’t want any demographic left out. “They’re a bit more realistic so they can be your personal avatar vs trying to make them cute, funny, and cartoony” Raimo explains.

How To Make A Facebook Avatar

Users will start to see a smiley-face button in the News Feed comment composer and Messenger sticker chooser they can tap to create their Facebook Avatar. For now, only people in Australia can make Avatars but everyone will be able to see them around Facebook.

The creation process begins with gender neutral blank people can customize from scratch across 18 traits. For now there’s no option to start with a selfie or profile pic and have Facebook automatically generate you an avatar. Facebook is researching that technique, but Raimo acknowledges that “We want to make sure we don’t show you something totally opposite of the photo. There’s sensitivity around facial recognition.”

The Facebook Avatar customizer

Facebook won’t be monetizing Avatars directly, at least at first. There are no sponsored clothing options from fashion brands or ways to buy fancy jewelry or other accessories for your mini-me. Raimo said Facebook is open to these idea, though. “It would help personalize it for sure and from a business perspective that would be smart.” It’s easy to imagine Nike or The North Face paying to let Avatar sport their logos, or fans coughing up cash to wear their favorite labels. Perhaps that’s a micropayment use case for Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency.

Facebook is also considering expanding Avatars for use as profile pics or in Groups — two areas of the app where you interact with strangers and you might enjoy the anonymity of a 2D drawing instead of a photo of your face. However, Facebook hasn’t deeply considered turning Avatars into a platform so you could use them in other apps through an API or keyboard you install on your phone.

Instead, step 1 was just to make sure the Avatar creation flow is easy and most people can make one that actually looks like them. The News Feed team that built Avatars plans to conduct surveys and focus groups to help it iterate. When asked about the ability to change the perceived age of Avatars to be inclusive of Facebook’s older users, Raimo admitted that’s a gap in the product that it plans to fill by year’s end. Currently there’s no way to add wrinkles so mom and dad’s avatars might look a bit too similar to yours.

Avatars have come a long way since Facebook’s v1 prototype a year ago

The biggest problem with Facebook Avatars is that they’re hopelessly late to the market. TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook was working on Avatars a year ago, and that was already a year after I wrote that “Facebook seriously needs its own Bitmoji“. While it’s good that it took the time to research how to make them inclusive, Snapchat gained a ton of ground in the meantime. Other competitors have cropped up like FaceMoji‘s hyper-realistic animated masks, charicature-style Genies, and Morphin which deepfakes you into popular GIFs.

Bitmoji has been around since 2014, and since Snapchat acquired it in 2016, it’s been a mainstay of the top 10 apps chart. Sensor Tower estimates Bitmoji has been downloaded over 330 million times. And Bitmoji now has its own developer kit that spawning hit social apps like YOLO, games where your character looks like you, and even merchandise and smart watch faces.  Like Snapchat Stories, Bitmoji may be too entrenched in popular culture for Facebook Avatars to ever escape their rap as a rip-off.

Facebook Avatars (left) vs Snapchat Bitmoji (right)

“We’re by no means the first ones here” concedes Facebook News Feed product lead Amit Fulay. Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a huge opportunity here.”The notion of having digital representation has been around for a really long time. What we’re trying to do is this at scale.” As was its stance on copying Snapchat Stories, Raimo says that Facebook cares more about building what the most people will use and enjoy than getting credit for inventing something.

The need for humans to expressively represent themselves on the internet is only growing as we shift from text-based to image-based communication. There are still billions of Facebook users without a Bitmoji. Whether for privacy, creativity, or convenience, there’s a wide range of use cases for having a parallel virtual likeness. It could protect our real face from needless exposure to the rougher sides of the web. And now Mark Zuckerberg has the foundation of a digital identity layer that could travel with us alongside our data, personalizing every online interaction.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Facebook introduces Avatars, its Bitmoji competitor

Analyst Canalys has updated its forecast of global smartphone shipments — saying it expects just 1.35 billion units to ship in 2019, a year-on-year decline of 3.1%.

This follows ongoing uncertainty around US-China trade talks and the presidential order signed by Trump last month barring US companies from using kit by Chinese device makers, including Huawei, on national security grounds — which led to reports that Google would withdraw supply of key Android services to Huawei.

“Due to the many uncertainties surrounding the US/China trade talks, the US Executive Order signed on 15 May and subsequent developments, Canalys has lowered its forecasts to reflect an uncertain future,” the analyst writes.

