While any Mac user can play with GarageBand and iMovie for free, it has been quite expensive if you wanted to move to pro apps — especially if you’re a student. Apple released a new app bundle with five different pro apps. It costs $199.99 and it’s just for students and people working in education. The five apps include Apple’s two most important pro apps — Final… Read More
If you’re worried about the dissolution of western democracy as we know it, worry no more. There’s no safer place to be than by the side of Peter Thiel, the entrepreneurial scamp who will likely outlive us all in more ways than one! Lucky for you, Thiel Capital just posted an open position for a personal assistant to the man himself. The job listing, available on LinkedIn,… Read More
Slowing growth, huge losses and no shareholder control could make Snap Inc.’s IPO a perilous gamble for investors. What it does have going for it is an addicted user base, fast-growing revenues and a visionary CEO. Read More
Facebook may be distancing itself from location-sharing between friends in its own app, but Facebook-owned WhatsApp appears to moving in this direction. A new feature spotted in the beta version of the popular mobile messaging software shows that WhatsApp has developed a real-time location-tracking option that could be used among the app’s friends. The addition was spotted this week… Read More
I’ve been reading a lot of Neil Postman lately. It’s been one of those years and I’m writing a book about fake news. Postman, the nicest guy in cultural criticism, was a folksy, friendly thinker who imagined the future in which we now live. One of his most important points, made in 1992 before the true data deluge that now befuddles us, is that information has become garbage.… Read More
Hulu just released a trailer for its adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a science fiction tale in which the U.S. Government has been toppled by a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship and women suffer a horrible revocation of rights. So yeah it’s a little too on the nose right now. Maybe the hope is that showing this during America’s leather ball smash… Read More
Domino’s is about to put its ordering bot, Dom, to a big test. Just ahead of Super Bowl weekend, the pizza chain is rolling out the ability to order off its full menu via Facebook Messenger – even if you haven’t already set up a pre-configured “pizza profile.” The update means it will be easier for more casual Domino’s customers to give the bot a try, as… Read More
Car makers are increasingly making data connections the default in new vehicles, and it’s having an impact in terms of usage: Chevrolet released numbers today that show in-car use of its OnStar 4G LTE data connection grew by around 200 percent in 2016 vs. 2015. Among its best-selling full-size SUV Tahoe and Suburban drivers specifically, the usage spike was even greater, rising 260… Read More
Earlier this week, word got out that LG’s fancy new UltraFine 5K display was having some serious issues, becoming “become unstable” and “unusable” when placed near a router. At the time, 9to5Mac spoke to an LG support rep, who confirmed that it was a known issue and advised keeping the screen at least two meters away from a wireless router. Today the company… Read More
PlayStation 4’s next big software update is going out now to beta testers, and it adds a lot for owners of the console to get excited about. There’s support for external USB HDDs, which means regardless of how much internal storage you have on your PS4, you can add up to 8TB of additional space via external drives, ensuring you’ll never run out of room for games and saves.… Read More
The dating game sure is tough to maintain. Zurich-based dating app Blinq has been acquired by a Swiss outdoor advertising firm, APG|SGA, with the latter coveting the team’s experience in rolling out beacon networks for a new division that will be developing interactive ads. Read More
Snap files publicly for its massive IPO, Uber will pause its service in Taiwan starting February 12th, Pokémon GO crosses $1 billion in revenue, Facebook lets you search images by content and Licking County government gets its offices shut down by ransomware. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
Medium CEO Ev Williams announced today at Upfront Summit that his company will launch a consumer subscription product, with the first version coming this quarter. This could help develop an additional revenue stream apart from advertisements. Finding a strong revenue source is critical, since Medium decided to lay off 50 staff, close its New York office, and announce a new direction last… Read More
Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a statement about his participation in Donald Trump’s economic advisory council, and a scheduled meeting of the group tomorrow. Musk said that he and others on the council will take the opportunity to voice their opposition to the president’s executive order on immigration and suggest how it might be changed. Musk took the opportunity to specifically… Read More
Drone racing as a sport is taking off, with teams, sponsors and television networks all getting in on the action of this developing scene. There’s a professional drone racing league, live streaming and even drone-racing simulators, where drone-pilot hopefuls can try emulating the real thing. But what if you want to actually take to the skies with a racing drone? Team… Read More
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. has finally revealed its long-awaited IPO filing. The social messaging company, which plans to go public in early March, just shared details about its growth trajectory and financials. And while we knew that Snap has raised at least $2.4 billion in capital from a long list of investors, we now know the ownership percentages. We also know the pre-IPO values of… Read More
WhatsApp proved itself to be the most YOLO-crypto company of 2016 when it turned on end-to-end encryption by default last April for its more than 1 billion users. (Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, took a more cautious approach when it added opt-in encryption to Messenger.) But WhatsApp’s all-in approach has come at a cost — the company’s executives were arrested… Read More
Most of today’s Snap coverage will be about its revenue and daily average usage numbers, but there was one small tidbit that emerged that will mean big business for the company’s cloud infrastructure partner, Google. In Snap’s S-1 filing, the company announced a license platform agreement it struck with Google for its cloud infrastructure services. Under the terms of… Read More
Now that Snap is revealing its financial guts to the world in its filing for its initial public offering, we’re getting a small glimpse at how much the company is paying to acquire startups. As Snap becomes a larger company and is able to amass more of a cash pile, it’ll be able to start picking off startups that can either fill out the company’s ranks with talent or add… Read More
Snapchat was flying high in early 2016, but the launch of direct competitor Instagram Stories coincided with a massive drop in how fast Snapchat was growing, judging by new stats in its IPO filing. That aligns with our report that multiple analytic providers and social media talent managers saw a big decline in Snapchat usage after Instagram Stories came out. While we can’t be sure… Read More
