Microsoft has unveiled the Surface Go, its new, low-end iPad competitor. The Surface Go is a 10-inch Windows tablet which looks almost identical to the Surface Pro, but smaller and more affordable. But can it tempt people away from their iPads?
Microsoft’s Surface line has sold surprisingly well so far, thank you very much. However, Microsoft has never been able to compete with Apple on price and portability. Until now. The Surface Go is Microsoft most affordable and portable Surface product yet.
The Most Affordable Surface Yet
On the Windows Blog, Microsoft describes the Go as the “smallest, lightest, and most affordable Surface yet.” This represents Microsoft offering “a new entry point for the Surface family, while keeping the premium qualities that have come to define it.”
The Surface Go boasts a 10-inch display (with a 1800 x 1200 pixel resolution), an integrated kickstand with unlimited positions, a front-facing camera, and a USB-C 3.1 port. It’s powered by Windows 10 and the 7th Generation Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4415Y.
Prices start at just $399, which puts the Microsoft Surface Go within spitting distance of the 9.7-inch Apple iPad. For $399 you get 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. However, if you’re willing to pay $549 you can get 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD.
The Microsoft Surface Go is available to pre-order in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
Coming to a Store Near You Soon
The Surface Go with Wi-Fi will start shipping (and appearing on store shelves) on August 2nd. Microsoft is promising to roll it out to more countries in the coming weeks. For those with good data plans, Microsoft will be launching an LTE model later this year.
Accessibility features are an essential part of any operating system. Of course, they’re vital for people with disabilities, but most users can make use of them in some capacity.
Note: Throughout this article, you will see the Search key feature prominently in shortcuts. However, the shortcuts will not work if you’ve remapped your Search key to Caps Lock (Settings > Device > Keyboard > Search).
ChromeVox
Ignore the futuristic-sounding name. ChromeVox is Google’s term for the operating system’s built-in screen reader.
You can enable ChromeVox by going to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Text-to-speech and turning on the appropriate toggle. Alternatively, press Ctrl + Alt + Z on any page.
There’s a long list of shortcuts that let you use the tool, but the most important are:
Search + K: Cursor location
Search + B: Next button
Search + L: Next line
Search + E: Next editable text area
Search + H: Next heading
Select to Speak
Select to Speak can read parts of a webpage out loud. Aside from the obvious benefits for people with vision impairments, you might find it useful if you’re eyes are feeling tired and you want to listen to an article rather than read it.
Enable Select to Speak in Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Text-to-speech > Select to Speak or press Ctrl + Alt + S to toggle the feature on and off.
To listen to text, you can either:
Hold down Search and click a line of text.
Hold down Search and drag your mouse over a section of text.
Highlight the text you want to listen to and press Search + S.
High Contrast Mode
Chromebooks offer a high contrast mode. They invert your screen’s colors to make them stand out more prominently. Doing so will make your desktop look seriously cool, even if it gives you a headache after a few hours of use.
You can turn on high contrast mode by navigating to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Use high contrast mode. Alternatively, use the Ctrl + Search + H keyboard shortcut.
Magnifier
There are two parts to the Chromebook’s magnifier tool. You can either enable a full-screen magnifier, or a docked magnifier.
The full-screen magnifier turns your display into a zoomed in version of whatever is being shown (i.e. you will not be able to see your whole desktop at the same time).
The docked magnifier places a zoomed in window at the bottom of your display, thus letting you see both your whole desktop and a close-up section of your screen at the same time.
For both options, you can customize the level of zoom. Go to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Display and flick the toggle next to either Enable full-screen magnifier or Enable docked magnifier. You can choose your zoom level below each respective toggle.
You can adjust the level of zoom in real-time by using one of two shortcuts:
Zoom in: Ctrl + Alt + Brightness up or Ctrl + Alt + two-finger scroll up
Zoom out: Ctrl + Alt + Brightness down or Ctrl + Alt + two-finger scroll down
Sticky Key functionality lets you use keyboard shortcuts (such as the ones we have been referencing in this article) without needing to hold down the various keys at the same time. Instead, you can press them sequentially.