It says its forecast is based on the assumption that restrictions will be stringently applied to Huawei once a 90-day reprieve which was subsequently granted expires — the temporary licence run from May 20, 2019, through August 19, 2019 — making it difficult for the world’s second largest smartphone maker by sales to roll out new devices in the short term, especially outside China, even as it takes steps to mitigate the effect of component and service supply issues.

“Its overseas potential will be hampered for some time,” the analyst suggests. “The US and China may eventually reach a trade deal to alleviate the pressure on Huawei, but if and when this will happen is far from clear.”

“It is important to note that market uncertainty is clearly prompting vendors to accelerate certain strategies to minimize the short- and long-term impact in a challenging business environment, for example, shifting manufacturing to different countries to hedge against the risk of tariffs. But with recent US announcements on tariffs on goods from more countries, the industry will be dealing with turmoil for some time,” added Nicole Peng, Canalys VP, mobility, in a statement.

It expects other smartphone makers to seek to capitalize on short term opportunities created by the uncertainty hitting the Chinese tech giant, and predicts that South Korea’s Samsung will benefit the most — “thanks to its aggressive device strategy and its ability to quickly ramp up production”.

By 2020, it expects the market to have settled a little — with active contingency plans to be in place in major mobile supply chains and channels to “mitigate Huawei’s decline”, as well as gear up for 5G device rollouts.

Canalys takes the view that 5G and other hardware innovations will be positive drivers for consumer demand — expecting smartphone shipments to return to soft growth globally in 2020, rising 3.4% to 1.39BN, albeit with some subtle regional variations that it says will allow some to recover faster than others.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | US/China trade uncertainty adds to global smartphone growth woes

Apple is holding a keynote today on the first day of its developer conference, and the company is expected to talk about a ton of software updates. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 5 PM in London, 6 PM in Paris), you’ll be able to watch the event as the company is streaming it live.

Rumor has it that the company plans to unveil the next versions of all its operating systems. Get ready for iOS 13 with system-wide dark mode, macOS 10.15, watchOS with some new apps from Apple and more.

The most interesting news of the show should be about a project called Marzipan. Apple plans to bridge the gap between iOS and macOS by letting developers release iOS apps on the Mac. It could change everything for the Mac. Apple could also unveil a new Mac Pro, so this should be interesting as well.

If you have an Apple TV, you can download the Apple Events app in the App Store. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old ones. The app icon was updated a few days ago for the event.

And if you don’t have an Apple TV, the company also lets you live-stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed now works in all major browsers — Safari, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

So to recap, here’s how you can watch today’s Apple event:

• Your favorite web browser on the Mac or Windows 10.
• An Apple TV with the Apple Events app in the App Store.
• Google Chrome on your Android phone.
• And here’s the link to the live stream.

Of course, you also can read TechCrunch’s live blog if you’re stuck at work and really need our entertaining commentary track to help you get through your day. We have a team in the room.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | How to watch the live stream for today’s Apple WWDC keynote

Want to rock out together even when you’re apart? Spotify has prototyped an unreleased feature called “Social Listening” that lets multiple people add songs to a queue they can all listen to. You just all scan one friend’s QR-style Spotify Social Listening code, and then anyone can add songs to the real-time playlist. Spotify could potentially expand the feature to synchronize playback so you’d actually hear the same notes at the same time, but for now it’s a just a shared queue.

Social Listening could give Spotify a new viral growth channel, as users could urge friends to download the app to sync up. The intimate experience of co-listening might lead to longer sessions with Spotify, boosting ad plays or subscription retention. Plus, it could differentiate Spotify from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal and other competing streaming services.

A Spotify spokesperson tells TechCrunch that “We’re always testing new products and experiences, but have no further news to share at this time.” Spotify already offers Collaborative Playlists friends can add to, but Social Listening is designed for real-time sharing. The company refused to provide further details on the prototype or when it might launch.

The feature is reminiscent of Turntable.fm, a 2011 startup that let people DJ in virtual rooms on their desktop that other people could join where they could chat, vote on the next song and watch everyone’s avatars dance. But the company struggled to properly monetize through ad-free subscriptions and shut down in 2014. Facebook briefly offered its own version called “Listen With…” in 2012 that let Spotify or Rdio users synchronize music playback.

Spotify Social Listening was first spotted by reverse-engineering sorceress and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. She discovered code for the feature buried in Spotify’s Android app, but for now it’s only available to Spotify employees. Social Listening appears in the menu of connected devices you can open while playing a song beside nearby Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. “Connect with friends: Your friends can add tracks by scanning this code – You can also scan a friend’s code,” the feature explains.

