Since March, Israeli attacks on Beirut and the occupation of southern Lebanon have displaced over 1 million people. Families are sheltering with relatives, renting if they can, or sleeping in cars and out in the open, placing immense strain on already fragile infrastructure. Over 130,000 people have also crossed into Syria, many in urgent need of food, cash assistance, and shelter, according to a report by the International Organization for Migration.

As humanitarian needs surge, so does the flow of money from abroad. Yet much of this support is not moving through traditional aid channels. Instead, it is being routed through digital fintech platforms to trusted individuals on the ground, who buy necessary items or distribute funds directly to the displaced.

There is no real-time dataset capturing donations linked specifically to the war. However, remittances—the closest available proxy—offer context. Lebanon receives roughly $6 billion to $7 billion annually from abroad, equivalent to about a third of its GDP, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2023.

The UNDP reported that remittance costs there averaged 11 percent, higher than the global average. In times of crisis, these flows often shift towards emergency support. What is different now is how that money moves: Increasingly, it is being sent instantly, peer-to-peer, through digital wallets.

“These informal inflows are captured by the formal BDL figures and constitute around 70 percent of the inflows during the crisis,” the UNDP added, noting that money is also often sent as cash with people traveling to the country.

From Gift Cards to Financial Infrastructure

Being Lebanese myself, my social media feed has been inundated with former colleagues and friends setting up their channels to receive donations, sharing photos of receipts, and showing where money is going.

One grass-roots campaign run by Lebanese lawyer Jad Essayli raised $65,125 in 10 days, purely through social media and digital transfers. When asked which platforms have been the most impactful, he and other fundraisers pointed to Whish Money, though many other platforms, including Paypal, Zelle, and Venmo are also being used.

Originally launched to digitize gift cards, the company has evolved into a broad financial platform offering remittances, peer-to-peer transfers, and payment services with more than 2 million users across 110 countries. “We started off from the fact that we wanted to disrupt the distribution of gift cards,” says Toufic Koussa, cofounder and chairman of Whish Money, describing how the company built an early wallet system in 2007 that allowed retailers to issue digital cards on demand. Over time, that infrastructure expanded into a full financial ecosystem.

When Banks Stop Working

The company’s core focus has been the unbanked and underbanked—those with limited or unreliable access to traditional banking. Those groups became central during Lebanon’s financial collapse. Globally, 1.4 billion people remain unbanked; the World Bank cites access to affordable financial services as being “critical for poverty reduction and economic growth.”

In Lebanon, as banks froze deposits and restricted withdrawals, platforms like Whish Money filled a critical gap, enabling people to move and access money outside the traditional system.

That infrastructure now shapes how aid moves in crisis. Money from family, diaspora, or grass-roots campaigns lands straight in a digital wallet and can be spent immediately. On Whish Money, peer-to-peer transfers are the most popular, followed by international remittances. Koussa also notes that Whish Money is uniquely connected to US banking infrastructure, allowing users to link accounts abroad directly to wallets in Lebanon.

Displacement is changing how people use these platforms. Overall growth is steady, but transaction patterns have shifted. Families are making bigger purchases, stocking up on essentials as uncertainty grows. Grocery bills that might have been $200 are now climbing as people prepare for the worst, Koussa says.

It’s smaller and more portable than the brutish Move, yet large enough to sound much fuller than the pint-sized Roam. It can sit fixed on its charging cradle to rival the homebound Sonos Era 100, or follow you anywhere. In other words, it’s the epitome of Sonos versatility, and now that it’s working properly, it’ll be hard to pass up.

Play On

Opening the Play’s brown cardboard packaging feels equal parts Scandi minimalism and sustainability, in line with recent releases like the Arc Ultra soundbar. Inside, a white acoustic wrapping gives way to a stout tubular speaker with a rubberized loop attached, measuring 7.6 x 4.4 x 3 inches and weighing just under 3 pounds. You’ll also find simple setup instructions and a wireless charging stand, but no wall adapter. You’ll need one that can supply at least 9 volts and 2 amps (18 watts), but a 15-volt, 3-amp (45-watt) model is recommended for “optimal” charging. Sonos says the adapter omission is about reducing e-waste, but will happily sell you one for $29.

Otherwise, the Sonos app is all you need to get going. After the obligatory firmware update, my Play was streaming on my home network in minutes. Sonos hosts over 100 streaming services directly, and you can also stream over third-party services like Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay, and more. You’ll find the speaker as its own “Room” on the app’s main page, where you can swipe up to group it with other Sonos products on your network, or go into the settings to tweak options like EQ, Room name (important if you have more than one Play), and Sonos Trueplay to auto-adjust the sound to your environment.

You’ll also find a Battery Saver toggle, which is set by default to shut down the power when it’s idle for too long. It’s this feature that, according to Sonos, caused my connection woes as I tested the speaker’s 24-hour battery claim. Sonos says it identified the root cause, and after the firmware update I’ve let the speaker power down multiple times, with no further network disruptions over a week of extra testing.

To use Area mode, you first have to define the boundaries of the area. This is done in the app via a process similar to what I’ve encountered on some competing hardware devices. You fire up the mapping mode, and the sprinkler engages. Then, using a simple remote-control system, you dial the water pressure to the appropriate level, aiming at the edge of your yard but not the fence; once the water is where you want it, you drop a pin to mark the boundary of the watering area. You then rotate the nozzle on top of the sprinkler a few degrees and repeat, setting the strength of the flow to cover the desired area. Repeat again and again until you’ve gone through 360 degrees and have dropped pins to visually represent the entirety of your yard. The company says the maximum supported area is a vast 4,800 square feet, with spray reaching up to 39 feet.

In the app, you can watch this area map being created in real time. The process is quite intuitive except for the final couple of points, where Aiper’s system makes it difficult to complete the 360-degree circuit. If you look at the completed map in the screenshot below, you’ll see a tiny sliver of yard that no amount of finagling could get Aiper to close up.

Watering runs can be initiated on demand or on a schedule, and you intriguingly define not an amount of time to run but a “water consumption limit,” measured in inches of water you want applied to the soil. While it’s nearly impossible to measure how accurate this is, qualitatively, those estimates felt about right in my testing.

In Area mode, the IrriSense 2 delivers water by spraying a jet in a single direction, rotating clockwise through its 360 degrees until it’s gone all the way around the map you’ve set before turning back and doing it again in a counter-clockwise direction, repeating this cycle until the desired irrigation depth has been reached.

While the IrriSense 2’s spray system is officially described as a gentle “mist,” it’s really more of a jet, particularly when it has to reach the far-away parts of the yard near the terminus of its range. That results in a lot more water being delivered to the edges of the yard than to the central portion of the mapped area, but that’s a common issue I’ve seen with rotary sprinklers like this. To account for this, the IrriSense 2 doesn’t just blast at full speed for the entirety of its run. Instead, repeated rotations reduce the pressure delivered bit by bit, until the final rotations are little more than a trickle of water hitting just a few inches away from the unit. (Note that canceling a run early means that only the outermost portions of the area will receive water.)

Photograph: Chris Null