For example, if you want to use the keyboard shortcut for paste, you would not need to press Control and V in tandem. You could press Control, release it, then press V, and the paste feature would activate.
When Sticky Keys are enabled, you will see a small box in the upper right-hand corner of your screen that shows when keys are active in the current sequence. If you don’t complete the sequence within a few seconds, the box will vanish, and you will need to start again.
You can turn on Sticky Keys by going to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Keyboard > Enable Sticky Keys.
On-Screen Keyboard
As the name suggests, enabling this feature will place a virtual keyboard on your screen. You can then type by clicking on the appropriate letters with your mouse pointer.
Again, this is another feature that everyone can make use of. Why? Because it gives you access to an emoji keyboard. Click on the three vertical dots on the left-hand side of the space bar, then select the smiley face.
Chrome is slowly implementing a way to type emojis in Chrome, but this trick gives you the functionality right now (rather than needing to use one of your Chromebook’s development channels) and lets you use emoji across the entire operating system rather than just in the browser.
The on-screen keyboard can be activated if you follow Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Keyboard > Enable on-screen keyboard.
Automatic Clicking
You can make Chrome automatically click objects on your screen merely by hovering the mouse over them.
This is useful if you don’t have a USB mouse handy and your Chromebook’s trackpad has become jammed.
You can even customize how long you need to hover for before a click is registered, thus preventing the possibility of accidentally clicking something you didn’t want to, just because you stopped moving your pointer.
To turn on the feature, go to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Mouse and touchpad > Automatically click when the mouse cursor stops. Once the feature is enabled, you can set the timer in the dropdown box below.
Large Mouse Cursor
The final accessibility tool worth paying attention to is the large mouse cursor. If you’re casting your screen in a presentation or making an instructional video for YouTube, this is really useful. It lets you—and others—locate the cursor more easily.
You can turn on the large mouse cursor by going to Settings > Advanced > Manage accessibility features > Mouse and touchpad > Show large mouse cursor.
You might also find it useful to highlight the cursor while it’s moving. You turn on the feature in the same menu, just slide the toggle next to Highlight the mouse cursor while it’s moving into the On position.
Check Out the Chrome Web Store for More Options
If Chrome OS doesn’t offer the accessibility tools you need, check out the Chrome Web Store’s dedicated section. It offers a few tools that might provide what you’re looking for, including a color enhancer and caret (keyboard shortcut) browsing.
French startup Ledger has been working for a while on a brand new app to manage your crypto assets on your computer. The company is designing and manufacturing one of the most secure hardware wallets out there.
While it’s clear that security has always been the first focus of the company, the user experience has been lacking, especially on the software front. The company launched a new app called Ledger Live to handle everything you used to do with Chrome apps before.
That’s right, before today, the company relied on Google Chrome for its desktop apps. You had to install the browser first, and then install a new app for each cryptocurrency. There was also a main app to update the firmware. It could quickly become a mess.
Now, everything is centralized in a single app. After downloading and installing the app on Windows, macOS or Linux, you can either configure the app with an existing Ledger device or configure a new Ledger wallet.
The app first checks the integrity of your device and then lets you manage the device. You can upgrade the firmware and install apps on your Ledger Nano S or Ledger Blue from the “Manager” tab.
More interestingly, you can now add all your wallets to the Ledger Live app. You won’t have to switch from one app to another to view your wallets. When you click the add button, the app will try and retrieve existing wallets on your device. You can also generate a new set of keys (and a new wallet) from there.
Once you’ve added all your wallets, you can get an overview of your entire portfolio. The app gets historical pricing information from popular exchanges, such as Kraken and Bitfinex. You can also click on individual accounts to see how a specific cryptocurrency has evolved over time.
