Google pulls the plug on Expeditions VR app, migrates tours to Arts & Culture

Google today announced that it is ending support for Expeditions. The VR app will also be pulled from its own Play Store and Apple’s App Store in June of next year. In a blogpost somewhat confusingly titled, “Expanding Google Arts and Culture with Expeditions,” the company notes the 360-degree tours captured for the project will survive — but will be moved to Google Arts & Culture.

Director of Program Management, Education, Jennifer Holland, says the decision was made to make the content more accessible to students and educators.

“Engaging students in the classroom has taken on an entirely different meaning this year. As schools around the world reimagine education from the ground up for a hybrid world, we’ve also been thinking deeply about how to adjust our tools to meet the moment and simultaneously build for the future,” she writes. “We’ve heard and recognize that immersive experiences with VR headsets are not always accessible to all learners and even more so this year, as the transition to hybrid learning has presented challenges for schools to effectively use Expeditions.”

The content will be included alongside Arts & Culture’s museum tours and other content, available for free to all users. That, at least, is a small win for teachers and parents who have struggled to keep up kids’ education in the face of a pandemic that has contributed to major school closures.

Notably, the news comes a little over a month after Google announced it would be ending support for the ill-fated Daydream VR platform. Launched four years ago, the project was an effort to bring low-cost virtual reality that failed to reach its potential.

Google wakes up from its VR daydream

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Final Exam

Final Exam

How the new generation of Latinx voters could change US elections | María Teresa Kumar

How the new generation of Latinx voters could change US elections | María Teresa Kumar

A historic number of Latinx voters participated in the 2020 US presidential election, including a record number of young people casting their ballots for the first time. Civic leader María Teresa Kumar takes a look at the issues closest to youth Latinx voters, including health care, climate equity and racial justice, and considers how this growing demographic could shape American politics for decades to come. Stay tuned for a Q&A with TEDx learning specialist Bianca DeJesus on why the US has a unique opportunity to harness its diversity and define the 21st century.

https://ift.tt/2Uqj3WW

Click this link to view the TED Talk

To future generations of women, you are the roots of change | Gloria Steinem and Pat Mitchell

To future generations of women, you are the roots of change | Gloria Steinem and Pat Mitchell

Activist and author Gloria Steinem is an icon of the global feminist movement. She's spent her life defying stereotypes, breaking social barriers and fighting for equality. In conversation with TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, Steinem reflects on the revolutionary roots of the feminist movement, the fundamental need for intersectionality to combat prejudice, and how she overcame her fears with the support of friends. Now she urges future generations of women to advocate for each other in solidarity -- and discover the freedom found in companionship and community.

https://ift.tt/2UpqEoz

Click this link to view the TED Talk

Nintendo’s Mario Game & Watch is a choice gaming stocking stuffer of 2020

Nintendo will never stop mining its past for new nostalgia-based products, but at least it tends to do so with aplomb and occasionally even generosity. The former at least is on display with the Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch, a standalone handheld that plays the first Mario game, its unbelievably hard “Lost Levels” sequel, and acts as a totally impractical timepiece.

This tiny gaming system isn’t the most practical thing in the world, but it is a charming piece of hardware that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Turn on the Game & Watch with a button on the side and you can select between, naturally, the Game and Watch modes. In game mode, you can select between playing the original Super Mario Bros. for NES, the sequel we never got in the U.S., but was eventually released as “The Lost Levels,” and a recreation of an old-school LCD game where Mario juggles balls at ever-increasing speeds.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The screen, while certainly small, is bright and sharp, apparently displaying the exact pixel dimensions of the original Nintendo game. It plays well, too — the controls are responsive, though it feels strange to play the game on anything other than an original NES controller. The buttons of the Game & Watch are a bit softer than I’d like — but they were good enough that I cleared the first set of levels without any real frustration other than my own lack of skill.

While there is no support for saving or rewinding the game — pretty much essential for the 99 percent of us who can’t beat it honestly — at least you don’t have to to try to beat it in one sitting. The game freezes its state when you turn if off or switch to any other game or mode, meaning you can play a couple levels between subway stops and not worry about losing progress.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

You can hand it back and forth with a friend (after sanitizing it, of course) too, since player 2 uses the same controls.

The juggling game is a fun little diversion but, like most of those old LCD games, goes from really boring to nearly impossible in the course of about 60 seconds.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The “Watch” mode has a charming little landscape with the current time made out of bricks, and Mario running across the screen below stomping goombas and avoiding bullet bills. If you watch for a while he’ll moonwalk, mount a pipe, and perform other hijinks. You can switch the background from normal to hills to mushroom platforms. I wouldn’t use it as a watch but if you don’t want to pull your phone out while you’re playing, there you go.

For $50 it may seem a little steep, and perhaps it is. If this had Marios 1 through 3 on it I would consider it a bargain, especially considering the ability to come back to the game time after time — I’d work my way through the epic-length third game with pleasure.

As it is, however, it’s hard to justify the price — except, of course, as a gift to a Nintendo-loving friend or loved one. That’s why I suspect these will sell like hotcakes this holiday season. With no new Switch hardware, no N64 mini, and no must-have games on Nintendo’s platforms, it’s looking a bit dry, but a Game & Watch is just silly enough — and decent enough — a device to sate the hunger of a retro-minded gamer for a few days.

