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Tag: Lime

  • Helium Called Out for Being Dishonest About Its Clients and Partners

    Helium Called Out for Being Dishonest About Its Clients and Partners

    **Updated with company statement to WPN.**

    Helium has been lauded as a Web3 success story, but the company has egg on its face after being dishonest about who its customers are.

    Helium is creating a decentralized wireless network that serves as a peer-to-peer network for IoT devices. One of its main selling points is that it allows customers to earn crypto. The company prominently features a number of companies as customers and partners in an effort to add legitimacy to its service. There’s just one problem: Some of them aren’t customers or partners and never have been.

    A report by Mashable found that, despite claiming Lime was one of its customers, Lime was not using Helium’s platform. In fact, other than a testing period in which it evaluated the possibility of adding Helium devices to its scooters, Lime was never a paying customer, let alone a partner.

    “Beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium,” Russell Murphy, Lime senior director for corporate communications, told Mashable.

    “Helium has been making this claim for years and it is a false claim,” Murphy said

    It appears Lime is finally preparing to take action and is planning to send Helium a cease and desist.

    Lime isn’t the only company Helium appears to have been dishonest about. According to The Verge, Salesforce has also denied being a Helium partner.

    “Helium is not a Salesforce partner,” Salesforce spokesperson Ashley Eliasoph told The Verge. When asked about Salesforce’s logo, which appeared on Helium’s website, Eliasoph said that “it is not accurate.”

    A spokesperson for the company reached out to WPN to provide the following statement:

    “Since the Network launched in 2019, we’ve worked with a variety of companies on various applications and pilots. In the case of the brands mentioned in recent articles, we had approvals to talk about the use cases but we’re going to be much more rigorous now about the logo approval process going forward to avoid any confusion. Both Nova and our partner the Helium Foundation have removed the reference.”

    Helium’s Financials

    Helium has already been called out for only bringing in $6,500 in revenue per month, despite receiving $365M of investment, with Andreessen Horowitz taking the lead in the fundraising. The VC firm called Helium the “fastest growing wireless network ever” at the time.

    Interestingly, according to Mashable, Helium CEO Haleem and Helium investor Kyle Samani confirmed the revenue numbers.

    For a company being held up as the poster child of Web3, Helium certainly has a lot to answer for. Only time will tell if these are the only revelations to come out or if there’s more yet to come.

  • How Lime Monitors Data From 26,000,000 Trips in Real-Time

    How Lime Monitors Data From 26,000,000 Trips in Real-Time

    Lime monitors data from their scooters and bikes in real-time in order to ensure that all bikes are charged and available to riders. In fact, in 2018 Lime monitored 26 million scooter and bike trips worldwide according to their year-end report. The average ride was just over one mile totaling 28 million miles for the year.

    Not only does Lime monitor data from their scooters they also remotely slow them down depending on where they are in a city, all in real-time.

    Xiuming Chen, Engineering Manager of Infrastructure at Lime, discussed how Lime uses AWS and Amazon Kinesis to ingest all of this real-time data:

    Lime Sends Commands to Scooters in Real-Time

    Lime is a company about urban transportation and we provide a green and affordable transportation option for the users. Our scooter is connected to our servers to ensure a higher quality of service. We need to send commands to scooters in almost real-time. Maintaining hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections is a huge engineering challenge and that number is only growing.

    Lime Slows Scooters Down Depending on Geolocation

    We collect all kinds of information between these vehicles. For example, GPS, location, velocity battery level, and motor information. Safety is a top priority for Lime. As an example, we have a feature that requires us to slow down vehicles when they enter certain areas of the city. To achieve that we have had to increase the frequency of data collection drastically. We have a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers. The team analyzes this data to help us understand how people use our service.

    On-Demand “Juicers” Use App to Collect Scooters

    Normally we see spikes from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., depending on where you are, but sometimes we also notice a very interesting spike at 9:00 p.m. So we have a network of on-demand workers that charge our scooters. We call them Juicers. Every night at 9:00 p.m. we start to allow Juicers to collect scooters. All of them open the app at the same time which causes the traffic to flatten our servers and causes a traffic spike. In the past, the traffic came directly into a relational database and our service become slower and unusable.

    Amazon Kinesis Ingests Real-Times Scooter Data

    We started to use Amazon Kinesis to ingest real-time data coming from our vehicles. The speed of the growth of this industry is incredible. Scalability is one critical issue we have to deal with and we can let Kinesis do the heavy lifting behind the scene. We can spend the time to work on some more important features that users really need.


  • Venture Capitalist Kyle Lui: Next Generation of E-Scooters are Coming

    Venture Capitalist Kyle Lui: Next Generation of E-Scooters are Coming

    Venture capitalist Kyle Lui says that there are a lot of exciting innovations coming to the world of e-scooters. Lui says that there will be larger batteries that will be swappable and where there will be ride-sharing style incentives for people to charge and relocate the scooters.

    Companies like Lime and SPIN, which was recently acquired by Ford Motor Company, are actively working on innovations that will improve the customer experience and e-scooter ecosystem.

    Kyle Lui, early-stage VC at DCM Ventures, recently discussed the evolution of e-scooters in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily:

    Exciting E-Scooter Innovations

    I think there are a lot of exciting things happening, both innovations that the scooter companies are creating themselves and then working with third-party manufacturers. On the battery side, it’s a combination of larger batteries, we know that in the most popular markets they don’t last through the day, so we’ll see batteries that have longer charges. I think you’ll start to see things like swappable batteries. You’ll start to see things where the charging of the battery is embedded into the scooters themselves that allow anyone to be able to charge them and not have special parts.

    I also think you’re going to see a lot of innovations beyond the battery to really improve the user experience. As people are riding this on a daily basis, there’s been a lot of feedback that’s been given on how to improve the consumer experience, how to make it safer, how to start to add autonomous features, how to have places for a helmet, and places to put a phone dock as you’re navigating. I think all of those will be coming in the next generation.

    Taking a Playbook Out of Traditional Ride-Share

    I think at the end of the day the business model is actually quite simple because the companies are very focused on driving revenue, driving number of rides, revenue per ride, and then the other side, the operational cost. So instead of having a large on the ground operations team, to be able to leverage third party, potentially even the riders themselves, to be able to charge them, make sure that they’re in the right place, and really take a playbook out of the traditional ride-sharing guys to make this an opportunity for people to make additional money.