Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with TechCrunch. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined – a figure that’s 77 percent higher than the $49 million it generated last November. That’s a new record.
Before, the biggest month Netflix had to date was July 2018, when it grossed an estimated $84.7 million. At the time, that was the most it had made on mobile since it began monetizing on mobile in September 2015.
To date, Netflix has grossed over $1.58 million on mobile.
The firm didn’t speculate as to what, specifically, drove Netflix to break records again in November, but there are probably a few factors at play, including the trend towards cord cutting and shift towards streaming services for traditional “TV” viewing.
But most notably, is the increasing revenue coming to Netflix from its international markets.
Sensor Tower did point out that Netflix’s U.S. app revenue grew 43 percent year-over-year in November, but other countries contributing more than $1 million in gross revenue were higher. For example, Germany grew 48 percent, Brazil was 49 percent, South Korea was 52 percent, and Japan was 64 percent.
However, the U.S. still accounts for the majority of Netflix’s in-app subscription revenue, at 57 percent in November. But with Netflix’s international expansion, its share is declining. When Netflix first began offering subscriptions in fall 2015, the U.S. then accounted for 71 percent of its revenue.
Netflix in recent weeks, has been doubling down on mobile. The company is now testing a mobile-only subscription aimed at making its service more affordable in Asia and other emerging markets.
A few days ago, Google removed popular Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech apps from its Play Store following a BuzzFeed investigation, which discovered the apps were engaging in ad fraud. Today, as a result of Google’s ongoing investigation into the situation, it has discovered three malicious ad network SDKs that were being used to conduct of ad fraud in these apps. The company is now emailing developers who have these SDKs installed in their apps, and demanding their removal. Otherwise, the developers’ apps will be pulled from Google Play, as well.
To be clear, the developers with the SDKs (software development kits) installed aren’t necessarily aware of the SDKs’ malicious nature. In fact, most are likely not, Google says.
Google shared this news in a blog post today, but it didn’t name the SDKs that were involved in the ad fraud scheme.
TechCrunch has learned the ad network SDKs in question are AltaMob, BatMobi and YeahMobi.
Google didn’t share the scale to which these SDKs are being used in Android apps, but based on Google’s blog post, it appears to be taking this situation seriously – which points to the potential scale of this abuse.
“If an app violates our Google Play Developer policies, we take action,” wrote Dave Kleidermacher, VP, Head of Security & Privacy, Android & Play, in the post. “That’s why we began our own independent investigation after we received reports of apps on Google Play accused of conducting app install attribution abuse by falsely claiming credit for newly installed apps to collect the download bounty from that app’s developer,” he said.
The developers will have a short grace period to remove the SDKs from their apps.
The original BuzzFeed report had found that eight apps with a total of 2 billion downloads from Cheetah Mobile and Kika Tech had been exploiting user permissions as part of an ad fraud scheme, according to research from app analytics and research firm Kochava, which was shared with BuzzFeed.
Following the report, Cheetah Mobile apps Battery Doctor and CM Launcher were removed by Cheetah itself. The company additionally issued a press release aimed at reassuring investors that the removal of CM File Manager wouldn’t impact its revenue. It also said it was in discussions with Google to resolve the issues.
As of today, Google’s investigation into these apps is not fully resolved.
But it pulled two apps from Google Play on Monday: Cheetah Mobile’s File Manager and the Kika Keyboard. The apps, the report had said, contained code that was used for ad fraud – specifically, ad fraud techniques known as click injection and click flooding.
The apps were engaging in app install attribution abuse, which refers to a means of falsely claiming credit for a newly installed app in order to collect the download bounty from the app developer. The three SDKs that Google is now banishing were found to be falsely crediting app installs by creating false clicks.
Combined, the two companies had hundreds of millions of active users, and the two apps that were removed had a combined 250 million installs.
In addition to removing the two apps from Google Play, Google also kicked them out of its AdMob mobile advertising network.