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Twitter labeled 300,000 US election tweets — around 0.2%

Just over a week after the U.S. elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of its efforts to label misleading tweets. The site says that from October 27 to November 11, it labeled some 300,000 tweets as part of its Civic Integrity Policy. That amounts to around 0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets sent during that two-week period.

Of course, not all Twitter warnings are created equal. Only 456 of those included a warning that covered the text and limited user engagement, disabling retweets, replies and likes. That specific warning did go a ways toward limited engagement, with around three-fourths of those who encountered the tweets seeing the obscured texts (by clicking through the warning). Quote tweets for those so labeled decreased by around 29%, according to Twitter’s figures.

The president of the United States received a disproportionate number of those labels, as The New York Times notes that just over a third of Trump’s tweets between November 3 and 6 were hit with such a warning. The end of the election (insofar as the election has actually ended, I suppose) appears to have slowed the site’s response time somewhat, though Trump continues to get flagged, as he continues to devote a majority of his feed to disputing the election results confirmed by nearly every major news outlet.

His latest tweet as of this writing has been labeled disputed, but not hidden, as Trump repeats claims against voting machine maker, Dominion. “We also want to be very clear that we do not see our job as done,” Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote. “Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges.”

YouTube removes ads from, but won’t pull, ‘Trump Won’ video following backlash

Twitter and other social media sites were subject to intense scrutiny following the 2016 election for the roles the platforms played in the spread of misinformation. Twitter sought to address the issue by tweaking recommendations and retweets, as well as individually labeling tweets that violate its policies.

Earlier today, YouTube defended its decision to keep controversial election-related videos, noting, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YT. These videos are not being surfaced or recommended in any prominent way.”

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Apple HomePod Mini review: Remarkably big sound

It’s hard to shake the sense that the smart speaker market would look considerably different had the HomePod Mini arrived several years back. It’s not so much that the device is transformative on the face of it, but it’s impossible to deny that it marks a dramatically different approach to the category than the one Apple took almost three years ago with the launch of the original model.

Apple has never been a particular budget-conscious company when it comes to hardware — terms like “Apple tax” don’t spring out of nothing. But the last few years have seen the company soften that approach in an effort to appeal to users outside its traditional core of creative professionals. The iPhone and Apple Watch have both seen the company more aggressively pushing to appeal to entry-level users. It only follows that it would follow suit with its smart speaker.

The smart speaker market is expected to grow 21% next year

Couple that with the fact that the Echo Dot and Google/Nest Home minis pretty consistently rate as the best-selling smart speakers for their respective company, and arrival of a HomePod Mini was all but inevitable, as Apple looks to take a bite out of the global smart speaker market, which currently ranks Amazon and Google at around 40% a piece. It’s going to be an uphill battle for the HomePod, but the Mini is, simply put, its strongest push in that direction to date.

Launched in early 2018 (after delays), the HomePod was a lot of things — but no one ever claimed it was cheap (though no doubt they found a way to spin it as a good deal). The $349 price tag (since reduced to $299) was hundreds of dollars more than the most expensive models from Amazon and Google. The HomePod was a premium device, and that was precisely the point. Music has always been a cornerstone of Apple’s philosophy, and the HomePod was the company’s way of embracing the medium without cutting corners.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

As Matthew wrote in a David Foster Wallacesque “four sentence” review, “Apple’s HomePod is easily the best sounding mainstream smart speaker ever. It’s got better separation and bass response than anything else in its size and boasts a nuance and subtlety of sound that pays off the seven years Apple has been working on it.”

He called it “incredibly over-designed and radically impressive,” while bemoaning limited Siri functionality. On the whole, the HomePod did a good job in being what it set out to be — but it was never destined to be the world’s best-selling smart speaker. Not at that price. What it did do, however, was help convince the rest of the industry that a smart speaker should be, above all, a speaker, rather than simply a smart assistant delivery device. The last several generations of Amazon and Google products have, accordingly, mostly brought sound to the forefront of product concerns.

A four-sentence HomePod review (with appendices)

Essentially, Amazon and Google have become more focused on sound and Apple more conscious of price. That’s not to say, however, that the companies have met somewhere in the middle. This is not, simply put, the Apple Echo Dot. The HomePod Mini is still, in many ways, a uniquely Apple product. There’s a focus on little touches that offer a comparably premium experience for its price point.

That price point being $99. That puts the device in league with the standard Amazon Echo and Google Nest, rather than their respective budget-level counterparts. Those devices run roughly half that price and are both fairly frequently — and quite deeply — discounted. In fact, those devices could nearly fall into the category of loss leaders for their respective companies — dirt-cheap ways to get their smart assistants into users’ homes. Apple doesn’t appear particularly interested in that approach. Not for the time being, at least. Apple wants to sell you a good speaker.