A help screen describes Social Listening as “Listen to music together. 1. On your phone, play a song and select (Connected Devices). You’ll see a code at the bottom of the screen. 2. On your friend’s phone, select the same (Connected Devices) icon, tap SCAN CODE, and point the camera at your code. 3. Now you can control the music together.” You’ll then see friends who are part of your Social Listening session listed in the Connected Devices menu. Users can also copy and share a link to join their Social Listening session that starts with the URL prefix https://open.spotify.com/socialsession/. Note that Spotify never explicitly says that playback will be synchronized.

With streaming apps largely having the same music catalog and similar $9.99 per month premium pricing, they have to compete on discovery and user experience. Spotify has long been in the lead here with its algorithmically personalized Discover Weekly playlists, which were promptly copied by Apple and SoundCloud.

Oddly, Spotify has stripped out some of its own social features over the years, eliminating the in-app messaging inbox and instead pushing users to share songs over third-party messaging apps. The deemphasis in discovery through friends conveniently puts the focus on Spotify’s owned playlists. That gives it leverage over the record labels during their rate negotiations as it’s who influences which songs will become hits, so if labels don’t play nice their artists might not get promoted via playlists.

That’s why it’s good to see Spotify remembering that music is an inherently social experience. Music physically touches us through its vibrations, and when people listen to the same songs and are literally moved by it at the same time, it creates a sense of togetherness we’re too often deprived of on the internet.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Spotify is building shared-queue Social Listening

On Wednesday, Google rolled out new policies around kids’ apps on Google Play following an FTC complaint claiming a lack of attention to apps’ compliance with children’s privacy laws, and other rules around content. However, kids’ apps weren’t the only area being addressed this week. As it turns out, Google also cracked down on loot boxes and marijuana apps, while also expanding sections detailing prohibitions around hate speech, sexual content and counterfeit goods, among other things.

The two more notable changes include a crackdown on “loot boxes” and a ban on apps that offer marijuana delivery — while the service providers’ apps can remain, the actual ordering process has to take place outside of the app itself, Google said.

Specifically, Google will no longer allow apps offering the ability to order marijuana through an in-app shopping cart, those that assist users in the delivery or pickup of marijuana or those that facilitate the sale of THC products.

This isn’t a huge surprise — Apple already bans apps that allow for the sale of marijuana, tobacco or other controlled substances in a similar fashion. On iOS, apps like Eaze and Weedmaps are allowed, but they don’t offer an ordering function. That’s the same policy Google is now applying on Google Play.

This is a complex subject for Google, Apple and other app marketplace providers to tackle. Though some states have legalized the sale of marijuana, the laws vary. And it’s still illegal according to the federal government. Opting out of playing middleman here is probably the right step for app marketplace platforms.

That said, we understand Google has no intention of outright banning marijuana ordering and delivery apps.

The company knows they’re popular and wants them to stay. It’s even giving them a grace period of 30 days to make changes, and is working with the affected app developers to ensure they’ll remain accessible.

“These apps simply need to move the shopping cart flow outside of the app itself to be compliant with this new policy,” a spokesperson explained. “We’ve been in contact with many of the developers and are working with them to answer any technical questions and help them implement the changes without customer disruption.”

Another big change impacts loot boxes — a form of gambling popular among gamers. Essentially, people pay a fee to receive a random selection of in-game items, some of which may be rare or valuable. Loot boxes have been heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, including their negative effect on gameplay and how they’re often marketed to children.

Last week, a new Senate bill was introduced with bipartisan support that would prohibit the sale of loot boxes to children, and fine those in violation.

Google Play hasn’t gone so far as to ban loot boxes entirely, but instead says games have to now disclose the odds of getting each item.

In addition to these changes, Google rolled out a handful of more minor updates, detailed on its Developer Policy Center website. 

Here, Google says it has expanded the definition of what it considers sexual content to include a variety of new examples, like illustrations of sexual poses, content depicting sexual aids and fetishes and depictions of nudity that wouldn’t be appropriate in a public context. It also added “content that is lewd or profane,” according to Android Police, which compared the old and new versions of the policy.

Definitions that are somewhat “open to interpretation” is something that Apple commonly uses to gain better editorial control over its own App Store. By adding a ban of “lewd or profane” content, Google can opt to reject apps that aren’t covered by other examples.

Google also expanded its list of examples around hate speech to include: “compilations of assertions intended to prove that a protected group is inhuman, inferior or worthy of being hated;” “apps that contain theories about a protected group possessing negative characteristics (e.g. malicious, corrupt, evil, etc.), or explicitly or implicitly claims the group is a threat;” and “content or speech trying to encourage others to believe that people should be hated or discriminated against because they are a member of a protected group.”

