No end user likes an exclusive hardware ecosystem. Fragmentation and lack of interoperability cause confusion for consumers, who may buy one smart-home product only to find out it can’t work with the smart hub, or smart lights, or smart toothbrush—or smart whatever—they’re already using in their home.

Matter is a new standard of over 200 smart-home players—including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung, as well as the trade group Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA)—that aims to make the world of smart gadgets interoperable. Founded in 2019 under the name Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP), the consortium rebranded into Matter earlier this year and plans to roll out in the first half of 2022.

• It originally intended to go live by the end of this year, but had to delay its debut as the project grew more complex.

Ultimately, the plan is to build a universal protocol that would let any set of smart devices interact with one another, assuming their manufacturer allows it.

We spoke with Michelle Mindala-Freeman, vice president of the CSA, about the mission behind Matter.

Read on for some highlights, and click here to read the full conversation.

On Matter’s origin...

Enclaves of innovation are great when you’re first starting an industry or a space, and that’s where kind of the cool ideas get started and people create. But if you really want to scale in the marketplace, and you really want to both extract the value as a manufacturer and a market player, or feel the value and see the value as a consumer, you have to get out of those silos.

I think that the origins of Matter are really centered around those beliefs—that until you can knock down the walled gardens that kind of separate silos of the [internet of things] IoT, we’re never going to see the scale and the value that IoT can bring to every consumer.

On upgradeability...

I do believe Google has announced that a number of their products are going to be upgradable. Amazon’s announced upgradability. A few other member companies have announced either upgradability or bridging that will be incorporated in their products as well.

It’s really dependent on how that manufacturer built that product, but that’s the goal to which many of our members aspire to.

Click here to read the full interview.—JM

Unlike other SPAC-happy EV startups, Rivian is going public the old-fashioned way: IPO.

The company released its S-1 document last Friday, giving the public a peek under the hood ahead of its IPO, reportedly set for late November.

Why it matters: The company was the first to deliver an electric truck to consumers, with its initial customer-bound R1T models rolling off the production line at its Normal, Illinois, factory just last month. Ford plans to deliver its first F-150 Lightning to customers in spring 2022, and Tesla’s Cybertruck production timeline has been pushed back to late 2022.

Rivian is also expected to seek a valuation of approximately $80 billion, which would make it among the largest IPOs in America over the last decade.

By the numbers...

As of last month, Rivian had about 48,390 preorders for its R1T pickup trucks and R1S SUVs in the US and Canada, according to its S-1. For context, Ford said it had about 150,000 reservations for the F-150 Lightning as of September, and Tesla reportedly has more than 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck.

• FWIW, preorders don’t always translate into sales.

The company has also raised about $10.5 billion since 2019, but it reported a loss of more than $1 billion last year, and has already lost $994 million in the first six months of 2021.

• Rivian’s R&D expenses, which go toward things like developing next-generation EVs, were $683 million in the first half of this year, compared with $766 million in all of 2020.

Click here to read the full story.—GD

Facebook has had one hell of a half-week, but in the name of Emerging Tech Brew, we’re zooming right in on the algorithm part of this story. So let’s talk about Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who leaked tens of thousands of pages of the company’s internal research on its algorithms.

Haugen, who worked on Facebook’s civic integrity team for nearly two years, secretly copied the documents before leaving the company in May. She alleges that many of Facebook’s problems stem from a 2018 algorithm overhaul, in which the company began awarding high-engagement posts (ones with spiking reactions, comments, and shares) the highest priority in users’ feeds.

• The problem: Facebook’s internal research found “angry content” gets the highest engagement—and therefore the most Home Feed real estate.
  

Haugen told 60 Minutes: “Political parties have been quoted, in Facebook’s own research, saying, ‘We know you changed how you pick out the content that goes in the home feed. And now if we don’t publish angry, hateful, polarizing, divisive content—crickets. We don’t get anything. And if we don’t get traffic and engagement, we’ll lose our jobs.’”

Haugen’s takeaways aligned with reporting by MIT Tech Review in March, which found that the company’s algorithms are geared to prioritize “hate speech” and “incendiary” content—and that Facebook hasn’t stopped it.

Looking ahead: This conversation isn’t all about Section 230. Since algorithms amplify what they’re taught to value, it seems likely that to fight toxicity, tech giants may have to switch out engagement with a whole new set of incentives. And since that’s not the most profitable path, federal regulation may end up needing to dictate that.

View this story on-site.—HF

Stat: Tesla has been ordered to pay a former plant contractor $137 million in damages, in what one Berkely Law professor believed to be “the largest verdict in an individual race discrimination in employment case."

Quote: “The current paradigm is that whoever finds [data], owns it—not whoever creates it, owns it. So I think within five years, we’ll see that paradigm fundamentally shifting—or at least I hope so.”—Margaret Mitchell, head of data governance at Hugging Face to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: The creator of an NFT project called “Evolved Apes” absconded with investors’ cash.

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Almost exactly a decade ago, on Oct. 4, 2011, Apple released Siri. It was the first mainstream voice assistant to market, but many critics argue Siri has fallen behind competitors from AI powerhouses Google and Amazon.

• Now, a full decade later, The Verge’s James Vincent argues the big problem “is that Apple still doesn’t know what it wants Siri to be. Is the feature simply a way to control your phone with your voice...Or is it something more ambitious?”

+1: Steve Jobs died almost exactly a decade ago, on Oct. 5, 2011.

When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for six hours on Monday, encrypted messaging app Telegram vaulted 57 spots in Apple’s App Store downloads, per App Annie data, becoming the No. 5 most-downloaded free app on the day. It says it added 70 million new users on Monday (for context, it had 500 million users as of January).

• Instagram and Facebook also both climbed four spots on the chart, making them No. 1 and No. 3 on the chart that day…does this count as the Streisand Effect?
• Signal and Discord also saw downloads jump, but not as much as Telegram.

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

• AI-ethics pioneer Margaret Mitchell on her five-year plan at open-source AI startup Hugging Face
• A London borough is using 3D digital mapping to city plan
• One way to track cannabis? Molecular barcodes