With Cheetah’s voluntary removal of two apps and Google’s booting of two more, a total of four of the eight apps that were conducting ad fraud are now gone from the Google Play store. When Google’s investigation wraps, the other four may be removed as well.
Even more apps could be removed in the future, too, given that Google is demanding that developers now remove the malicious SDKs. Those who fail to comply will get the boot, too.
One resource Google Play publishers, ad attribution providers, and advertisers, may want to take advantage of, going forward, is the Google Play Install Referrer API. This will tell them how their apps were actually installed.
Explains Google in its blog post:
Google Play has been working to minimize app install attribution fraud for several years. In 2017 Google Play made available the Google Play Install Referrer API, which allows ad attribution providers, publishers and advertisers to determine which referrer was responsible for sending the user to Google Play for a given app install. This API was specifically designed to be resistant to install attribution fraud and we strongly encourage attribution providers, advertisers and publishers to insist on this standard of proof when measuring app install ads. Users, developers, advertisers and ad networks all benefit from a transparent, fair system.
“We will continue to investigate and improve our capabilities to better detect and protect against abusive behavior and the malicious actors behind them,” said Kleidermacher.
The year is 1940. Through the use of arcane atomic technologies, the Axis have brought back modern technology from the year 2018. Their main prize? This amazing Enigma Pocket Watch. This tiny watch, created by a maker calling himself asciimation, uses an Arduino Pro Micro and a small OLED screen to recreate the Enigma machine in pure code.
Asciimation previously built an Enigma wristwatch and he is working on an 3D-printed Enigma machine. The Enigma was a seemingly unbreakable encoding machine used by the Germans during World War II and was about the size of a small briefcase. Stuffing all of the logic into a tiny watch case – of WWII vintage – is an amazing feat.
Luckily the aforementioned time travel device was never built and this wild little pocket watch never made it into enemy hands but we can only imagine the havoc it would wreak if some Panzer captain somewhere had one of these on his belt. You can read all about the build on Asciimation’s site.
Posted by Anurag Batra and Parker Barnes, Product Managers, Google AI
Recently, we introduced the Inclusive Images Kaggle competition, part of the NeurIPS 2018 Competition Track, with the goal of stimulating research into the effect of geographic skews in training datasets on ML model performance, and to spur innovation in developing more inclusive models. While the competition has concluded, the broader movement to build more diverse datasets is just beginning.
Today, we’re announcing Open Images Extended, a new branch of Google’s Open Images dataset, which is intended to be a collection of sets that complement core Open Images with additional images and/or annotations. The first set we are adding is the Crowdsourced extension which is seeded with 478K+ images donated by Crowdsource app users from all around the world.
About Open Images Extended
To bring greater geographic diversity to Open Images, we enabled the global community of Crowdsource app users to photograph the world around them and make their photos available to researchers and developers as part of the Open Images Extended dataset. A large majority of these images are from India, with some representation from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
The images, focus on some key categories like household objects, plants & animals, food, and people in various professions (all faces are blurred to protect privacy). Detailed information about the composition of the dataset can be found here.
Pictures from India and Singapore contributed using the Crowdsource app.
Get involved
This is an early step on a long journey. To build inclusive ML products, training data must represent global diversity along several dimensions. To that end, we invite the global community to help expand the Open Images Extended dataset by contributing imagery from your own hometown and community. Download the Crowdsource Android app to contribute images you’ve taken from your phone, or contact us if there are other image repositories (that you have the rights for) that you’re interested in adding to open-images dataset.
Acknowledgements The release of Open Images Extended has been possible thanks to the hard work of a lot of people including, but not limited to the following (in alphabetical order of last name): James Atwood, Pallavi Baljekar, Peggy Chi, Tulsee Doshi, Tom Duerig, Vittorio Ferrari, Akshay Gaur, Victor Gomes, Yoni Halpern, Gursheesh Kaur, Mahima Pushkarna, Jigyasa Saxena, D. Sculley, Richa Singh, Rachelle Summers.
