Even though the year is not yet over, 2022 has been the US’s most active wildfire year within the past decade in terms of the number of fires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Through early October alone, 55,612 fires have burned up nearly 7 million acres across the country.

As wildfire risk continues to rise, startups are providing new tech, like AI-assisted cameras or drones, that attempts to aid fire authorities in detecting wildfires earlier.

Zoom in: German startup Dryad Networks, which has raised €13.9 million since its 2020 founding, is based on an approach that uses devices to detect fires at their exact source.

• Dryad places IoT sensors throughout fire-prone forests, where they aim to identify fires before they can grow into deadly infernos.

“The advantage of that approach is that we can detect fires even during what’s called the smoldering phase. So before there is an open fire, before you can even see it from a kilometer or two kilometers away,” Carsten Brinkschulte, co-founder and CEO of Dryad Networks, told Emerging Tech Brew.

By the numbers: So far, Dryad has deployed 12 proof-of-concept installations in countries like the United States, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Germany, and South Korea.

It has installed a few hundred sensors through these projects, and plans to manufacture at least 10,000 sensors to aid in large-scale deployments by the end of 2022, Brinkschulte said. He added that Dryad is aiming to manufacture 230,000 units by the end of 2023.

Click here to keep reading about Dryad’s detection tech.—JM

Meta had a splashy event on Tuesday where it announced an ambitious new VR product—and no, we’re not referring to avatars with legs.

• The company unveiled the ~$1,500 Quest Pro headset this week, which is targeted at power users and potential metacommuters (read: people who want to do their real-life jobs in a metaverse setting).

The new product comes nearly one year after Meta became Meta. Let’s take a by-the-numbers look at the company’s massive bet on VR, based on the most recent figures:

• Revenue: In Q2 2022, Meta made $452 million from its Reality Labs segment, up 48% from $305 million a year prior.
• Expenses: In Q2 2022, Meta spent ~$3.3 billion on its Reality Labs projects, up 19% YoY from ~$2.7 billion.
• Losses: In Q2 2022, Meta lost $2.8 billion on Reality Labs projects, up 15% YoY ~from $2.4 billion.
• Hardware: By the end of this year, Meta is projected to have sold 13.9 million VR headsets in total, per IDC estimates.
• Software: In total, Meta’s VR app has been installed an estimated 21 million times, per Sensor Tower, and Horizon Worlds had ~300,000 monthly active users as of February, per Meta.
• Developers: The company claims that 33 game titles have made $10+ million in gross revenue so far, up from 22 in February. To date, users have spent $1.5 billion on games and apps in the Quest Store.

Zoom out: At least some execs are reportedly uncomfy with Reality Labs’s burn rate, and the company’s metaverse VP recently implored employees in the org to “make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” per The Verge.

Read this story on-site.—DM

Although there’s only one (1) country in the world that currently allows the sale of cultivated-meat products, some industry execs forecast rapid advancement in the near future.

Israel-based Aleph Farms, one of the most well-capitalized cultivated-meat companies in the world, expects to reach price parity with conventional products by 2028, its co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia said at our September event.

“Beef is priced much higher than chicken or even pork, so I believe that cultivated-beef products will reach price parity with conventional meat products quicker than cultivated chicken, for instance,” he added.

On the other hand...In recent years, some studies—like the industry-infamous 2020 techno-economic analysis—have concluded that cultivated meat is unlikely to ever become cost-competitive.

Toubia said during the event that such analyses are a “good basis for discussion, but they don’t necessarily take into account the level of innovation our companies…are implementing to make a change in those basic assumptions.”

Click here to read the full story (and to check out video replay).—DM

Stat: Bank of America said its virtual assistant has been used 1 billion times by 32 million customers since it was released in 2018.

Quote: “This is more like shutting down speakeasies.”—Roblox Chief Scientist Morgan McGuire on moderating content in the company’s virtual world

Read: More Meta content: The Verge did an hour-long sit-down with Mark Zuckerberg about the state of the metaverse and also released a hands-on review of the new headset.

Learn: Extra! Extra! Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman is spilling all his content creator secrets next week on October 17. Lock in your seat for his master class and prepare to walk away a better, more successful creator.

Scalable security: A strong biz is a safe biz, and Vanta is here to help you Fort Knox-ify your company’s data. Join their live product demo to get the deets on Vanta’s market-leading compliance automation software.*

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• An artist is burning thousands of his paintings to “transform” them into NFTs.
• Legislators in France have proposed an outright ban on AI art generators, claiming they “undermine the spirit of the arts.”
• People are making hundreds of thousands of dollars ghostwriting tweets for VCs.
• Researchers concluded that putting big, animated googly eyes on autonomous vehicles could make them safer.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why Betterment’s robo-advisor doesn’t use AI
• How Aalyria rose from the rubble of Alphabet’s high tech experiments
• Intel’s autonomous vehicle unit Mobileye ends NYC testing