The portfolio interface looks like a Coinbase account. It’s well-designed and it’s a great way to get a quick look of your accounts.
Many Ledger users have been using tracker websites and apps. These services let you enter a cryptocurrency and the amount you own to get an overview of everything you own independently of the wallet.
Ledger’s new app partially replace tracker services. If you don’t need to check your balance from your phone, you can get enough information with the Ledger app. You can see your balance without having to plug your Ledger device.
The company is already working on new features. You’ll be able to view and manager ERC20 tokens in the future. So if you invested in a bunch of obscure ICOs, your tokens will be there too.
Ledger also told me that you could imagine an integration with decentralized exchanges eventually. This way, you would be able to send tokens to an address and get another set of tokens back on another Ledger-generated address. It would be a great way to exchange cryptocurrencies without signing up to a centralized exchange and leaving the Ledger app.
Mobile games publisher and marketer Tilting Point is dramatically increasing its commitment to its user acquisition fund.
The company announced a $12 million fund at the end of 2016, which it said would help developers grow their games while remaining independent. Today it revealed that it’s committing $132 million in annual spending to the fund.
CEO Kevin Segalla said that as mobile app stores become more and more crowded, “user acquisition has gotten incredibly complicated,” so most indie developers “don’t have the tech and the expertise to do it.”
That’s where Tilting Point comes in. President Samir El Agili said the company has built “machine learning technology to maximize and optimize user acquisition.” It likes to work on games that are at the “crossroads,” taking a solid game with a sustainable business model, then dramatically accelerating its growth with advertising.
Segalla said that given the fund’s success, the question became, “How can we do this at a much larger scale?” which led to the much larger fund commitment, thanks to capital committed by CFC Capital (Tilting Point’s majority shareholder) and Metropolitan Partners Group.
Just to be clear, the $132 million isn’t a price tag that Tilting Point is putting on its own services, and instead represents money that will actually be spent on advertising.
Segalla argued that the deals are structured in a way where Tilting Point’s incentives are properly aligned with the developer’s.
“This is not a loan that we’re giving them, it’s not something where we’re looking for equity, there’s no ongoing revenue share,” he said. Instead, the company is betting that that the spending will pay off in its relationship with developer and the resulting fees: “What we’re doing is risking our own capital because we believe in our marketing, our tech and our team.”
Tilting Point says it’s open to partnering with developers in any genre, and is also looking to work with developers internationally. Segalla predicted that fund could allow Tilting Point to work with 20 new games each year, though El Agili noted that the exact number will depend on the games: “The truth is, if get two to three games that do extremely well right away, we can start spending a lot of money.”
Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers.
The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly as Slack — a simple collection of group chats and channels that can get out of hand very fast — something a little more palatable. As companies get bigger and bigger, the sheer amount of information that ends up in it will grow faster and faster. That means that the right information will generally be more difficult to access, and if Slack is going to stick to its roots as a simple internal communications product, it’s going to have to lean on improvements under the hood and small changes in front of users. The company says search is now 70% faster on the back end.
Users in Slack will now be able to filter search results by channels and also the kinds of results they are looking for, like files. You can go a little more granular than that, but that’s the general gist of it, as Slack tries to limit the changes to what’s happening in front of users. Slack threads, for example, were in development for more than a year before the company finally rolled out the long-awaited feature. (Whether that feature successfully changed things for the better is still not known.)
Slack now has around 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users, and is still clearly pretty popular with smaller companies that are looking for something simpler than the more robust — and complex — communications tools on the market. But there are startups trying to pick away at other parts of the employee communications channels, like Slite, which aims to be a simpler notes tool in the same vein as Slack but for different parts of the employee experience. And there are other larger companies looking to tap the demand for these kinds of simpler tools like Atlassian’s Stride and Microsoft’s teams.
iOS users have been reporting problems with excessive battery drain after updating to iOS 11.4.