Maybe you’ve just purchased a brand new laptop. Or maybe you have an older laptop sitting in your closet that you’d like to bring back to life. Either way, the best Linux distros for laptops are those that offer better driver support and can accommodate the performance offered by most laptops.
People buy laptops for a specific purpose. That may be software development, creating graphic content, gaming, or office work. The Linux distros below are well suited to run on any laptop.
Choosing the Best Linux Distros for Laptops
New laptops come with processors that are just as powerful, if not more so, than many desktop computers.
Desktop computers have components that can be replaced if they aren’t compatible with a certain Linux distro. That isn’t the case with laptops. Components are often soldered directly to the motherboard, so the Linux distribution you use will need to accommodate that.
The Linux distros below have the best support for graphic and sound cards, webcams, wireless adapters, and more. Many are also very lightweight, which is especially suitable for older laptops.
Manjaro Linux is one of the easier open-source Linux distros to learn how to use. It’s designed to work right out of the box, with a wide variety of pre-installed software.
The highlight of Manjaro Linux is that it’s well known for having amazing hardware support, thanks to its hardware detection manager.
Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, one of the most well-known and highly-customizable Linux operating systems. There are plenty of great reasons to install an Arch Linux distro like Manjaro.
You can easily change the kernel without any complex troubleshooting. Arch Linux-based distros also let you choose your own components. This means you can customize it to suit the specific laptop you’re installing it on.
And if you ever find yourself looking for support, Manjaro has a great community. You have access to the Arch Wiki, and of course the Manjaro forums.
Best of all, if you really want to go full-out Manjaro, you can buy the Spitfire, a laptop created and sold entirely by the Manjaro team.
An obvious choice for the best Linux distro for laptops is definitely Ubuntu.
It’s easily one of the most popular and well-known Linux distributions, which means it comes with a large user community as well as solid online support.
But what makes it especially useful for laptops both new and old is the fact that it’s free, lightweight, and offers excellent driver support for most hardware.
Ubuntu will usually accept any hardware you connect to your laptop. This is thanks to the fact that most manufacturers provide Ubuntu drivers.
In the Ubuntu Software Center, you’ll find free apps to accomplish just about any task on your laptop.
It works fine on older laptops that are a few years old, but it’s important to note that it does require more RAM than many other lightweight distros out there. So, if your laptop is very old, you may want to opt for one of the other Linux distros on this list.
Elementary OS is a distribution based on Ubuntu. With it, you get the beautiful, custom desktop environment known as Pantheon.
Beyond the fact that it’s so aesthetically pleasing is the fact that it’s well-known as a powerful operating system that can accomplish anything you’d need to do with a laptop. And if that laptop is a low-end one that you’ve pulled out of the closet, it can run on that as well.
The Elementary OS community developed the OS to be as lightweight and efficient as possible. Because of this, it runs easily on a large assortment of low-end laptops (or even desktops if you’re so inclined).
It also comes with most of the drivers low-end laptops will need to start working right out of the box.
The display utility includes a night light feature for when you’re using your laptop in those low-light environments like a student lounge or a library.
It also provides convenient scaling, and the ability to mirror your display if you’re using your laptop to give a presentation on a larger screen.
Elementary OS is considered one of the best alternative Linux distros for anyone switching over from Windows or macOS. And if you’re a Mac user, it’s especially good thanks to the Mac-like appearance of the desktop.
We’ve included Elementary OS on our list of the best Linux distros to install, and for good reason. And if you ever run into any issues, the Elementary OS community forum provides excellent help.
The Linux openSUSE distro is sponsored by major companies like B1 Systems and AMD (and of course, SUSE).
It’s also popular among system admins and computer science students. Why? Because it puts you in control of many functions and services without the need to learn or memorize any complex commands.
This is thanks to YaST, one of the best and most powerful system configuration tools of any Linux distro out there.
