Meta said on Tuesday its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses would be available for sale in India starting May 19 at a starting price of ₹29,990 (about $353).

The smart glasses are currently available for pre-order on Ray-Ban’s site, and will be stocked in Ray-Ban stores at launch.

Meta said the smart glasses launching in India will support Meta AI, which can answer questions about what’s in front of you, translate both audio and video live, send messages via your phone, make calls for you, and more.

The smart glasses currently support live translation for English, French, Italian and Spanish even when users are offline. Notably, Meta hasn’t added support for Indian languages yet.

Meta has said it would enable the glasses to connect and play music through apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, Shazam and Apple Music in India.

The company has so far sold around 2 million pairs of the glasses since they launched in 2023.

AllTrails, the hiking and biking companion that was named 2023’s iPhone App of the Year, is launching a new premium membership called “Peak” that includes an upgraded feature set. This $80-per-year subscription will introduce AI tools to build custom routes, real-time trail condition forecasts, trail traffic heatmaps, and a feature that lets you identify trees and plants using your phone’s camera.

The new option will initially roll out in the next few weeks to select members and will be available globally to all users by June. AllTrails users can sign up for early access on its website.

A longtime popular app for outdoor enthusiasts, AllTrails raised a growth round of $150 million in 2021 when the COVID pandemic saw people rekindling their relationship with nature amid lockdowns and social distancing measures.

Unfortunately for the company, Apple entered AllTrails’ market just ahead of naming it App of the Year by adding support for topographic maps with trailheads, contour lines, hill shading, elevation gains, and more in Apple Maps in the U.S. The following year, Apple encroached even further, with features like offline maps, custom routes, and tools to explore national parks and other trails outside the U.S.

AllTrails’ latest update, then, can be seen as the company fighting back with a selection of features targeted at its most engaged and most active members.

The new AI-powered feature in the Peak membership, for instance, lets users build their ideal trail either by starting from scratch or customizing existing trails. Smart-routing functionality uses AI to change a trail by making it shorter, less steep, or even “more scenic,” among other things.

The new trail conditions forecast will provide information about the temperature, precipitation, snow depth, and more, essentially putting a weather app inside AllTrails. There are also alerts for things like air quality and mosquito activity. A later update will add terrain and ground conditions, like pavement, gravel, or mud.

The added heatmap option can help hikers and bikers who hate getting stuck on crowded trails, as well as those who prefer a crowd for safety purposes, like when hiking alone. To work, the app’s access to millions of users’ activity provides it with traffic data to make estimates, similar to how Google Maps uses data to predict when a store, restaurant, bar, or other venue is the most “busy.”

This summer, Peak members will also gain access to an Outdoor Lens feature, which lets them instantly identify a tree, plant, or flower and log it in the app. Over time, more identification features will be added to the Lens, the company notes.

In addition to Peak’s launch, AllTrails is rolling out updates to its Base and Plus memberships.

Base is the company’s free offering with trail maps, community reviews, and navigation, while Plus adds offline access, wrong-turn alerts, 3D trail previews, and live trail activity sharing

Both will receive a feature called Points of Interest, which adds more than 500,000 mapped viewpoints, landmarks, and trail amenities to the app. Plus subscribers, meanwhile, will also gain a feature called Offline Area, which lets them download a customized area for offline exploration that includes high-resolution maps and other details.

For decades, buying property in Egypt meant navigating a fragmented real estate market, relying on personal networks, dealing with commission-driven brokers, and facing developers more focused on selling than serving customer needs.

In 2019, Mostafa El Beltagy co-founded Nawy to bring transparency and efficiency to the market. Now positioning itself as Africa’s largest proptech platform, Nawy has raised $52 million in Series A funding, led by Africa-focused VC firm Partech Africa, validating its model of combining property listings with brokerage services.

The round, which also includes $23 million in debt financing from Egypt’s top banks, brings the total to $75 million, one of the largest Series As for an African startup. In 2022, it raised a $5 million seed round led by Egypt’s wealthiest family, the Sawiris.

CEO El Beltagy’s journey into proptech began with personal frustration. After several years working in corporate jobs across multiple countries, the former Vodafone executive wanted to invest in real estate in Egypt, a market many people view as a hedge against inflation and currency devaluation.

However, as he navigated the process of purchasing property, the lack of transparency and the prevalence of biased advice became glaring problems.

“I had no way to look at the market and understand what’s out there, aside from going almost developer by developer, picking up their brochures and asking their salespeople questions, which was highly inefficient,” the CEO recounted. “In this sector, everyone is incentivized to push you one way or another.”

These challenges led El-Beltagy to build Nawy to help people buy, sell, invest in, finance, and manage property. Its model, combining a property listing platform with brokerage services, has set it apart in an industry still dominated by agents with entrenched, offline relationships. The chief executive launched the company alongside Abdel-Azim Osman, Ahmed Rafea, Mohamed Abou Ghanima and Aly Rafea.

Making real estate accessible

At first, Nawy struggled to secure those listings. Developers were skeptical about Nawy’s value because it wasn’t big enough to drive traffic to their listings. Brokers, on the other hand, saw Nawy as a competitor.

To build trust, Nawy introduced immediate commission payments, funded upfront, to brokers who made their first transaction on the platform. This shifted sentiment, leading to word-of-mouth growth that has seen over 3,000 brokerages actively using Nawy Partners (its product for brokers), accessing live inventory and flexible payouts.

Additionally, the Cairo-based proptech attracts over a million monthly visitors, with hundreds of developers competing for visibility. About 150 developers cover most of Egypt’s new build market, which is worth around $30 billion, based on 100,000 transactions annually, according to El Beltagy.

Over the last few years, Nawy has expanded beyond listings and brokerage services, evolving into a full-stack real estate ecosystem. This includes Nawy Shares, a fractional ownership product that lets users invest in property with at least $500, making real estate accessible to Egypt’s middle-income population, which has long been priced out.

Additionally, Nawy has developed a mortgage product, “Move Now Pay Later,” designed to allow users to buy through installment plans and financing options in a market where banks rarely offer loans for real estate purchases.

“The real estate market is very lopsided in the sense that most people are buying new build, not resale. We believe enabling this product will cause a bit of a shift,” El Beltagy said of the embedded finance product. “It’s mortgage packaged differently because mortgages are almost non-existent here.” He added that Nawy’s $23 million debt facility backs this offering.