Technology

Beats Studio 3 wireless headphones

A Los Angeles jury has ruled that Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, the founders of Apple-owned Beats Electronic, owe $25.25 million in royalties to an early collaborator who helped create the first model of Beats Studio headphones. Founded in 2008, Beats was acquired by Apple in 2014.

The plaintiff, Steven Lamar, claims that he first proposed the concept behind the headphones to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre (real name Andre Young) in early 2006 and continued working with the Beats founders until falling out with them later that year. This led to a settlement that Lamar claims stipulated he would receive royalties on all future releases in the Beats Studio line. Dre and Iovine argued, however, that they had fulfilled their end of the agreement by paying Lamar royalties for the original headphone model, which was released in 2008.

The jury decided that under the 2007 settlement, Lamar is indeed entitled to a percentage of the sales on all models of Studio headphones.

TechCrunch has sent requests for comment to Apple, Beats and Roam, the headphone company founded by Lamar.

Instagram future growth depends on the developing world, so itbuilt a version of its app just for them. &Instagram Lite& for Android appeared today in the Google PlayApp Store without any announcement from the company. &The Instagram Lite app is small, allowing you to save space on your phone and download it quickly& the description reads.

At just 573 kilobytes, Instagram Lite is 1/55th the size of Instagram32 megabyte main app. It lets you filter and post photos to the feed or Stories, watch Stories, and browse the Explore page, but currently lacks the options to share videos or Direct message friends.

Instagram Lite addresses many problems common amongst mobile users in the developing world who are often on older phones with less storage space, slower network connections, or who can&t afford big data packages. Users might not have to delete photos or other apps to install Instagram Lite, or wait a long time and pay more for it to download.

Screenshots of Instagram Lite

The release follows Instagramrevamped mobile website that launched last month, also designed for the developing world. At the time I wrote, &The launch begs the question of whether Instagram will release an Instagram Lite version of its native app.& The answer is yes.Mobile analytics service Sensor Tower tipped TechCrunch off to the release.

When asked for comment, an Instagram spokesperson confirmed that Instagram Lite began testing in Mexico this week, and provided this statement: &We are testing a new version of Instagram for Android that takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster.& The company wouldn&t say whether ads would be included. Later this year the app will expand to more countries, and get messaging and video posting capabilities.

The &Lite& trend has picked up steam recently. Facebook launched Facebook Lite in 2015, and it had 200 million users by 2017. That paved the way for the launch of Messenger Lite in April 2018, and Uber glommed on to the strategy with the release of its own Lite app earlier this month. Users have clearly been craving Instagram Lite, since a fake/unofficial Facebook Page with that has racked up over 2000 Likes.

Instagram announced last week at the IGTV unveiling that it had hit 1 billion monthly active users. Itbeen growing at roughly 100 million users every four months, with much of that coming from the developing world. Snapchat neglected international markets to focus on US teens, leaving the door open for Instagram and WhatsAppclones of Snapchat Stories to grab big user bases in countries like India and Brazil.

With this new growth tool in its belt, Instagram may see even swifter adoption in emerging markets. It could score potentially score evenue straight from Lite if ads are included, then as phones and networks improve, hope to shift users onto the full-fidelity version. Now, eyes will be on Snapchat to see if it builds its own Lite app. Otherwise it risks continuing to slip further behind the Instagram juggernaut.

Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year.

&This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment ofKaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that stillcannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets,& said KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville in a statement.

Our mobile world is dominated today by smartphones: there were about 1.6 billion of them sold last year. But feature phones have continued to move, too: itestimated that there were about 450 million-500 million of them shipped in 2017. And their sales are actually growing faster right now than their souped-up cousins.

KaiOS-powered phones play squarely in the latter category, and they are gaining traction in markets where feature phones still hold sway. In India, they have overtaken AppleiOS to become the second-most popular devices after Android handsets.KaiOS tells us that there have been more than 40 million KaiOS phones shipped to-date.

GoogleKaiOS investment could be seen as a way of introducing its services to feature phone users who might eventually graduate to smartphones. However, there is also scope for holding on to these users even as they stay in the feature phone category, which continues to evolve and become more functional.

&We&re excited to work with Google to deliver its services on more mobile devices,& said Codeville, the KaiOS CEO. &Having an intelligent voice assistant on an affordable mobile phone is truly revolutionary as it helps overcome some of the limitations a keypad brings.&

A Nokia device running KaiOS

KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozillafailed Firefox OS experiment, as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better.

KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax andAlcatel, and it works with carriers includingSprint and AT-T — it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with IndiaReliance Jio, the challenger telco that disrupted the Indian market with affordable 4G data packages.

Reliance Jio offers its own range of KaiOS handsets, and coupling that with its low-cost data packages, KaiOS& share of Indiaphone market has reportedly jumped to 15 percent — overtaking AppleiOS in the process and putting it second behind only Android. (Jioown devices have actually increased the number of feature phones in India, such has been its impact in the country.)

That market share alone in a high-growth market like India is likely enough to pique Googleinterest.

&We want to ensure that Google apps and services are available to everyone, whether they are using desktops, smartphones, or feature phones.& said Anjali Joshi, VP of Product Management for GoogleNext Billion Users division, in a statement. &Following the success of the JioPhones, we are excited to work with KaiOS to further improve access to information for feature phone users around the world.&

Beyond this, the Next Billion business unit works on customizing the Google experience and services to fit the needs of new internet users in emerging markets, including the launch of new services like thisneighborhoods app and a successful public WiFi program.

While Google continues to develop its Android smartphone platform, it has long been an advocate of expanding its services to other platforms, too, and thatbeen the case with KaiOS.

In February, KaiOS announced that it would be adding Google Search, Google Maps and the Google Voice Assistant to the new Nokia 8110 feature phone, and it seems that this is the Google agreement that will be expanded to all models as part of Googleinvestment.

To be clear, Google services are not the only ones on KaiOS. Itadded apps for Twitter and Facebook earlier this year, and it mixes dedicated KaiOS apps — WhatsApp is said to be coming — with others that are more basic HTML-5 web apps.

Googleinvestment in KaiOS is the latest in a line of direct startup deals from the U.S. tech giant that sit alongside investments made by GV and CapitalG, its two investment arms. Google has also backed concierge service Dunzoand is partnering with the carrier Orange to make investments and potentially acquire startups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.