This means you can easily configure the OS to suit the particular laptop system you’re installing it on.
It has fantastic driver support, and works well right out of the box.
It was even given a test-run by ZDNet on a brand new laptop with the latest hardware installed. They found that it worked flawlessly.
“Display, graphics, sound, USB and SD slots. Nothing special to install, download, compile, or whatever. When I plugged in an HDMI display, with the system already running, it was recognized and configured at the optimum resolution as an extended desktop, all without disturbing the laptop display. Very, very nice.”
With the ability to handle even the latest hardware, you can be sure openSUSE will work just as well installed on any of your older laptops.
And if you do run into any issues, openSUSE provides an entire section of their Wiki devoted to helping people install and use openSUSE on laptops.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but many people opt to install it instead because of how lightweight it is.
It also feels a bit more familiar to people who are accustomed to the Windows user interface.
It comes pre-installed with a number of things Ubuntu doesn’t install by default.
For example, it includes the codecs you need to watch Flash video. Ubuntu has the option to install third-party tools for this during installation, but those options aren’t set by default.
The benefit you get by installing Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu is a more lightweight OS that works on older laptops. But you still get access to Ubuntu software repositories to download additional apps and tools you might want.
The Best Linux Distro for Your Old Laptop
If you’re focusing on installing Linux on an older laptop, there are several important things you need to take into account.
Lack of processing power
Limited RAM
Older devices (hard to find drivers)
Limited hard drive space
For all of these reasons, you might want to avoid Ubuntu on older laptops. Ubuntu runs efficiently on new laptops, and those that are a few years old. But if you’re considering something like an old Dell Latitude with 4GB or RAM and a vintage processor, Ubuntu could bog it down.
Instead, opt for the Linux distros listed above that are resource efficient. The best choices here include:
Manjaro: customized as a scaled down OS with limited features
Elementary OS: designed to be lightweight and efficient
Linux Mint: a favorite among old-laptop Linux enthusiasts
You can’t go wrong installing any of these Linux distros on an old laptop that you’d like to bring back to life.
Choosing a Linux Distro
When you’re trying to decide on which Linux distro above that you should install on your laptop, much depends on what’s important to you.
If you prefer a beautiful interface with more of a macOS feel, then Elementary OS is the one you want. If you’re looking for an OS that’s extremely easy to use but still highly functional, then Manjaro is perfect. If you’re installing on an older laptop and want a lightweight OS that has the look and feel of a Windows PC, then Linux Mint is the way to go.
Really, it depends on your intentions for using the laptop, and your own preferred user interface. That’s the beauty of Linux distros, there’s a flavor to suit anyone.
If you’re also thinking of installing Linux on a desktop PC, make sure to read our list of great distros that’ll give any old desktop PC new life. Who knows, you may get so used to using Linux that you prefer it over Windows or macOS.
You probably do some of the same tasks on your smartphone every day. When you get into the car, you want to play your driving playlist. While taking your dog out for a walk, you start listening to your favorite podcast. On your way home, you always text your significant other when you’ll get there.
These are repetitive tasks all of us do on our iPhones. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate them? Thanks to Siri Shortcuts, you can do just that.
Three Birds With One Shortcut
You should automate anything that you do multiple times a day that takes more than a few taps. This lets you spend less time on your iPhone and more time doing other work.
Start by recording these tasks and seeing if you can automate them with Shortcuts. Shortcuts is Apple’s automation app that lets you create complex workflows (actions that happen automatically, one after the other, once the shortcut triggers).
Shortcut can trigger in three different ways: from the Shortcuts widget on the Lock screen, from the Share sheet, and using a custom Siri phrase.
Let’s say you’ve created a shortcut that plays your favorite playlist and puts your iPhone in Do Not Disturb. When you get in your car, all you do is say “Let’s drive” to Siri. Both of these actions will then happen in quick succession. If you’re not a Siri person, you can start the process by tapping the Let’s drive shortcut from the Shortcuts widget on the Lock screen.
