Amazon is closing down Freevee, its free ad-supported video on demand service. This platform was home to original programming as well as more than from the Prime Video roster. Freevee will be phased out over the coming weeks, and its content will become available as part of Prime Video. The ad-supported tier of Prime Video is included as part of Amazon’s Prime membership for $15 a month.

“To deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers, we have decided to phase out Freevee branding,” an Amazon spokesperson told . “There will be no change to the content available for Prime members, and a vast offering of free streaming content will still be accessible for non-Prime members, including select originals from Amazon MGM Studios, a variety of licensed movies and series, and a broad library of FAST channels – all available on Prime Video.”

The free viewing platform went through several rebrands since its original launch as IMDb Freedive in January 2019. It its final phase as Freevee in April 2022.

Luggage storage as a vector for piling into convenience-based revenue opportunities in the business of global travel continues to put a spring in San Francisco-based Bounce‘s step. The startup has just tucked $19 million in Series B funding into its suitcase, with a plan to keep rolling revenue that’s grown 20x since its $12M Series A back in spring 2022.

Market expansion and adding more verticals are on the cards for Bounce for the next couple of years.

Asia-Pacific is a major focus, according to co-founder and CEO Cody Candee, who says revenue from the region is growing by up to 4x year-over-year. He suggests the consumer behavior the startup is building toward is way more pronounced in markets like Japan, where coin lockers for luggage and convenience stores that offer much more than soda are established already.

Figuring out where Bounce needs to expand to meet traveler demand isn’t tricky, as the startup can see the locations its users are searching for. “We have more than a million people that land on our website or app every month,” Candee noted, saying this lets it create a ranked list of which areas are in most demand.

The startup’s big vision remains serving “cloud storage for the physical world,” as Candee puts it. That translates to a mobile app that lets users (mainly travelers) find and access services for storing and moving their stuff.

Its partners are SMEs with brick-and-mortar locations that have space to store luggage (and, in some cases, accept packages), and delivery firms that can move stuff around on demand. Bounce provides its 13,000+ partners with a revenue share for servicing its app users.

With the fresh cash from the Series B, Bounce predicts it can reach around 30,000 locations by the end of 2026. However, Candee stresses that the company’s focused on “quality, not quantity” — in this context, that means locations in the vicinity of places where travelers may look to store stuff, so around mainline train stations and the like.

Bounce for hotels

Expanding verticals is another piece of the plan that will be funded by the new money, Candee said. He pointed to Bounce for Hotels, for example, which lets hotels offer luggage storage to its own guests via Bounce’s platform.

Candee says the vertical arose organically, after the startup noticed that hotels that had been using its platform to charge non-guests for luggage storage started charging their guests, too. Bounce now has more than 100 hotels doing this through its platform, he said.

“We thought, wow, this is really interesting here,” he told TechCrunch. “I guess, you know, it was crazy a couple decades ago when it was the norm to always have breakfast included with your hotel stay. And then they split that out as a separate thing that consumers buy. And maybe we do the same with luggage storage.”

While budget travelers may not like the fact that Bounce is instrumental in turning free luggage storage into an extra hotel charge, the startup will probably dodge any blame, as that’s more likely to manifest as negative hotel reviews.

Candee also notes that hotels don’t have to charge; they can offer their guests luggage storage via its platform for free. For hotel guests, he argues, there will be the convenience upside of getting access to a whole suite of other services via Bounce’s platform.

“Imagine you go into a hotel, you see a Bounce kiosk, and it says store your bags here, store your bags elsewhere in the city, ship your bags home, deliver your bags to the train station or wherever you want to go,” he said. “And then maybe even a fifth one: We’ve seen a couple companies pop up that can check your bag into your flight from the hotel. We can build all these things with integrations without having to do our own delivery or anything like that.”

“That really ties into the whole vision and how hotels can be an access point into that whole Bounce ecosystem,” he added. “Bounce can be more ubiquitous more quickly with more services.”

An app to tap others’ things too?