On Sunday, 9to5Mac reported on a raft of posts on Apple forums complaining about excessive battery drain since updating. ZDNet also flagged complaints around the issue early last month.
The update to Apple’s mobile operating system was released at the end of May, adding support for Messages in iCloud, plus some media and entertainment features, such as AirPlay 2 and support for two HomePod speakers to work as a stereo pair.
Safe to say, radically reduced battery life was not among the listed additions.
This TC writer also noticed an alarming depreciation in battery performance after updating to iOS 11.4 at the end of last month — with the battery level dropping precipitously even when the handset was left untouched doing nothing.
Looks like updating to iOS 11.4 has decimated iPhone battery life
We reached out to Apple immediately after noticing the problem — but the company has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Judging by forum complaints, other iOS users have also found that updating to iOS 11.4 impacts the standby battery life of their device.
In my case checking the (beta) battery health feature in the iPhone settings threw no light on the abnormal performance, with maximum capacity reported as a (healthy sounding) 91%, as well a claim that “normal” peak performance was supported.
The ‘battery usage’ report that’s built into iOS also seemed unable to shed any light on what was causing the battery to drain so fast — listing an app that had been used prior to the previous charge as responsible for the largest chunk of usage. So evidently not identifying the real culprit.
In the end, rebooting my affected iPhone seemed to improve the battery drain issue. Though I can’t be sure whether or not the device has taken a small hit to battery performance as a consequence of the iOS update.
In the middle of writing this report, an additional update — iOS 11.4.1 — has been pushed out by Apple, though it’s not clear whether this explicitly fixes the battery drain issue or not. Battery drain is not listed among the bugs iOS 11.4.1 addresses. But, either way, it’s worth updating in case it helps.
Battery and performance issues have been something of a recurring problem for Apple’s iOS devices in recent years. Again in my case, my affected iPhone 6S only had its battery replaced under an Apple free battery replacement program last year — ironically as a result of a battery fault that caused unexpected shutdowns — so really the battery should have a decent amount of life left in it still.
And as (bad) luck would have it, the iPhone 5 I owned prior to this was also affected by an earlier Apple battery fault. So this is the third battery-related problem to strike the two iPhones I’ve owned over the past five years. Which is certainly unfortunate.
That said, two handsets lasting five years is a testament to Apple’s otherwise lasting build quality. (Albeit, this Samsung-branded portable battery pack has been the unsung workhorse hero stepping in when the batteries conked out, as TC colleagues can also testify…)
Meanwhile after more user complaints last year Apple was forced to apologize for not being more transparent with customers about how it handles performance on iOS devices with older batteries — clarifying that its software in fact slows down the maximum performance of iPhones with older batteries as a power management technique to avoid unexpected shutdowns.
The company has faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny as a result of this throttling of device performance.
Although it also quickly offered discounted $29 battery replacements to iPhone owners with an iPhone 6 (or later) whose battery “needs to be replaced” — as well as promising to add controls to iOS to enable users to switch off the feature if they choose.
For its forthcoming iOS 12 update — which was trailed at WWDC, and is due out this fall — Apple says the release will “double down” on performance, slating a slew of refinements, bug fixes and optimizations incoming. So, hopefully, any lurking battery and performance gremlins will soon be kicked into touch.
While massive restaurant chains might have resources to build out their own management systems or integrate with larger point-of-sale providers, Toast — a provider of tools for restaurants to manage their business — is raising a big round of funding to go after everyone else.
Now Toast is a business valued at $1.4 billion thanks to a fresh infusion of $115 million in its latest round of funding. At its core, Toast is a point-of-sale for restaurants, though over time it’s added more and more services on top of that. Now the goal is to be not just a point of sale, but offer a whole system to help restaurants operate efficiently. That can range from the actual point of sale all the way to loyalty programs and reporting on that information. The round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from new investor Tiger Global Management and other existing investors.