In both cases, you didn’t need to go to the Music app or Control Center to do the job.
The Shortcuts app also lets you import existing shortcuts. Thankfully, there’s a great community dedicated to sharing awesome shortcuts. If any of the shortcuts below strikes your fancy, just download and you can import it into the Shortcuts app.
If you need three or more alarms to wake up every day, it makes sense to create a shortcut that starts multiple alarms at once. Using the Toggle Alarm shortcut, you can enable an alarm that you’ve already created. The Create Alarm action does just as it sounds.
In this example, I’ve toggled a 5:45am alarm and created a 6:00am alarm. After downloading, it, you can customize the times to suit your needs.
Timers come in handy every day for the laundry, coffee, boiling pasta, and more. Create a shortcut for your most-used timers and you can trigger them from Shortcuts widget or Siri.
For example, I have a four-minute coffee timer that I trigger by simply saying “French Press” to Siri.
The Play Playlist shortcut comes straight from the Shortcuts Library and it’s quite simple. Just pick one of the available playlists and choose Repeat or Shuffle options. If needed, add a Siri phrase.
When you turn off Wi-Fi from Control Center, it doesn’t stay off completely. The next morning at 5am, it re-enables automatically. This shortcut properly disables Wi-Fi from settings.
Using the Send Message action in Shortcuts, you can dispatch a canned message to one or more contacts using the Messages app.
After adding the Send Message action, add recipients and text. Disable the Show When Run toggle to make this a background process.
If you routinely send the same text message over and over to family members (like that you’ve left home), this action can be a huge time saver. Add a Siri phrase to do this without even touching your iPhone.
When you’re exploring Apple Music and come across an awesome song, you usually have to tap quite a bit to add it to one of your favorite playlists. But there’s an easier way.
Initiate this shortcut when you’re playing the song, pick the playlist, and you’ll add it to the end of the list. Check out our guide to Apple Music playlists for more.
Calculate Tip is a complex shortcut that shows you just how powerful the Shortcuts app is. You can use the shortcut to replace a tip calculator app or back-of-the-napkin math.
iOS 12 lets you set Do Not Disturb for an hour or indefinitely. But what if you want to set it for 15 minutes, or hour and a half? With this shortcut, you can.
Initiate the shortcut, type in the minutes or hours, and Do Not Disturb will activate for the said time.
You should build this shortcut yourself, depending on your nighttime routine. You might do one or all of the following tasks when you go to bed:
Turn on Do Not Disturb
Turn off cellular and Wi-Fi
Start playing a podcast
Turn off the smart lights
Listen to some calming music
Something else entirely
You can load all of the above into a single shortcut. Create a new shortcut and search for the above actions like Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb, and so on. Then give it a Siri phrase like Good Night.
Next time you go to bed, just tell Siri “Good Night” and watch as it does everything in your shortcut one by one.
More Hidden Features in iOS 12
The Siri Shortcuts and automation feature in iOS 12 is completely hidden. And there are more secret features like this. Check out our favorite iOS 12 hidden features like third-party password manager support, advanced notification management, and a lot more.
Kirthiga Reddy, a former executive with Facebook, has taken the role and, in doing so, she becomes the first female member of SoftBank’s Vision Fund investment team. She will be based in San Carlos, Silicon Valley.
Reddy spent eight years at Facebook, mostly as managing director for its business in India and Southeast Asia before a two-year stint in the U.S. leading global partnerships.
In her new role, she will work closely with Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisors who is located in the Bay Area and was previously an exec at Google and LinkedIn. Reddy said her focus will be frontier technologies such as AI, robotics, health, bio engineering, IoT and more. In a comment to Bloomberg, she revealed that she is “actively recruiting” for the firm, especially for female investors.
