Spotify is enhancing its audiobooks streaming service with a feature that may be familiar to the app’s music consumers: Countdown Pages.
For audiobooks, the Countdown Pages will allow Spotify’s users to pre-save books ahead of their release.
With the addition of the new Countdown Pages feature, Spotify hopes to grow the service’s adoption further by tapping into its larger global user base of over 600 million listeners.
Otherwise, Spotify’s free users can now opt into a standalone audiobooks subscription for $9.99 per month, which debuted earlier this month.
Countdown pages for audiobooks will launch in all markets where Spotify’s audiobooks are available, including the U.S., U.K. Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.
Mews, one of the startups building tools to help hotels manage IT better is announcing a growth round of $110 million to capture more business.
The funding — led by Kinnevik — is coming in at a $1.2 billion valuation post-money.
That is a slight up-round on the Series C that Amsterdam-based Mews announced at the end of 2022, when Mews raised $185 million on an $865 million valuation.
It said it now has more than 5,000 hotel customers, compared to 3,253 hotels a year ago.
Mews nominally looks after hotels and hospitality, but that could be hostels or Airbnbs or services for people in mixed-use real estate.
The startup’s eponymous app lets people self-publish stories, and then, using AI and data science, it selects what it believes are the most compelling of these to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on a second app, Galatea.
The $37 million, a Series C, is being led by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.
The investment brings the total raised by Inkitt to date to $117 million (other rounds included a $3.9 million seed; a $16 million Series A and a $59 million Series B).
The average number of books read (and completed) has also dropped to around 5.
“Inkitt is doing just that with stories, creating content that is hyper-personalized and meaningful to every person.”
