The Daily Crunch 08/29/16

Fitbit forges on, mattresses clog up the mail and if you're not ready to bring a self-driving car to market, then what's wrong with you? All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 29, 2016. And I've got a surefire investment guarantee to pay you back tenfold, just hit me up on Instagram.

1. Last wearable co. standing?

The wearable hype cycle has mostly deflated in the last year or so, and a lot of consolidation means there are relatively few big-name players dedicated to wearable hardware anymore. Fitbit remains, however, and it debuted two new devices today. These induce the Charge 2 and an all-new Flex, both of which are modular for flexibility in wear options. Brian took the Fitbit Charge 2 for a ride, judging it a decent upgrade, though not revolutionary. The question is, are dedicated wearables at the stage where all they have to do is tread water between generations to survive?

2. The Mattressing

Will mattress stores even exist in 10 years? A new mail-order mattress startup has raised a decent Series A round to build its shippable foam hybrid mattress business, helping it play catch-up with industry leader Casper. But it's now just one in a crowd – a crowd which includes legacy follow-ons like Sealy, which introduced its Cocoon product specifically to take on the trend. Soon, mattresses with actual springs could become an endangered species – maybe I'll buy up a horde and sell them at a 300 percent markup when the mattresspocalypse comes.

3. Instascammers

Where there are lots of people combined with ease of access, scammers will flock. Instagram has its fair share of rubes, and a particular type of scam, called "money flipping," has taken root. The scam involves scammers trying to get people to put money into so-called special investments with "guaranteed" large multiple returns. Scam as old as time, but a new platform to exploit, and one where you can use pictures of riches and excess as an additional hook for the gullible.

4. At the inclination point of the self-driving hype curve

It's almost like a bell sounded somewhere – companies are busting out of the self-driving starting gate with surprising speed, and that includes Yandex (the Google of Russia), Baidu (the Google of China), and Google (the Google of Google). Google's new executive team behind its self-driving car subsidiary means business, which indicates it's edging closer to the consumer market, and both Baidu and Yandex are trying to follow their North American predecessor as closely as possible.

5. Is the smart home finally getting truly smart?

The early days of the smart home were kind of brutal; complicated setup, complicated operation and complicated versions of devices that used to be simple. But there are signs that sanity is coming to this space, and Philips' new motion sensor is one. Another is the Logitech Pop, and both share a common goal: take away complexity by making control of smart things either dead simple or automatic. The key is reduced mental load, which is what smart homes are supposed to provide to begin with.

6. Signal is the Clinton campaign's comms platform of choice

What do you do when Trump tells Russia to try to hack your campaign? For Hilary Clinton and her cohorts, the answer was Signal, a messaging app that the Clinton campaign adopted en masse following the DNC email archive hack. Signal is an iOS/Android messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption which is endorsed frequently by Edward Snowden as his personal messaging platform of choice. It's probably never happened, but the idea of Snowden sending Clinton an upside-down smiley emoji on Signal is wonderful to contemplate.

7. Square turns former foes into friends

Square's business model is changing, and its go-to-market tactics are changing, too. The tech commerce company is partnering with Vend and TouchBistro, two POS platform providers that at one time would've been direct competitors for Square. Now, though, Square is going to be selling hardware, payment processing and credit capital products to TouchBistro and Vend customers –showing that a slight change in perspective can turn competitors into collaborators pretty quickly.