And you know what? The HomePod Mini is a surprisingly good speaker. Not just for its price, but also its size. The Mini is nearly exactly the same size as the new, round Echo Dot — which is to say, roughly the size of a softball. There are, however, some key differences in their respective designs. For starters, Amazon moved the Echo’s status ring to the bottom of the device, so as to not impede on its perfectly spherical design. Apple, on the other hand, simply lopped off the top. I was trying to figure out what it reminds me of, and this was the best I came up with.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The design decision keeps the product more in line with the original HomePod, with an Aurora Borealis of swirling lights up top to show you when Siri is doing her thing. It also allows for the inclusion of touch-sensitive volume buttons and the ability to tap the surface to play/pause music. Rather than the fabric-style covering that has dominated the last several generations of Google and Amazon products, the Mini is covered in the same sort of audio-conductive mesh material as the full-size HomePod.

The device comes in white or space gray, and unlike other smart speakers, seems to be less about blending in than showing off. Of course, being significantly smaller than the HomePod makes it considerably more versatile. I’ve been using one of the two Minis Apple sent on my desk at home, and it’s an ideal size. On the bottom is a hard plastic base with an Apple logo.

There’s a long, non-detachable fabric cable. It would be nice if the cord was user-detectable, so you can swap it out as needed, but no go. The cable sports a USB-C connector, however, which makes it fairly versatile on that end. There’s also a 20W power adapter in the box (admittedly, not a sure bet with Apple, these days). It’s disappointing — but not surprising that there’s no auxiliary input on-board — there wasn’t one on the standard HomePod, either.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Where Amazon switched to a front-facing speaker for the new Echo, Apple continues to focus on 360-degree sound. Your preference may depend on where you place the speaker, but this model is more versatile, especially if you’re not just seated in front of the speaker all day. I’ve used a lot of different smart speakers in my day, and honestly, I’m really impressed with the sound the company was able to get out of the 3.3-inch device.

It’s full and clear and impressively powerful for its size. Obviously that goes double if you opt for a stereo pair. Pairing is painless, out of the box. Just set up two devices for the same room of your home and it will ask you whether you want to pair them. From there, you can specify which one handles the right and left channels. If you’d like to spread out, the system will do multiroom audio by simply assigning speakers to different rooms. From there, you can just say, “Hey Siri, play music in the kitchen” or “Hey Siri, play music everywhere.” You get the picture.

In fact, the whole setup process is pretty simple with an iPhone. It’s quite similar to pairing AirPods: hold the phone near the speaker and you’ll get a familiar white popup guiding you through the process of setting it up, choosing the room and enabling voice recognition.

The speakers also get pretty loud, though if you need clear sound at a serious volume, I’d strongly recommend looking at something bigger (and pricier) like the original HomePod. For the living room of my one-bedroom in Queens, however, it does the trick perfectly, and sounds great from pretty much any angle in the room.

As a smart assistant, Siri is up to most of the basic tasks. There are also some neat tricks that leverage Apple’s unique ecosystem. You can, say, ask Siri to send images to your iPhone, and it’ll oblige, using Bing results. The fact of the matter is, however, that Amazon and Google got a pretty major head-start on the smart home assistant front and Apple is still catching up.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

There have, however, been some key strides of late — particularly as it pertains to Home/HomeKit. The last couple of iOS updates have brought some solid smart home updates; 14.1 brought intercom functionality specifically for HomePods and 14.2 extends that to other other devices. So you can say, “Hey Siri, intercom everyone, dinner is ready,” and beam it to various devices. The feature joins similar offerings from Amazon and Google, but does so on a wide range of (Apple) products, sending a pre-recorded snippet of your voice to the devices.

The system works out of the box with HomeKit-compatible devices — it’s a small list, compared to what’s currently offered for Alexa and Google Assistant, but it’s growing. You can check out the entire list of compatible smart home devices here.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

I found the voice recognition to be quite responsive to voice, even when the music is playing loud. Beyond Siri, there are a couple of ways to interact with the device. In addition to a single tap on the top to play/pause, a double-tap advances the track, triple-tap goes to the previous track and touching and holding fires up Siri. Unlike other smart speakers, there’s no physical button to turn off the mic — and you can’t ask Siri to do this either. The device is only listening for a “hey Siri” trigger and audio isn’t stored, but the feature would be nice for additional peace of mind.

You can also control music from your iPhone using AirPlay 2. That’s my preferred method, because I’m a bit of a micromanager when it comes to music. You’ll need to hit the AirPlay button to do that — or you can simply hold the iOS device near the HomePod Mini to take advantage of handoff using the U1 chip (iPhone 11 or later). That’s a neat little trick.

As someone who’s more accustomed to using Spotify than Apple Music, one thing that tripped me up a bit, however, is that when you ask the HomePod to play music, it will pick up from the last time you verbally requested playback, rather than treating all of your Apple Music listening sessions as a single stream. I prefer Spotify’s unified cross-device approach here.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

That said, a nice little iOS 14.2 addition brings your aggregated listening history (Apple Podcasts and Music) to a single stream accessible by long-pressing your HomePod in the Home app. From there you can tap on an album or podcast to automatically send them to the smart speaker.

All told, I’ve quite enjoyed my time with the little smart speaker. As I noted at the top, it’s hard not to wonder what might have been if Apple had launched the Mini alongside the initial HomePod. I suspect the company would still be a ways from market share domination, but the product really could have eaten into Amazon and Google’s lead. Instead, Apple waited — likely in hopes of getting the package right. That’s certainly understandable. Apple’s never been one to rush into a product, and the HomePod Mini sounds all the better for it.

