Technology

Eyewear can be a statement-making, attention-grabbing fashion accessory — if done right. King Children, a custom eyewear startup emerging from stealth today, aims to give everyone unique, custom designs made for them, by them.

Harnessing the power of 3D scanning and printing technology, in addition to augmented reality, King Children aims to create custom frames that fit your face perfectly.

&One of the things we felt strongly about is there are so many consumer brands that don&t treat people of diverse backgrounds equally,& King Children co-founder and CEO Sahir Zaveri told TechCrunch. &They make products designed for these imaginary, average people. They don&t end up fitting diverse people as well. What we started to think about was creating a brand and platform that by definition would treat every single person equally.&

To get started, you use the KC app to take a 3D scan of your face. From there, you can design your own pair of glasses based on the shape of your face, structure and hairstyle. Then, you can adjust the lens height and width, nose bridge, nose pad position, pantoscopic tilt, frame wrap and more. Next, you select whether they&ll be sunglasses, prescription or blue blocker lens. You can also add an inscription up to ten characters. Within two weeks, you&ll have your new pair of glasses.

&One thing I personally love about our model is we run a zero-inventory model, which is a huge change in the world of consumer retail,& Zaveri said. &We own no stock whatsoever. When trends change, we have no retail we have to get rid of.&

The part where I try on some glasses via AR

In total, King Children costs $125 for a pair of glasses. In the event you don&t like the way the glasses turnout, King Children offers free returns.

&An extremely important aspect of this was that we needed to make sure we were able to deliver this product to the mass market,& Zaveri said. &It can&t be prohibitively expensive so that we would lose the point of what we were trying to achieve.&

But while Zaveri stressed the importance of diversity and access, King Children only works with the latest iPhones — the iPhone X, XS, XS Max and XR. The cheapest one, the XR, has a starting price of $749. Eventually, King Children will look to support all devices that enable facial scanning with accuracy down to the millimeter.

King Children uses &engineering-grade plastic& for its glasses, Zaveri said, which enables the company to &make high-quality frames that are exceptionally light but strong.&

&As you can imagine, eyewear for us is only the beginning,& Zaveri said. &But I would like to stress that we&re really focused on eyewear. We&re not actively working on any other products.&

Chinasearch engine giant Baidu is continuing its partnership spree for Apollo, its open development platform for autonomous driving, after it inked a deal with Swedish automaker Volvo to develop level four self-driving passenger cars.

&Autonomous driving has been our dream, but itcoming true,& said Li Zhenyu, vice president and general manager of Baiduintelligent driving group, at the companyannual conference today. Level four means the vehicles can drive on pre-mapped roads with little or no human intervention.

The agreement came a day after Baidu and Ford forged an agreement to test self-driving vehicles on Chinese roads for two years. The American car giantself-driving system has already been fitted into Apollo, according to the duojoint statement.

The Baidu-Red Flag autonomous passenger car

Baidu and Volvo, which is owned by ChinaGeely, said they plan to mass produce the vehicles for the Chinese market, although there is no timeline for the promise. The deal marks Volvofirst partnership to jointly develop autonomous vehicles in China. This is also the first time for Baidu to work with a non-Chinese automaker to mass produce level four passenger cars.

Over the past few months, Baidu has signed a number of Chinese carmakers including BAIC and Red Flag onto Apollo amid a global race to mass produce autonomous vehicles. As of July, the Apollo ecosystem counted 116 partners, up from 50 a year ago.

Baidu previously said its first batch of level four autonomous driving vehicles through the BAIC deal would be ready by 2021. Its level four minibuses with Xiamen King Long are already running in over ten locations throughout China, BaiduCEO Robin Li said during its Q3 earnings call on Tuesday.

Baidu has also been expanding its Apollo network by linking up with the government. On Tuesday, it announced a collaboration with the Chinese city of Changsha, which has over seven million residents, to apply self-driving solutions to the cityroads. Baidu is also in talks with Beijing and Shanghai for a similar tie-up.

Spotify, the streaming music company that went public earlier this year, posted its quarterly results today, and while itcontinuing to grow at a modest pace, it appears to be just about meeting analyst expectations when it comes to its financials, and therefore continues to struggle in the public markets.

The company announced that it made €1.352 billion in revenues for the quarter that ended in September. That was just ahead of analysts& average estimates of $1.51 billion, or €1.33 billion.

Spotify revenues are up 31 percent on a year ago; its operating loss is now at €6 million, a 92 percent improvement on a year ago; and its margins are now at 25 percent, &outperforming& its expectations. With Spotifymonthly active users now at 191 million — up 28 percent on last year — it will be interesting to see if investors will remain patient in the months ahead as Spotify tries to tip the scales in its favor.

The companystock has been getting hammered in recent times, with lingering skepticism in the market that Spotify will be able to sustain its growth and tip into the black over the longer term.

It doesn&t look like todaynews has done much to change that. At the start of this week, its share pricefell to of $139/share. Currently, itat $134/share, down 10 percent,and itgone as low as $134.54/share in trading today — a sign that even with the gains reported today, investors are not hugely impressed. (Its market cap as of yesterdayclose was $26.9 billion.)

One reason for skepticism, despite meeting expectations, might be that Spotify has already warned that there will, indeed, be some dings to that margin in the quarters ahead. This week the company announced a partnership with Google where it will offer Google Home Mini speaks to people taking its Family plan as a holiday season promotion.

&We anticipate that this partnership will have an adverse impact of approximately 50 basis points on our Gross Margin profile in Q4,& the company noted.

The US continues to be the biggest part of Spotifyuser base, although the company said that Latin America and Rest of World are growing the fastest (which is often the case with newer markets for consumer companies).

Within its user base, paying premium subscribers now total 87 million, keeping it well ahead of Apple Music50 million (which it reported this past summer). That figure is up 40 percent and Spotify said it was fuelled by the companyFamily and Student plans. The company is now working with other streaming providers like Hulu and Showtime to offer bundles of entertainment, with a Student tier it introduced this quarter priced at $4.99, which has helped the company lock in more users who are less likely to churn.

However, the company continues to rely heavily on the &free& part of its freemium model for growth: it now has 109 million ad-supported MAUs, up 20 percent. The company has been expanding the kinds of advertising it serves to these users, so while it doesn&t monetise them with subscriptions, it will be getting its pound of flesh in other ways. Its programmatic ad platform, Ad Studio, is currently only live in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, so there is still a lot of room for growth both in those markets and in others.

That will also mean that it needs to get its house in order. Specifically, Spotify has been facing — like many others that allow for easy and quick registrations to access services — a longer-term issue of weeding out bots and other fake users on the platform in order to get to a more accurate audience number. Spotify does not say how many users itidentified through this process but says that it has been continuing that work.

The free users and the ad model that supports them, in any case, remain a relatively untapped part of Spotifybusiness: the company said that premium revenue accounted for €1,210 million in Q3, up 31 percent on a year ago. That means ads are making only about €140 million at the moment.