Down the line, Candee reckons ongoing shifts in the concept of ownership of physical stuff will enable the business to keep bouncing further in terms of the service mix. Think enabling users to rent their stuff, even to each other, as a sort of Airbnb for things, though he concedes that’s the “multi-decade vision.”

“This is years out, but the infrastructure to get there is all these integrations around shipping and delivery. And if we’re very successful with our vision, then the next generation from now will think that we were crazy for buying everything we needed […] to use just like one time,” he said.

“Because the generation after us, with a Bounce world, will be one in which they say, ‘Oh, if I need to use something, I’ll just download it from the Bounce cloud. I’ll rent it, I’ll access it, whatever it is.’ So that’s the big, crazy vision of where we can go. But shipping and delivery, and furthering our core of all these storage points, is the basis of that.”

That explains why the startup’s efforts and funding are still targeted at the foundational piece of expanding its partner network by adding more locations near places where travelers are likely to want to store and move their stuff.

Currently, Bounce’s network of physical location partners touches some 4,000 cities in 100 countries. It also says its service has been used to store about 6 million bags since the app launched back in 2019.

On the logistics front, Candee reckons the direction of travel favors Bounce’s big mission, too — he pointed out that when he kicked off the startup, there was no DoorDash Drive, for example; the delivery firm’s white label API lets others tap into its logistics tech and network of drivers.

“I think it’ll get easier and easier to do these things,” he said. “The bigger we get doing our core business, the easier it will be to land global and local partnerships for delivery, integration, and all kinds of other partnerships we want to do.”

Bounce’s Series B was led by Sapphire Sport, with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, as well as new investors 20VC Growth, FJ Labs, Shilling, and Thayer Ventures, among others.

“We’re excited to see how this new capital will fuel Bounce’s growth into new markets and power storage operations at hotels and venues,” said David Hartwig, partner, and Rico Mallozzi, principal, at Sapphire Sport in a joint statement.

“We’ve been impressed by their ability to scale their storage network with speed and efficiency, and believe they’ve only begun to tap into the potential of serving diverse storage needs,” they added.

Bluesky says it won’t use blockchains even though it’s funded by Blockchain Capital.

Its $15 million funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital group that has invested in crypto firms, like Kraken, OpenSea, and Coinbase. Despite this, Bluesky says it’s not changing its stance on blockchains:

This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)

• Apple will soon let you share an AirTags location securely with an airline
• With several airlines onboard, the hope is to help sooner reunite lost baggage with an AirTag inside
• “Share Item Location” will launch with iOS 18.2 later in 2024

If you’ve ever had an airline lose your luggage, Apple might have announced the best news possible. And this is one that I really wish had arrived months earlier.

As part of iOS 18.2, which is expected to launch in December 2024, Apple is giving AirTags and FindMy a significant upgrade that will likely be music to many ears. You’ll now be able to securely share your AirTags location with a specific person, but more importantly, a business.

With “Share Item Location,” you can easily and quickly generate a shared URL showing the AirTag’s location, a map, and the timestamp. Why is this so handy? Well, if you’re already in the habit of having an AirTag in your luggage, and if it goes missing, you’ll be able to share this URL with, say, an airline – like United or Delta, among others – in the hopes of getting it back sooner. The map viewable by the URL will be similar to seeing the AirTag’s location within the FindMy app, and it can be accessed from a browser.

In fact, “Share Item Location” is designed for a trusted person or an airline from the ground up, in that Apple is working with many airlines to let a user share this link if a piece of luggage goes missing. Those airlines include United and Delta Airlines as well as Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling as of the time of writing.

Artificial intelligence coupled with Google Street View images has created hundreds of thousands of “digital twins” of trees across North America. The simulation could help city planners better predict how seasonal foliage boosts cooling or when growing branches may require trimming.

“If you can model the existing set of trees and you have a reasonable model of infrastructure like power lines, you can understand where you’re going to have trees growing into power lines that are potentially most harmful,” says …