“We’re just trying to keep our finger on the pulse to what matters to restauranteurs,” CEO Christopher Comparto said. “We hear a lot about the labor side of the equation. We’re working through what to do there. If you ask restaurants about the number one thing they’re thinking about, most respondents say it’s around labor — that’s a really big one.”
Starting off in 2011 as a point-of-sale business, the company now offers a complete suite of tools that help restaurants streamline both the front and back house of the restaurant. And as Toast collects more and more data on how restaurants are using its tools — like any startup with a lot of inbound data, really — it can start helping those restaurants figure out how to improve their businesses further. That might be modifying menus slightly based on what people are enjoying, or pointing them in the right direction as to when to make slight adjustments to their basic operations.
There’s also an online ordering part of the business. Toast helps restaurants boot up an online ordering part of their business quickly, in addition to offering tools to help streamline that process. A restaurant might deal with a flood of orders or throttle them if necessary. Businesses then get reports on their whole online ordering business, helping them further calibrate what to offer — and what might work better for the in-person experience as well.
The next focus for Toast, Comparto said, is figuring out the labor side of the equation. That comes down to helping restaurants not only find new employees, but also figure out how to retain them in an industry with a significant amount of turnover. Attacking the hiring part of the problem is one approach, though there are other approaches like Pared, which looks to turn the labor market for restaurants into an on-demand one. But there’s obvious low-hanging fruit, like making it easier to switch shifts among other things, Comparto said.
“1 in 11 working human beings work in restaurants,” Comparto said. “I would say we’re still trying to figure out what we can do as a central platform of record, continuing to carry a high quality network of partners or us building some things ourselves. We’re early days in figuring them out. If you go to any restaurant in Boston, and look at all the help wanted signs, you can see the barrier to being successful is a lot of times more on the employee side than on the guest side. Then once you have them hired, you have to think about how you can retain those employees and make sure they’re engaged and successful.”
Toast isn’t the only startup looking to own a point-of-sale and then expand into other elements of running a business, though. Lightspeed POST, which also offers a pretty large set of tools for brick-and-mortar stores — including restaurants — raised $166 million late last year.There are also the obvious point-of-sale competitors like Square that, while designed to be a broad solution and not just target restaurants, are pretty widely adopted and can also try to own that whole restaurant management stack from clocking in and out to getting reports on what’s selling well.
Facebook is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality.
At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger. Now a similar experience will start appearing in the News Feed, with a select group of advertisers testing out AR ads.
Ty Ahmad-Taylor, vice president of product marketing for Facebook’s global marketing solutions, showed off ads that incorporated his face into Candy Crush gameplay footage, and other ads that allowed shoppers to see how virtual sunglasses and makeup would look on their own faces.
“People traditionally have to go into stores to do this,” Ahmad-Taylor said. “People still really love that experience, but they would like to try it at home” — so this “bridges the gap.”
These ads look like normal in-feed ads at first, but they include a “Tap to try it on” option, which opens up the AR capabilities. And of course if you like the way it looks in AR, you can go ahead and buy the product.
Facebook says Michael Kors was the first brand to test out AR ads in the News Feed, with Sephora, NYX Professional Makeup, Bobbi Brown, Pottery Barn, Wayfair and King planning their own tests for later this summer.
Ahmad-Taylor made the announcement this morning at a New York City event for journalists and marketers highlighting Facebook’s advertising plans for the holidays.
In addition, he announced a new Video Creation Kit, which will allow advertisers to incorporate existing images into templates for mobile video ads. According to weight loss company Noom, which has been testing out these tools, the resulting videos performed 77 percent better than the static images.
Lastly, Facebook says it will continue to expand its support for shopping in Instagram Stories. It made shopping tags available to select brands in Stories last month, and for the holidays, it plans to roll that out to all brands that have enabled shopping in Instagram. It’s also making its collections ad format available to all advertisers.
