It’s been almost two years since Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, but in late September the companies dropped one of their first crossover episodes: Device Connect for Fitbit.

Fitbit might be a consumer-device powerhouse—the vast majority of its revenue has historically come from selling its wearables—but Device Connect represents an expansion of Health Solutions, its enterprise-focused business.

• The Health Solutions segment accounted for 8% of Fitbit’s total revenue across the first three quarters of 2020, when the company last disclosed the figure.

The new service is targeted at healthcare professionals and organizations looking for “accelerated analytics and insights” into patients and customers. Individual users will “have control over what data they share” with medical companies, physicians, and hospitals, and how it is used.

Big picture: Device Connect could be a powerful tool not only for patients and physicians but also for Google and Fitbit as it relates to efforts to gain an edge in the highly competitive wearables space, according to Ramon Llamas, research director for mobile devices and AR/VR at IDC.

But success in the enterprise market will likely depend on the economics of Device Connect itself, he said.

“We’re talking about devices that are going to, on average, cost around $200. They’re not cheap. And once you scale that out to numbers of people, that’s a lot of patients,” Llamas told Emerging Tech Brew.

Read the full story on Fitbit’s new enterprise play.—JM

Voice assistants can make phone calls, check scores, and schedule appointments, so it only makes sense that they can work as banking assistants too.

In recent years, financial institutions have experimented with voice assistants as part of a larger effort by banks to meet customers where they are, according to Tiffani Montez, principal banking analyst, at Insider Intelligence.

“It is now less focused on physical distribution points and more focused on digital touchpoints. Digital touchpoints in the past has meant that it’s more around online and mobile banking,” Montez told Emerging Tech Brew. “When you think about the internet of things and you think about even younger consumers’ interest in using voice assistants, that is where customers are.”

• By the end of this year, 42% of Americans were projected to be monthly voice-assistant users, according to a recent estimate from Insider Intelligence.
• And that percentage could grow to 45% by 2026, per the research firm.

Even so...Despite the popularity of the tech in general, Montez said there’s still a long way to go before voice banking is widely adopted, as “a lot of them [still] have poor functionality or poor user experience.”

Read the full story on-site.—JM

Yes, social media remains a world dominated by a few key players, because, you know, network effects and all of that. But occasionally, a new company manages to elbow its way into the space.

This year…That company is BeReal, which was founded in 2020 but had (is still having?) its moment in 2022. We checked in with all of you, our readers, about whether you’ve ever used the photo-sharing app.

• Most of our ~1,100 respondents have never Been Real: Just about 22% said they have used the app before, while the remaining 78% have not.
• Last week, Sensor Tower estimated that BeReal had surpassed 50 million installs but noted that just ~9% of Android users with the app on their phones actually open it every day. For context, Instagram leads the social media pack here, with 39% of users opening it daily.

Big picture: BeReal has grown faster than your hunger while watching too many cooking TikToks—its MAUs rose 2,254% from January to September, per Sensor Tower—but social media upstarts face a difficult road to permanence.

The app is reportedly looking to monetize its newfound audience via paid in-app features, not advertising, in an effort to both keep its “core product free” and preserve the user experience.

This week’s poll: Have you ever used a financial institution’s chatbot, in voice or text form?

Yes
No

Stat: Meta now has less than 200k monthly active users in Horizon Worlds, per internal company documents reviewed by the WSJ, down from the 300k MAU it said it had in February. Its goal for MAU by year’s end is reportedly just 280k, revised down from its initial target of 500k.

Quote: “With Apple joining the fray…two trillion-dollar companies would now seem to agree that the opportunity could be massive.”—A New Street Research analysis of the space race around satellite-based phone service, cited by the Wall Street Journal

Read: An mRNA cancer vaccine is possible “before 2030,” according to BioNTech’s co-founders. The company has multiple cancer vaccines in clinical trials.

Communicate: CFOs are all about the numbers, but soft skills (or lack of ’em) can make or break your financial leadership. Learn which 4 skills are most in demand in Oracle NetSuite’s new business guide.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

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

• How the EU’s proposed IoT cybersecurity law could affect device makers
• This startup thinks IoT devices can help with wildfire detection
• Why Betterment’s robo-advisor doesn’t use AI