Published Aug. 2, 2026at6:00am<\/p>\n
Last year, I wrote about Avi Schiffmann<\/a> and his quest to build Friend, a $129 AI companion that resembles a glowing Apple AirTag and is worn as a pendant around your neck. It glowed and buzzed when you talked to it and responded via an app.<\/p>\n People had thoughts. After Schiffmann, 23, blanketed the New York subway with messages such as \u201cI\u2019ll never bail on our dinner plans\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ll binge the entire series with you,\u201d the ads were quickly graffitied. There was an anti-Friend protest party. The Atlantic labeled Schiffmann as New York\u2019s \u201cmost hated tech founder.\u201d (opens in new tab)<\/a><\/p>\n But you know what they say about publicity: He sold his entire 5,000-unit run.<\/p>\n Now Schiffmann\u2019s back with Friend version 2.0. At $249, the new Friend is bigger, more expensive, and, thanks to a built-in speaker, able to talk back. Memory storage is $9.99 a month, and pink, yellow, green, and blue skins will be available in the fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published Aug. 2, 2026at6:00am Last year, I wrote about Avi Schiffmann and his quest to build Friend, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,21400,101,103,102,104,106,105,4568,8170,47272,1970],"class_list":["post-422830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-lower-haight","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-social-media","tag-startups","tag-tech-bros","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}