Yesterday, we learned that 18-month-old, Bay Area-based electric scooter rental company Lime is joining forces with the ride-hailing giant Uber, which is both investing in the company as part of a $335 million round and planning promote Lime in its mobile app. According to Bloomberg, Uber also plans to plaster its logo on Lime’s scooters.
Lime isn’t being acquired outright, in short, but it looks like it will be. At least, Uber struck a similar arrangement with the electric bike company JUMP bikes before spending $200 million to acquire the company in spring.
There are as many questions raised by this kind of tie-up as answered, but the biggest may be what the pact means for Lime’s fiercest rival in the e-scooter wars, 15-month-old L.A.-based Bird, who several sources tell us also discussed a potential partnership with Uber.
Despite recently raising $300 million in fresh capital at a somewhat stunning $2 billion valuation, could its goose be, ahem, cooked?
At first glance, it would appear so. Uber’s travel app is the most downloaded in the U.S. by a wide margin, despite gains made last year by its closest U.S. competitor, Lyft, as Uber battled one scandal after another. It’s easy to imagine that Lime’s integration with Uber will give it the kind of immediate brand reach that most founders can only dream about.
A related issue for Bird is its relationship with Lyft, which . . . isn’t great. BIrd’s founder and CEO, Travis VanderZanden, burned that bridge when, not so long after Lyft acqui-hired VanderZanden from a small startup he’d launched and made him its COO, he left to join rival Uber.
Lyft sued him for allegedly breaking a confidentiality agreement when he joined Uber, and the two sides later settled for undisclosed terms. But given their history, it’s hard to image Lyft — which also has a much smaller checkbook than Uber — paying top dollar to acquire Bird.
Where that leaves the company is an open question, but people familiar with both Bird and Lime suggest the e-scooter war is far from over. For example, though Uber sees its partnership with Lime as “another step towards our vision of becoming a one-stop shop for all your transportation needs,” two sources familiar with Bird’s thinking are quick to underscore its plans to expand internationally quickly and not merely fight a turf war in the U.S. (It already hasone office in China.)
That Sequoia Capital led Bird’s most recent round of funding helps on this front, given Sequoia Capital China’sgrowing dominancein the country and the relationships that go with it. Then again, Sequoia is also an investor in Uber, having acquired a stake in the company earlier this year, and alliances are generally temperamental in this brave new world of transportation. In just the latest unexpected twist, Lime’s newest round included not only Uber but also GV, the venture arm of Alphabet, which only recently resolved a lawsuit with Uber.
Another wrinkle to consider is the exposure that Lime receives from Uber, which could prove double-edged, given the company’s ups and downs. Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, appears determined to steer the company to a smooth, and decidedly undramatic, public offering in another year or so. But for a company of Uber’s scale and scope, that’s a challenge, to say the least. (Its newest hire, Scott Schools — a former top attorney at the U.S. Justice Department and now Uber’s chief compliance officer — will undoubtedly be tasked with minimizing the odds of things going astray.)
Yet it’s Lime’s very arrangement with Uber that could potentially create the greatest opportunity for Bird. First, by agreeing to allow Uber to apply its branding to its scooters, Lime will be diluting its own brand. Even if Uber never acquires the company, riders will associate Lime with Uber and think, for good or bad, that it’s a subsidiary.
Further, Uber does not appear to have made any promises to Lime in terms of how prominently its app is featured within its own mobile app. which already crams in quite a lot, from offering free ride coupons to featuring local offers to promoting its Uber Eats business.
Consider that in January 2017, Google added the ability to book an Uber ride to both the Android and iOS versions of its Google Maps service. Uber might have thought that a coup, too, at the time. But last summer, Google quietly removed the feature from its iOS app, and it removed the service from Android just last month. If there wasn’t much outrage over the decision, likely it’s because so few users of Google Maps noticed the feature in the first place.
Lime’s arrangement could prove more advantageous. Only time will tell. But everything considered, whether or not Bird flies away with this competition will likely owe less to Lime’s new arrangement with Uber than with its own ability to execute.