Kirthiga Reddy [right] is interviewed alongside India Today Group Chief Creative Officer Kalli Purie [left] in 2012 (Photo by Qamar Sibtain/India Today Group/Getty Images)
“I look forward to contributing to their mission to positively shape the future by seeking to back the boldest, most transformative optimistic, and ideas of today. Like in other investment firms, the Venture Partner role enables quick integration of new talent from non-investing backgrounds, which is a perfect fit for me. I look forward to bringing my technical and business expertise – from both enterprise and consumer technology, in developed and emerging markets – to the Vision Fund team,” Reddy wrote in a post on LinkedIn announcing the move.
The Vision Fund has been criticized for an all-male cast of 10 deal-makers. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said in September that he has “no prejudice of any kind,” and first-in-command Rajeev Misra has led an effort to hire women for the team.
Right now there’s a small cluster of games available including Hades, a new title from Supergiant Games that is in ‘early access’ for $19.99, and Epic’s own Fortnite and Unreal Tournament, both of which are free. But Epic is saying that’s there’s a lot more to come. In particular, the store will offer a free game every two weeks, starting out with Subnautica from December 14-17 and Super Meat Boy from December 28 until January 10.
What is most interesting about the store is the revenue split, which is just twelve percent. That has set off a change at Valve, the firm behind Steam, as we reported earlier this week:
While Valve will continue to take an App Store-like 30 percent from sales of game makers with less than 10 million in revenue, that figure drops to 25 percent until they hit 50 million revenue, from which point the slice drops to 20 percent.
“As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” EpicGames CEO Tim Sweeney told TechCrunch in an emailed statement sent earlier this week. “Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”
The Epic Games Store is part of a wider vision for the coming that prompted a range of investors to pump $1.25 billion into the company in October. That round was participation from the likes of KKR, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed Venture Partners and it is said to value the Epic Games business — which also includes Unreal Engine for game development — at more than $15 billion.
Spotify knows what music you like. Yes, even those guilty pleasures you only listen to when no one else is around. And as an early Christmas gift, the music streaming service has compiled everything it knows about your musical journey through 2018.
Spotify Wrapped gives you a customized look at your streaming habits through 2018. You’ll be able to find out how many hours you’ve spent listening to Spotify, your favorite genres, artists and songs, and much more besides. All personalized for you.
How to See Your Spotify Wrapped for 2018
To see your year in music for 2018, just visit SpotifyWrapped.com, and connect with Spotify. This just means signing in to your account and giving permission for 2018 Wrapped to access your account. So do make sure you’re on the right website first.
Once you’ve connected your account, Spotify will start telling you all about your streaming habits through 2018. So if you pretend to be a metalhead when you actually prefer Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj, make sure no one is looking over your shoulder before finding out:
The first song you listened to in 2018.
How many minutes you spent listening to Spotify.
How many hours you spent with your favorite artist.
Your top artists, songs, and genres of music.
Your top 100 songs of 2018 (in a playlist).
Your favorite musical subgenre.
The oldest song you listened to in 2018.
The podcasts you listened to in between songs.
The songs Spotify thinks will help you broaden your horizons.
Spotify makes it clear that this is a customized experience designed for each individual user. Which means your Wrapped could differ from mine. This will depend on the type of account you have, and how you use Spotify. Still, it’s fascinating nonetheless.
Your Listening Habits Aren’t So Secret Now
Spotify Wrapped has become something of an annual tradition now. And it’s fascinating to see your listening habits laid out in such bare terms. And while we wish the streaming service would fix these common Spotify problems, we hope Wrapped is back in 2019.
If there’s one thing ultraportable laptops are not known for, it’s the ability to play PC games. Shrinking down a laptop means there must be power sacrifices to make everything fit. Graphics cards are big and they take up a lot of space inside a computer, so when you trim down, GPUs need to go.
This tends to make PC gaming an impossible task, but Razer is aiming to make gaming on an ultraportable laptop possible with the new version of the Razer Blade Stealth, which is available with Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics with 4GB GDDR5 VRAM built-in.
What Makes the New Razer Blade Stealth Special?