Additional changes include an update to the Intellectual Property policy that more clearly prohibits the sale or promotion for sale of counterfeit goods within an app; a clarification of the User Generated Content policy to explicitly prohibit monetization features that encourage objectionable behavior by users; and an update to the Gambling policy, with more examples.

A Google spokesperson says the company regularly updates its Play Store developer policies in accordance with best practices and legal regulations around the world. However, the most recent set of changes err on the side of getting ahead of increased regulation — not only in terms of kids’ apps and data privacy, but also other areas now under legal scrutiny, like loot boxes and marijuana sales.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google Play cracks down on marijuana apps, loot boxes and more

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is doubling down on India’s burgeoning video market, looking to fight back local rival ByteDance, Google and Disney to gain its foothold in the nation. The company said today that it is pumping $100 million into Vmate, a three-year-old social video app owned by subsidiary UC Web.

Vmate was launched as a video streaming and short-video-sharing app in 2016. But in the years since, it has added features such as video downloads and 3-dimensional face emojis to expand its use cases. It has amassed 30 million users globally, and will use the capital to scale its business in India, the company told TechCrunch. Alibaba Group did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about its ownership of the app.

The move comes as Alibaba revives its attempts to take on the growing social video apps market, something on which it has missed out completely in China. Vmate could potentially help it fill the gap in India. Many of the features Vmate offers are similar to those offered by ByteDance’s TikTok, which currently has more than 120 million active users in India. ByteDance, with a valuation of about $75 billion, has grown its business without taking money from either Alibaba or Tencent, the latter of which has launched its own TikTok-like apps with limited success.

Alibaba remains one of the biggest global investors in India’s e-commerce and food-tech markets. It has heavily invested in Paytm, BigBasket, Zomato and Snapdeal. It was also supposedly planning to launch a video streaming service in India last year — a rumor that was fueled after it acquired a majority stake in TicketNew, a Chennai-based online ticketing service.

UC Web, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, also counts India as one of its biggest markets. The browser maker has attempted to become a super app in India in recent years by including news and videos. In the last two years, it has been in talks with several bloggers and small publishers to host their articles directly on its platform, many people involved in the project told TechCrunch.

UC Web’s eponymous browser rose to stardom in the days of feature phones, but has since lost the lion’s share to Google Chrome as smartphones become more ubiquitous. Chrome ships as the default browser on most Android smartphones.

The major investment by Alibaba Group also serves as a testament to the growing popularity of video apps in India. Once cautious about each megabyte they spent on the internet, thrifty Indians have become heavy video consumers online as mobile data gets significantly cheaper in the country. Video apps are increasingly climbing up the charts on Google Play Store.

In an event for marketers late last year, YouTube said that India was the only nation where it had more unique users than its parent company Google. The video juggernaut had about 250 million active users in India at the end of 2017. The service, used by more than 2 billion users worldwide, has not revealed its India-specific user base since.

T-Series, the largest record label in India, became the first YouTube channel this week to claim more than 100 million subscribers. What’s even more noteworthy is that T-Series took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. The additional 90 million subscribers signed up to its channel in the last two years. Also fighting for users’ attention is Hotstar, which is owned by Disney. Earlier this month, it set a new global record for most simultaneous views on a live-streaming event.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Alibaba pumps 0 million into Vmate to grow its video app in India

This morning’s Moto Z4 news was good cause to go back and reassess the state of the modular phone. Three years after the line launched, the concept hasn’t exactly ignited the market — in fact, there are really just a handful of scattered competitors to show for it. Essential is among the most prominent, with the PH-1’s clever two-pin connector.

By sheer coincidence, it turns out today is the two-year anniversary of the company’s debut. Founder Andy Rubin took to the stage at Code 2017 with big ideas and two products. One, the PH-1, has come and gone, launching a couple of months late in August 2017 before being discontinued late last year. The other, the Essential Home hub, never appeared at all.

The day the products were announced, then COO Niccolo de Masi (who appears to have since moved on to Honeywell spin-off Resideo), spoke of the company’s 10-year plan. It was an acknowledgement that it had a tough road ahead, as it planned to take on big names like Apple and Samsung. But the company certainly had the money. A $300 million raise helped the startup achieve unicorn status not long after taking the stage at the conference.

But the intervening two years have been plagued with bad news. In spite of positive reviews, the company reportedly only shipped 88,000 phones in 2017. The PH-1 got a massive price drop and its first modular accessory, a 360 camera, was discounted to $19, down from $250.