Certainly, that’s what BIrd’s flock would argue. Yesterday afternoon, Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia and a Bird board member, declined to discuss the Lime deal, instead emailing one short observation seemingly designed to say it all: “Travis [VanderZanden] is far more customer obsessed than competitor obsessed. That is a quality we look for in great founders.”
A Bird spokesperson offered an equally sanguine quote, saying that Bird is “happy to see our friends in the ride-sharing industry coalesce on the pressing need to offer a sustainable and affordable alternative to car trips.”
One of the additions is peer-to-peer payments. You could already pay or request money from a friend through Google Pay Send, but as of today, you can also do it into the main Google Pay app.
Gerardo Capiel, Director of Product Management at Google Pay, noted that this makes it easier to split the bill with your friends — if you bought something with Google Pay, you can tap on the purchase and then request payment from up to five people.
Since Google is basically combining two apps, it sounds like Google Pay Send isn’t long for this world — as Capiel put it, “We want to basically bring everything into Google Pay,” but he said the timing is “TBD” on when Pay Send might be shut down.
The Google Pay app is also gaining the ability to save mobile tickets and boarding passes, to be found in a new Passes tab that will also include loyalty cards and gift cards. Ticketmaster and Southwest are supported at launch, and Google says it has plans to add Eventbrite, Singapore Airlines and Vueling.
While some of Google Pay’s functionality (like the new Passes Tab) is limited to Android, Capiel said the goal is to support users on any platform. So you can also access Google Pay on the web and on an iOS app. Now Google says it’s making it easier to manage all your payment information across platforms, allowing users (for example) to update their payment info on the web and see it reflected in their app.
Looking ahead, Capiel said his team plans to add support for more ticketing partners, and also to launch the Google Pay app in more countries — particularly the ones where the service is already being used for online payments.
“We’re working to bring everything into the app,” he added. “Some things are a little trickier than others, for a number of reasons, but we will continue to make the experience as complete as possible.”
One of the additions is peer-to-peer payments. You could already pay or request money from a friend through Google Pay Send, but as of today, you can also do it into the main Google Pay app.
Gerardo Capiel, Director of Product Management at Google Pay, noted that this makes it easier to split the bill with your friends — if you bought something with Google Pay, you can tap on the purchase and then request payment from up to five people.
Since Google is basically combining two apps, it sounds like Google Pay Send isn’t long for this world — as Capiel put it, “We want to basically bring everything into Google Pay,” but he said the timing is “TBD” on when Pay Send might be shut down.
The Google Pay app is also gaining the ability to save mobile tickets and boarding passes, to be found in a new Passes tab that will also include loyalty cards and gift cards. Ticketmaster and Southwest are supported at launch, and Google says it has plans to add Eventbrite, Singapore Airlines and Vueling.
While some of Google Pay’s functionality (like the new Passes Tab) is limited to Android, Capiel said the goal is to support users on any platform. So you can also access Google Pay on the web and on an iOS app. Now Google says it’s making it easier to manage all your payment information across platforms, allowing users (for example) to update their payment info on the web and see it reflected in their app.
Looking ahead, Capiel said his team plans to add support for more ticketing partners, and also to launch the Google Pay app in more countries — particularly the ones where the service is already being used for online payments.
“We’re working to bring everything into the app,” he added. “Some things are a little trickier than others, for a number of reasons, but we will continue to make the experience as complete as possible.”
As Twitter finally gets serious about purging fake accounts, and YouTube says it will try to firefight conspiracy theories and fake news flaming across its platform with $25M to fund bona fide journalism, Facebook-owned WhatsApp is grappling with its own fake demons in India, where social media platforms have been used to seed and spread false rumors — fueling mob violence and leading to number of deaths in recent years.
The full page WhatsApp anti-fakes advert also informs users that “starting this week” the platform is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to determine whether a message has been forwarded. “Double check the facts when you’re not sure who wrote the original message,” it warns.