Apple reveals the $99 HomePod Mini

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Netflix’s latest experiment is a TikTok-like feed of funny videos

Netflix already borrowed the concept of short-form video “Stories” from social apps like Snapchat and Instagram for its Previews feature back in 2018. Now, the company is looking to the full-screen vertical video feed, popularized by TikTok, for further inspiration. With its latest experiment, Fast Laughs, Netflix is offering a new feed of short-form comedy clips drawn from its full catalog.

The feed includes clips from both originals and licensed programming, Netflix says. It also includes video clips from the existing Netflix social channel, “Netflix Is A Joke,” which today runs clips, longer videos and other social content across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Fast Laughs resembles TikTok in the sense that it’s swiped through vertically, offers full-screen videos and places its engagement buttons on the right side. But it’s not trying to become a place to waste time while being entertained.

Like many of Netflix’s experiments, the goal with the Fast Laughs feed is to help users discover something new to watch.

Instead of liking and commenting on videos, as you would in a social video app, the feed is designed to encourage users to add shows to their Netflix watch list for later viewing. In this sense, it’s serving a similar purpose to Netflix’s “Previews” feature, which helps users discover shows by watching clips and trailers from popular and newly released programming.

As users scroll through the new Fast Laughs feed, they’ll encounter a wide range of comedy clips — like a clip from a Kevin Hart stand-up special or a funny bit from “The Office,” for example. The clips will also range in length anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds.

In addition to adding clips to Netflix’s “My List” feature, users can also react to clips with a laughing emoji button, share the clip with friends across social media, or tap a “More” button to see other titles related to the clip you’re viewing.

Here’s the full intro explaining this new Netflix feature… pic.twitter.com/T7OriLUHd8

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 12, 2020

The feature was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, based in the U.K. In his app, Fast Laughs appeared in front of the row of Previews, where it was introduced with text that said “New!”

Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch the experiment had been tested with a small number of users earlier this year, but has recently started rolling out to a wider group this month — including users in the U.K., the U.S. and other select markets.

It’s currently available to a subset of Netflix users with adult profiles or other profiles without parental controls on iOS devices only. However, users don’t need to be opted in to experiments nor do they need to be on a beta version of the Netflix app to see the feature. It’s more of a standard A/B test, Netflix says.

And because it’s a test, users may see slightly different versions of the same feature. The product may also evolve over time, in response to user feedback.

Netflix is hardly the first to “borrow” the TikTok format for its own app. Social media platforms, like Instagram and Snapchat, have also launched their own TikTok rivals in recent months.

But Netflix isn’t a direct competitor with TikTok — except to the extent that any mobile app competes for users’ time and attention, as there are only so many hours in a day.

Instead, the new feed is more of an acknowledgment that the TikTok format of a full-screen vertical video feed with quick engagement buttons on the side is becoming a default style of sorts for presenting entertaining content.

“We’re always looking for new ways to improve the Netflix experience,” a Netflix spokesperson said, confirming the experiment. “A lot of our members love comedy so we thought this would be an exciting new way to help them discover new shows and enjoy classic scenes. We experiment with these types of tests in different countries and for different periods of time — and only make them broadly available if people find them useful,” they added.

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Gifting a gadget? Check its creep factor on Mozilla’s ‘Privacy not included’ list of shame

Buying someone a gadget is a time-honored tradition, but these days it can be particularly fraught, considering you may buy them a fitness tracker that also monitors emotions, or a doorbell that snitches to the cops. Mozilla has put together a helpful list of popular gadgets with ratings on just how creepy they are.

“Privacy not included” has become an annual tradition for the internet rights advocate, and this year has an especially solid crop of creepy devices, given the uptick in smart speakers, smart security cameras, and smart litterboxes.

On the “creepy” end of the spectrum is… pretty much everything by Amazon except the Kindle. The devices in question send tons of data to Amazon by design, of course, but Mozilla feels the company hasn’t yet earned the trust to make that sort of thing acceptable. Facebook’s Portal earns a creepy spot for a similar reason.

Image Credits: Mozilla

Some random gadgets like a smart coffee maker and Moleskine smart notebook get creepy ratings because they don’t give the kinds of assurances about data and security that any company collecting that information should give. That sort of thing is common in smart gadgets — they may not be fundamentally creepy, but the company that makes them reserves the right to make it creepy at any time.

On the other end of the spectrum, Withings earns points for its smart devices with reasonable privacy policies and security. Non-Ring smart doorbells get good marks, and Garmin’s smart watches too.

These are informal rankings based on the potential for abuse or exposure of your data, and it doesn’t mean that they’re perfectly safe or private. If you’re buying one of these things, it’s best to immediately go through the settings and preferences and disable anything that smells invasive or creepy. You can always enable features again, but once you’ve put your data out there, it’s hard to get it back.

Check out the rest of the list here.

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Daily Crunch: Apple unveils new Macs

Apple announces “One More Thing” before the holiday season, Uber lets you reserve rides 30 days in advance and Spotify makes another podcast acquisition. This is your Daily Crunch for November 10, 2020.