Last May, rumors surfaced that the company had gone up for sale and its follow-up phone had been canceled. And in October, it laid off nearly a third of its staff. Founder Andy Rubin has been laying low in the meantime. That same month, The New York Times published an explosive story about a $90 million Google payoff in the wake of sexual misconduct claims, causing him to take leave from Essential.

All the while, however, the company has firmly denied claims that it’s going away. I spoke to a rep at the company recently who said things are in the works, without revealing any specifics. There have been a ton of patent filings that appear to point to some future handset. It announced a new mod for the PH-1 in June and even acquired a company in December. Hell, earlier this month, it issued a new security patch, holding to its promise of monthly updates — a hell of a lot more than many more successful smartphone makers have offered.

That’s part of what makes the Essential story so frustrating. The PH-1 was a novel device, among the first to go with a camera notch display. Its $699 price (later reduced to $499) also predated Samsung/Apple/Google’s move into budget flagships. But even with a unicorn valuation, hardware is hard. And Essential may have entered the market at the worst possible time, as smartphone sales were beginning to flag for the first time ever.

Two years after launch, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Essential’s time may have come and gone. For now, however, the company appears to simply be biding its time before announcing what comes next.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Two years after Essential’s launch, still no Home hub or second phone

When it arrived in 2016, the Moto Z felt revolutionary — or, at the very least, novel. Motorola soon announced it was making the Moto Z its flagship device. In the intervening three years, the line has yet to set the world on fire.

It’s seemingly been a decent seller for the company, but with rare exceptions (as it happens, today is the second anniversary of the Essential announcement) the rest of the smartphone industry has yet to embrace the modular handset revolution.

It’s not for lack of trying, of course. Motorola’s released a wide range of Mods, including, most notably, a 5G unit, marking the first time that technology was widely available in North America. This morning the Lenovo-owned brand just announced the availability of the Moto Z4 (though not before the product accidentally went on sale at at least one retail location).

As ever, the latest version of the line points to one of the peculiarities of the modular phone concept, with upgraded base specs on a phone whose features rely largely on peripherals. Of course, the reasonable $499 starting price certainly cushions the blow a bit.

The base specs are a mixed bag. It’s got a 6.39-inch display, coupled with a middling Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 and a beefy 3,600mAh battery that the company rates at two days. The phone also adds a night-vision mode to the rear-facing 48 megapixel sensor.

The gray version of the handset starts shipping June 13, with a white model arriving over the summer. The unlocked version ships with a free Moto 360. Verizon’s also making the 5G Mod available for $200 (down from $350) for a limited time.

I’ll be spending more time with the phone in the near future — for now, however, it feels like Motorola’s most intriguing and promising handset is beginning to feel more and more like a middle of the road device.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | The latest modular Moto Z has a beefy battery and improved low-light camera

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings

Uber drivers have been able to rate their passengers before this, but those passengers were never really at risk of deactivation — until now. In a blog post, Uber’s Kate Parker said that while only “a small number of riders” should be affected, “it’s the right thing to do.”

The company isn’t announcing a specific rating cutoff. Instead, it says it will deactivate users who fall significantly below a city’s average, after “several notifications and opportunities to improve his or her rating.”

2. Huawei files motion to challenge sweeping US ban, calling it ‘not normal’

The Chinese hardware giant has filed a motion for summary judgement that questions the constitutionality of the section of the National Defense Authorization Act that the Trump administration used to halt imports.

3. Flipboard hacks prompt password resets for millions of users

Hackers stole usernames, email addresses, passwords and account tokens for third-party services. According to Flipboard, “not all” users’ account data were involved in the breaches, but the company declined to say how many users were affected.

4. Amazon just launched a $90, 5.5-inch Echo Show

The Echo Show 5 (that’s “five” for inches) doesn’t replace any existing Amazon smart screen, even though the price point will no doubt make many think twice about the $130 Spot.

5. Talkspace picks up $50 million Series D

Talkspace launched back in 2012 with a mission to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible. The platform allows users to pay a subscription fee for unlimited messaging with one of the company’s 5,000 healthcare professionals.

6. NYC subway riders will be able to swipe in with Apple Pay starting Friday

Apple Pay is hitting select subway stations this Friday, May 31. New Yorkers will then be able to swipe their iPhones or Apple Watches to catch a ride.

7. Q&A with J Crowley, Head of Product at Airbnb Lux, on what makes a great PM

Crowley has run product at three big-name companies: Foursquare/Swarm, Blue Apron and now Airbnb. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Daily Crunch: Uber will deactivate low-rated riders