The new Razer Blade laptop stands out because it mixes the lightweight, tiny-bezel design of an ultraportable laptop with some of the power of a bulky gaming PC. While it’s not quite as powerful as a hulking monster with a desktop graphics card, the Blade Stealth can handle a lot more games than your average ultrabook.
“The Blade Stealth has excelled at being the best productivity laptop on the market,” says Razer’s Co-Founder and CEO, Min-Liang Tan. “We pushed the boundaries further by incorporating NVIDIA graphics with up to four times the graphics performance while continuing to keep the system incredibly compact and thin. The results of our efforts have lead Razer to create one of the world’s most powerful ultraportable laptops ever.”
Razer’s new laptop has an impressively tiny bezel that looks almost edgeless. There’s 4.9mm of bezel on each side of the laptop, which is a decrease of 60% from the previous version of the Blade Stealth.
Here’s a look at the overall specs of the Razer Blade Stealth:
13.3? display with either 1080p or 4K touchscreen display
Up to 512GB SSD
Up to 16GB RAM
Four upward firing speakers
Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) power port
2 Type-A USB 3.1 ports
USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 port
Battery life up to 13 hours
Razer Chroma keyboard
How Much Is the Razer Blade Stealth?
You can purchase the Razer Blade Stealth right now starting at $1399. However, for the model that includes the NVIDIA graphics and a 1080p display, you’ll need to drop $1599. For the 4K model with the graphical power, it’ll set you back $1899.
The laptop is available right now directly from Razer.
“We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees, and our partners. We believe we’re doing everything that we possibly can to deliver a great service and we’re in the process of fixing all the things that went wrong.”
To that end, the company is launching a new pricing structure that will take effect in January. If you like paying $9.95, don’t worry: You’ll still be able to do that (at least in some geographies). If, on the other hand, you’re willing to pay a little more, you’ll no longer be limited by the ever-changing list of movies that MoviePass is supporting on a given day.
So there are now three tiers, each of them offering three movie tickets each month. There’s Select, which will cost between $9.95 and $14.95 per month (depending on geography), and will only allow viewers to watch certain movies on certain days; All Access, which costs between $14.95 and $19.95 and allows you to go to any standard screening; and Red Carpet, which costs between $19.95 and $24.95 and includes one IMAX, 3D or other large-format screening each month.
The company says that this new structure will allow it to break even on the tickets it’s selling — a key step to making the business model work.
The competition is growing. And app store intelligence company Sensor Tower says MoviePass only added 12,000 new users to its mobile app last month, down 97 percent from the growth it was seeing at its high point in January.
In addition to rethinking its pricing, MoviePass is also making organizational changes. The company told The New York Times that although Lowe will remain CEO, he’ll be handing over responsibility for day-to-day operations to Executive Vice President Khalid Itum.
Getting news in the morning has long been my most used feature on Google Assistant. Asking Home “what’s in the news” brings up a quick flash briefing from a handful of selected outlets. It’s quick, it’s easy and it helps fill me in on the way out the door.
Google’s long promised to improve on this feature, offering an on-demand take take on news radio. Over the past year or so, it’s been working with a handful of publishers — including The Associated Press, Hollywood Reporter, Universo Online and the South China Morning Post — to create news playlists. The audio feed adapts to the time of day and the listener’s preference, using a similar AI model to the one that currently powers Google News.
“It starts with a briefing of top stories and updates on topics you care about, and extends into longer-form content that dives deeper into more stories,” the company writes in a blog post. “At any point in your day when you want to listen to the latest news—as a morning wake-up, during your commute, or while jogging—the Google Assistant will be ready with new stories and updates to the ones you’ve already heard.”
Like the current offering, users can ask Google to skip or repeat certain stories.
In addition to its existing partnerships, the company has created a template for news outlets to record stories that can be plugged into the feed. There’s also the new Google News Initiative, which is designed to help outlets create more audio offerings.
The feature is starting to roll out now to users in the U.S.