The big story: Apple unveils new Macs

During an unusually brief and focused “One More Thing” event, Apple announced three new Macs that will all use the M1 chip, its first chip for Macs. This is the beginning of a previously announced shift of the Mac lineup to Apple silicon.

What about the actual Macs? Well, there’s a new MacBook Air, which still costs $999 but is supposed to be 3.5x faster than the previous generation — and it doesn’t include a fan! There’s also a new Mac Mini with a base price of $699, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro that starts at $1,299.

Oh, and Big Sur, the latest version of the Mac operating system, will be released this Thursday, November 12.

The tech giants

Uber will now let users book rides 30 days in advance and pick a favorite driver — The new option, called Uber Reserve, will begin to show up on the app in the next week.

Google adds COVID-related health and safety info to Google Travel — When users search for hotels and vacation rental properties through Google Travel, they may see new information about COVID-19 safety precautions at the property.

Spotify buying podcast hosting and ad company Megaphone for $235M — Spotify already had an existing partnership with the company, including use of its hosting services.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Hopin raises $125M for its online events platform on the back of surging growth — TechCrunch is one of the customers for Hopin’s online events platform.

Spearhead launches $100M fourth fund to transform founders into top-notch VC investors — The premise remains simple: offer founders with great networks and hustle $1 million in capital to go out and start writing angel checks and build their own portfolio.

Carbon Health raises $100M with plans to expand pop-up clinics ahead of COVID-19 vaccination programs — The company plans to open 100 pop-up clinics in 20 markets across the U.S.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Five VCs discuss the future of SaaS and software after Pfizer’s vaccine breakthrough — SaaS stocks sold sharply on good vaccine tidings, but do VCs care?

Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic — We spoke with the heads of three accelerators about the challenges and opportunities presented by the new virtual environment.

What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder — TheVentureCity’s Andy Arieto shares some knowledge.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

All Slingbox devices will stop working in two years — All Slingbox products will become less and less functional, leading up to a full shutdown two years from today.

House Reps ask FCC to ‘stop work on all partisan, controversial items’ during transition — This likely includes the FCC’s effort to reinterpret Section 230, an important protection for internet platforms, at the Trump administration’s request.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Facebook’s Snapchat-like ‘Vanish Mode’ feature arrives on Messenger and Instagram

Facebook today announced its new Snapchat-like feature for disappearing messaging, Vanish Mode, is arriving on Messenger and Instagram. The feature, meant for more casual conversations, allows users to set chats to automatically delete after the message is seen and the chat is closed.

In Vanish Mode, Messenger and Instagram users can send text chats, emoji, pictures, GIFs, voice messages, and stickers, which will disappear after they’ve been seen and users leave the chat, Facebook explains.

Image Credits: Facebook

However, unlike on Snapchat, Vanish Mode is not a default setting. Instead, users are meant to enable it from within an existing chat by swiping up on their mobile device’s screen while in the chat.

Upon first launch, a screen will appear explaining how Vanish Mode works. It also notes that users will be alerted if someone takes a screenshot of the conversation — as Snapchat does.

For safety purposes, Facebook supports blocking and reporting in Vanish Mode. If a user in the conversation reports a chat, the disappearing messages will be included for up to 1 hour after they disappear, the company explains. This allows Facebook to review the reported conversation and take action, if need be.

Image Credits: Facebook

Vanish Mode is also an opt in experience — meaning you can can choose whether to enter a Vanish Mode chat. And it only works with people you’re connected to, Facebook says.

Once in Vanish Mode, the screen goes dark to signal the change. To exit Vanish Mode, you tap on the “Turn Off Vanish Mode” button at the top of the screen.

Facebook’s plans for Vanish mode were announced earlier as part of its overhaul of the Instagram messaging experience in September. This update had included the ability for Instagram and Messenger users to communicate across apps, along with other “fun” features.

As a part of that update, Instagram received many Messenger-inspired additions — like the ability to change the chat color or react with any emoji, for example. But though announced, the Vanish Mode feature was then said to be coming “soon.”

Image Credits: Facebook

To be clear, Vanish Mode is not designed to cater to those looking to secure an entire conversation. Though the feature is end-to-end encrypted, Facebook already offers a fully end-to-end encrypted conversations feature, Secret Conversations. Instead, Vanish Mode’s main focus is to chip away at yet another advantage held by rival Snapchat.

That’s part for the course for Facebook these days. The company already copied the Stories format popularlized Snapchat, and now that product alone on each of its platforms is used by more people (500M+) than all of Snapchat. (249M).

To get Vanish Mode, and other recent updates to the Instagram messaging experience, users have to opt-in to the upgrade. Essentially, these new features are being used as lures to get Instagram users to agree to the upgrade.

The upgrade then locks them further inside the Facebook universe as they then also receive the ability to communicate cross-platform with users on Facebook. Eventually, WhatsApp may become a part of this cross-platform communication strategy, as well.

Once upgraded, people can use just one messaging apps to reach friends and family on two of the largest social networks in the world. And with additions like Vanish Mode, they won’t miss out on things found on competitors’ apps. Meanwhile, with Reels on Instagram, Facebook aims to retain TikTok users, too.

Facebook says Vanish Mode is launching starting today on Messenger in the U.S. Canada, Mexico, Peru and Bangladesh, and on Instagram (soon) in Canada, Argentina, Chile, Peru and a few other countries. It will soon roll out to other countries across both platforms, the company says.

