Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about the future of apps, this week I’m highlighting a story I wrote this week about the future of augmented reality.

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The big story

I’ve spent a decent amount of my time at TechCrunch focused on covering the emerging augmented reality industry. I’ve gone to industry mixers, chatted with motivated entrepreneurs, and — in the past 18 months — I’ve covered the decimation of a huge chunk of AR startups.

This week, yet another company met its end (through an acquisition), and I took the time to look back on the dozens of AR startups whose rises and falls I’ve covered, with an eye towards what went wrong. The industry has some substantial backers behind it, with the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook all singing its praises. In that way, it’s something of an inevitability that the technology will at least get its fair shot.

Here’s an excerpt of my story, which you can read the rest of with an Extra Crunch subscription:

The first wave of AR startups offering smart glasses is now over, with a few exceptions.

Google acquired North this week for an undisclosed sum. The Canadian company had raised nearly $200 million, but the release of its Focals 2.0 smart glasses has been cancelled, a bittersweet end for its soft landing.

Many AR startups before North made huge promises and raised huge amounts of capital before flaring out in a similarly dramatic fashion.

The technology was almost there in a lot of cases, but the real issue was that the stakes to beat the major players to market were so high that many entrants pushed out boring, general consumer products. In a race to be everything for everybody, the industry relied on nascent developer platforms to do the dirty work of building their early use cases, which contributed heavily to nonexistent user adoption.

A key error of this batch was thinking that an AR glasses company was hardware-first, when the reality is that the missing value is almost entirely centered on missing first-party software experiences. To succeed, the next generation of consumer AR glasses will have to nail this.

Killer apps of AR (and VR) have long been viewed as some kind of milestone that a platform can reach once enough users and developers coalesced around the hardware. That thinking is born out of how late-stage mobile has developed, but it also vastly overestimates the starting point of current consumer AR offerings. While gaming has developed swimmingly enough in the VR world, there is almost nothing worthwhile for consumers to do in AR on any platform.

Read the rest here

Trends of the week

Tesla is the world’s most valuable automaker
This week, Elon Musk’s Tesla reached a wild milestone. The company became the world’s most valuable automaker by market cap, roaring past $81 billion in public value. The company has some big challenges ahead of it, but it’s clear plenty of shareholders feel they’re positioned to meet them. Read more here.

Lululemon buys Mirror for $500M
Lululemon isn’t your typical tech M&A leader, but the fitness clothing company stepped into the world of connected fitness technology this week with the acquisition of Mirror. The startup is aiming to stop the meteoric rise of Peloton and expand the at-home connected exercise equipment market with a full-length mirror that streams exercise classes to a user’s home. Read more about it here.

Advertisers revolt and Facebook tries to appease them
Facebook has been in a pretty rough position the past several weeks as CEO Mark Zuckerberg took an outspoken stance on why the company should not take down content from President Trump that potentially violated its terms of service. This week, as pressure mounted, the company tried to appease advertisers and users by pledging to flag “newsworthy” political speech on its site that violated policies. Read more here.

Extra Crunch

As Uber hunts for a deal, can Postmates leverage an IPO?

It’s been a busy week for on-demand delivery company Postmates. According to reporting, the company is reviving its IPO plans, possibly selling to Uber, or perhaps looking to go public with the help of a special purpose acquisition vehicle, also known as a SPAC.

For Postmates,  a company caught somewhere between DoorDash’s cash-fueled rise and Uber’s ability to lose hundreds of millions on its Uber Eats delivery service every quarter, multiple options are likely welcome.

Postmates first filed to go public in early 2019, but its IPO failed to materialize. The company was also reported to be pursuing a sale in 2019 after it had filed to go public. An M&A exit also failed to appear.

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