 

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L’Oréal rolls out a line of ‘virtual makeup’

Selfie filters have improved immensely over the past several years, but companies on the forefront of the tech see plenty of room to grow.

The cosmetics world has also seen some rapid change in the past several years as makeup has proven particularly ripe for up-and-coming direct-to-consumer and influencer-endorsed brands to take hold. Plenty of legacy brands have seen their revenues decimated, while others have proven resilient by leaning into new tech and sales channel trends.

Back in 2018, L’Oréal made the interesting decision to buy an augmented reality filter company called Modiface. Fast forward to 2020 and they’ve opted to roll out a line of “virtual makeup” selfie filters. The “Signature Face” filters show off eye makeup, lipsticks, and hair products from the company.

They’ve gone fairly wide with the rollout supporting Instagram, Snapchat, Snap Camera and Google Duo. Snap Camera support in particular enables the selfies to be used across plenty of video chat services like Houseparty and Zoom, L’Oréal is marketing these selfies as a way to spice up your look on video calls specifically. You can check our more details on where you can use the filters on their site.

In terms of the filters themselves, there’s nothing terribly more advanced about them than the makeup-centric selfie filters that have been floating around Snapchat for years, but it is interesting to see such a substantial brand leaning in so heavily and pitching this idea where people use selfie filters during video calls in a non-gimmicky way. It’s not clear whether the technology or consumer habits are there yet but it’s certainly plausible that things could move in that direction, especially as social media apps begin a more-focused drive towards becoming commerce platforms.

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Facebook loses final appeal in defamation takedown case, must remove same and similar hate posts globally

Austria’s Supreme Court has dismissed Facebook’s appeal in a long running speech takedown case — ruling it must remove references to defamatory comments made about a local politician worldwide for as long as the injunction lasts.

The Austrian Supreme Court has now delivered its final judgment in the #Glawischnig-Piesczek case. #Facebook has to remove the defamatory comment and any comments that are identical or equivalent in meaning worldwide.https://t.co/zhbYRr4DnG https://t.co/Y2W5SWRgO6

— Clara Rauchegger (@ClaraRauchegger) November 12, 2020

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the ruling.

Green Party politician Eva Glawischnig successfully sued the social media giant seeking removal of defamatory comments made about her by a user of its platform after Facebook had refused to take down the abusive postings — which referred to her as a “lousy traitor”, a “corrupt tramp” and a member of a “fascist party”. 

After a preliminary injunction in 2016, Glawischnig won local removal of the defamatory postings the next year but continued her legal fight — pushing for similar postings to be removed and take downs to also be global.

Questions were referred up to the EU’s Court of Justice. And in a key judgement last year the CJEU decided platforms can be instructed to hunt for and remove illegal speech worldwide without falling foul of European rules that preclude platforms from being saddled with a “general content monitoring obligation”. Today’s Austrian Supreme Court ruling flows naturally from that.

Europe’s top court sets new line on policing illegal speech online

Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports that the court confirmed the injunction applies worldwide, both to identical postings or those that carry the same essential meaning as the original defamatory posting.

It said the Austrian court argues that EU Member States and civil courts can require platforms like Facebook to monitor content in “specific cases” — such as when a court has identified user content as unlawful and “specific information” about it — in order to prevent content that’s been judged to be illegal from being reproduced and shared by another user of the network at a later point in time with the overarching aim of preventing future violations.

The case has important implications for the limitations of online speech.

Regional lawmakers are also working on updating digital liability regulations. Commission lawmakers have said they want to force platforms to take more responsibility for the content they fence and monetize — fuelled by concerns about the impact of online hate speech, terrorist content and divisive disinformation.

A longstanding EU rule, prohibiting Member States from putting a general content monitoring obligation on platforms, limits how they can be forced to censor speech. But the CJEU ruling has opened the door to bounded monitoring of speech — in instances where it’s been judged to be illegal — and that in turn may influence the policy substance of the Digital Services Act which the Commission is due to publish in draft early next month.

In a reaction to last year’s CJEU ruling, Facebook argued it “opens the door to obligations being imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and then interpret if it is ‘equivalent’ to content that has been found to be illegal”.

“In order to get this right national courts will have to set out very clear definitions on what ‘identical’ and ‘equivalent’ means in practice. We hope the courts take a proportionate and measured approach, to avoid having a chilling effect on freedom of expression,” it added.

How will EC plans to reboot rules for digital services impact startups?

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Udemy and altMBA co-founders return to edtech with a new, stealthy business

In 2009, Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani tried to convince people to learn online through live classes. But what he discovered instead was that everyone wanted an online repository of content that allowed them to learn at their own pace, whenever and wherever. So, he canned his idea and Udemy created what is now called a massive open online course provider, or MOOC.

In the years since, Biyani was let go from Udemy, started a 200-person food company, shut that down, took a sabbatical, and is now returning to the seedling he left behind in 2009: live, online courses.

Today, Biyani tells TechCrunch that he is teaming up with Wes Kao, the co-founder of AltMBA, an online cohort-based leadership program, to start an edtech company that combines both of their experiences into one focus: live, cohort-based learning. The duo grew up as friends in the same hometown, but only recently reconnected over education once Biyani returned from sabbatical. Kao’s experience building an online course from scratch, with an over 95% completion rate, was validation that the format worked. And soon enough, they incorporated a company together.

The company will focus on cohort-based learning, mixing live and asynchronous components. As it’s still in early stealth, the founders said it doesn’t have a name yet. Instead of a company site, they have a Notion landing page.

8 edtech investors talk re-skilling, digital universities, ISAs and other post-pandemic trends

Despite those missing details, what Biyani did say is that the startup’s main focus is creating a community where anyone can start their own course. Kao says that creating a course requires over a dozen people behind the scenes — teacher assistants, community moderators and the process is essentially “an entire production.” With the startup, she wants to democratize that operation.

“I see it as a way to help more traders and experts be able to share their knowledge,” she said. “And take away the question marks on how to build community.”

The company from the start will focus on the back-end production of helping teachers, but eventually create a marketplace to allow students to see a directory of classes.

“It should be as easy as building a Substack,” Biyani said, referring to the popular newsletter service. Similar to Substack, the company will only make money if the instructor, or creator, does. It takes a chunk of each student’s subscription cost as revenue.

The company is entering a crowded space. Yesterday, CampusWire announced that it has pivoted to start offering build-your-own courses to experienced professors. MasterClass allows celebrities to teach classes, Teachable allows anyone to create their own course, and the list continues.

But Biyani views their biggest competitor as teachers who have already built courses without a third-party service. The company is planning to bring those creators onto their platform by offering ways to manage their customer base.

Can learning pods scale, or are they widening edtech’s digital divide?

Ultimately, the market will only be won over by the startup that has the best strategy, product, and teacher pool. Based on their stealthy vision, the duo has raised $4.3 million in a round led by First Round Capital. Other investors include Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Li Jin, Arlan Hamilton and co-founders from Lambda School, Outschool, Superhuman, and Udemy.

It’s a stacked term-sheet for a company in the early stages, suggesting that that edtech’s boom is still very much upon us. Lavingia says that he committed right away even though he didn’t use the product.

“Gagan’s name was enough for me,” he said. “I think I followed him on Twitter a year or two ago and i’d back anything he does just based on what he shares.”

Backstage Capital’s Hamilton said that Kao has been within the Backstage mentor network for a while, and added that “there’s a perfect storm for Wes and Gagan to execute within.”

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Python creator Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft

Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, today announced that he has unretired and joined Microsoft’s Developer Division.

Van Rossum, who was last employed by Dropbox, retired last October after six and a half years at the company. Clearly, that retirement wasn’t meant to last. At Microsoft, van Rossum says, he’ll work to “make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows).”

A Microsoft spokesperson told us that the company also doesn’t have any additional details to share but confirmed that van Rossum has indeed joined Microsoft. “We’re excited to have him as part of the Developer Division. Microsoft is committed to contributing to and growing with the Python community, and Guido’s on-boarding is a reflection of that commitment,” the spokesperson said.

The Dutch programmer started working on what would become Python back in 1989. He continued to actively work on the language during his time at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in the mid-90s and at various companies afterward, including as Director of PythonLabs at BeOpen and Zope and at Elemental Security. Before going to Dropbox, he worked for Google from 2005 to 2012. There, he developed the internal code review tool Mondrian and worked on App Engine.

I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows :-). There’s lots of open source here. Watch this space.

— Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum) November 12, 2020

Today, Python is among the most popular programming languages and the de facto standard for AI researchers, for example.

Only a few years ago, van Rossum joining Microsoft would’ve been unthinkable, given the company’s infamous approach to open source. That has clearly changed now and today’s Microsoft is one of the most active corporate open-source contributors among its peers — and now the owner of GitHub. It’s not clear what exactly van Rossum will do at Microsoft, but he notes that there’s “too many options to say” and that “there’s lots of open source here.”

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Act now before Google kills us, 135-strong coalition of startups warns EU antitrust chief

A coalition of 135 startups and tech companies with services in verticals including travel, accommodation and jobs have written to the European Commission to urge antitrust action against Google — warning that swift enforcement is needed or some of their businesses may not survive.

They also argue the Commission needs to act now or it risks undermining its in-train reform of digital regulations — which is due to be lay out in draft form early next month.

The letter has been inked by veteran Internet players such as Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, Opentable, Tripadvisor and Yelp, co-signing along with a raft of (mostly) smaller European startups across all three verticals.

A further 30 co-signatories are business associations and organizations in related and other areas such as media/publishing — making for a total of 165 entities calling for Google to face swift antitrust banhammers.

A European Commission spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch it’s received the Google critics’ letter — saying it will reply “in due course”.

‘Not competing on the merits’

While there have been complaints on this front before — the Commission has said it’s been hearing rumblings of discontent in the travel segment since for years at this point — a growing coalition of businesses (including some based in the US) are bandying together to pressure the EU antitrust chief to clip Google’s wings — with, for example, jobs-related businesses joining the travel startups whose complaints we reported on recently.

Reuters, which obtained the letter earlier, reports that the coalition is the largest ever to complain in concert to the EU’s competition division.

Travel startups cry foul over what Google’s doing with their data

In the letter, which TechCrunch has reviewed, the group argues that Google is violating a 2017 EU competition enforcement decision over Google Shopping that barred the tech giant from self-preferencing and unfairly demoting rivals.

The group argues Google is unfairly leveraging its dominant position in Internet search to grab marketshare in the verticals where they operate — pointing to a feature Google displays at the top of search results (called ‘OneBoxes’) where it points Internet users to its own services, simultaneously steering them away from rival services.

The Commission is considering limiting such self-preferencing in forthcoming legislative proposals that it wants to apply to dominant ‘gatekeeper’ Internet platforms — which Google would presumably be classified as.

For, now, though no such ex ante regulation exists — and the coalition argues the Commission needs to pull its finger out and flex its existing antitrust powers to stop Google’s market abuse before its too late for their businesses.

“Google’s technical integration of its own specialised search services into its near monopoly general search service continues to constitute a clear abuse of dominance,” they argue in the letter to Vestager.

Europe to limit how big tech can push its own services and use third-party data

“Like no service before, Google has amassed data and content relevant for competition on such markets at the expense of others – us,” they go on. “Google did not achieve its position on any such market by competing on the merits. Rather, there is now global consensus that Google gained unjustified advantages through preferentially treating its own services within its general search results pages by displaying various forms of grouped specialised search results.”

A similar complaint about Google unfairly pushing its own services at the expense of rivals’ can be found in the US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against it, filed just last month — which is doubtless giving succour to Google complainants to redouble their efforts in Europe.

Back in 2017, the Commission found Google to be a dominant company in Internet search. Under EU law this means it has a responsibility not to apply the same types of infringing behavior identified in the Google Shopping case in any other business vertical, regardless of its marketshare.

Antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has gained a reputation for taking on big tech during her first (and now second term) stint as the Commission’s competition chief — now combined with an EVP role shaping digital strategy for the bloc.

But while, on her watch, Google has faced enforcement over its Shopping search (2017), Android mobile OS (2018) and AdSense search ad brokering business (2019), antitrust complainants say the regulatory action has done nothing to dislodge the tech giant’s dominance and restore competition to those specific markets or elsewhere.

“The Commission’s Google Search (Shopping) decision of 27 June 2017 (was supposed to) set a precedent that Google is not permitted to promote its own services within the search results pages of its dominant general search service. However, as of today, the decision did not lead to Google changing anything meaningful,” the coalition argues in the letter dated November 12, 2020.

The Commission contends its Shopping decision has let to a significant increase in the rate of display of offers from competitors to Google in its Shopping units (up 73.5%), also pointing to a rate of near parity between Google offers on Shopping units getting clicks and rivals’ offers being clicked on. However, if Google is compensating for losing out on (some) marketshare in Shopping searches by dialling up its marketshare in other verticals (such as travel and jobs) that’s hardly going to sum to a balanced and effective antitrust remedy.

It’s also interesting to note that the signatures on the latest letter include the Foundem CEO: aka the original shopping comparison engine complainant in the Google Shopping case.

In further remarks today, the Commission spokesperson told us: “We continue to carefully monitor the market with a view to assessing the effectiveness of the remedies,” adding: “Shopping is just one of the specialised search services that Google offers. The decision we took in June 2017 gives us a framework to look also at other specialised search services, such as Google jobs and local search. Our preliminary investigation on this is ongoing.”

Google’s EU Android choice screen isn’t working say search rivals, calling for a joint process to devise a fair remedy

On the Commission’s forthcoming Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act package, the coalition suggests a lack of action to rein in abusive behavior by Google now risks making it impossible for those future regulations to correct such practices.

“If, in the pending competition investigations, the Commission accepts Google’s current conduct as ‘equal treatment’, this creates the risk of pre-defining and hence devaluing the meaning of any future legislative ban on self-preferencing,” they warn, adding that: “Competition and innovation will continue to be stifled, simply because the necessary measures to counter the further anti-competitive expansion are not taken right now.”

Additionally, they argue that a legislative process is simply too slow to be used as an antitrust corrective measure — leaving their businesses at risk of not surviving Google in the meanwhile.

“While a targeted regulation of digital gatekeepers may help in the long run, the Commission should first use its existing tools to enforce the Shopping precedent and ensure equal treatment within Google’s general search results pages,” they urge, adding that they generally welcome the Commission plan to regulate “dominant general search engines” but emphasize speed is of the essence.

“We face the imminent risk of being disintermediated by Google. Many of us may not have the strength and resources to wait until such regulation really takes effect,” they add. “Action is required now. If Google were allowed to continue the anti-competitive favouring of its own specialised search services until any meaningful regulation takes effect, our services will continue to lack traffic, data and the opportunity to innovate on the merits. Until then, our businesses continue to be trapped in a vicious cycle – providing benefits to Google’s competing services while rendering our own services obsolete in the long run.”

Asked for its response to the group’s criticism of its business practices, a Google spokesperson send this statement: “People expect Google to give them the most relevant, high quality search results that they can trust. They do not expect us to preference specific companies or commercial rivals over others, or to stop launching helpful services which create more choice and competition for Europeans.”

Google fined $2.7BN for EU antitrust violations over shopping searches

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