"Question information that upsets you", says WhatsApp's full-page advertisements. Clearly the solution to declining newspaper ad revenues in India will come from how we tackle our digital fake news crisis. pic.twitter.com/3h5XyJeMIr
This follows tests WhatsApp was running back in January when the platform trialed displaying notifications for when a message had been forwarded many times.
Evidently WhatsApp has decided to take that feature forward, at least in India, although how effective a check it will be on technology-accelerated fakes that are likely also fueled by local prejudices remains to be seen.
Trying to teach nuanced critical thinking when there may be a more basic lack of education that’s contributing to fomenting mistrust and driving credulity, as well as causing the spread of malicious fakes and rumors targeting certain people or segments of the population in the first place, risks both being ineffectual and coming across as merely irresponsible fiddling around the edges of a grave problem that’s claimed multiple lives already.
Facebook also stands accused of failing to respond quickly enough to similar risks in Myanmar — where the UN recently warned that its platform was being weaponized to spread hate speech and used as a tool to fuel ethnic violence.
Reuters reports that the first batch of WhatsApp fake ads are running in “key Indian newspapers”, and images posted to Twitter show an English-language full-page advert — so you do have to question who these first ads are really intended to influence.
But the news agency reports that Facebook also intends to publish similar ads in regional dailies across India over the course of this week.
We’ve reached out to WhatsApp with questions and will update this story with any response.
“We are starting an education campaign in India on how to spot fake news and rumours,” a WhatsApp spokesman told Reuters in a statement. “Our first step is placing newspaper advertisements in English and Hindi and several other languages. We will build on these efforts.”
The quasi-educational WhatsApp fake news advert warns users about “false information”, offering ten tips to spot fakes — many of which boil down to ‘check other sources’ to try to verify whether what you’ve been sent is true.
Another tip urges WhatsApp users to “question information that upsets you” and, if they do read something that makes them “angry or afraid”, to “think twice before sharing it again”.
“If you are not sure of the source or concerned that the information may be untrue, think twice before sharing,” reads another tip.
The last tip warns that “fake news often goes viral” — warning: “Just because a message is shared many times, does not make it true.”
Did you know you can use your iPhone as an audio input device on your Mac? Meaning, you can play the audio from your iPhone on your Mac.
Doing so has obvious benefits. For example, you can listen to a podcast on your Mac from your iPhone without needing to export the file. Or you can play content from Spotify (or another music streaming service) through your computer’s more powerful speakers.
Sadly, there’s only one downside: you cannot use the trick to play phone calls, so this is not a suitable method for recording conversations. Nonetheless, it’s a cool trick to have in your repertoire. Let’s take a look at how to set it up.
How to Play Audio From an iPhone on a Mac
Before following the instructions, make sure you’ve got a Lightning USB cable handy (the same one you use to charge your device). You’ll need it to complete the setup process. When you’re ready, follow the step-by-step guide below:
Connect your iPhone to your computer using the USB cable.
On your Mac, open Audio Midi Setup. You’ll find it in Applications > Utilities.
If you don’t see your iPhone listed in the left-hand panel, go to Window > Show iOS Device Browser.
Locate your iPhone in the list of devices and highlight it.
Click on Enable. Your phone will now appear as an input device.
No further steps are required. Any audio you play on your phone (again, except phone calls) will be reproduced on your Mac.
If you want to disable the audio, you can just unplug your device. When you plug it any again, the audio output will resume. And if you want to turn off the output permanently, go back to Applications > Utilities > Audio Midi Setup, locate your device in the left-hand panel, and click on Disable.
macOS is full of little features that its users love. One of these that’s never really had an equivalent on Windows is Quick Look, which allows Mac users to instantly preview any file by pressing Space. If you’d like a taste of this on Windows, a free app can make it happen. Here’s how to try it.
How to Preview Files With Spacebar on Windows 10
Open the Microsoft Store and search for QuickLook, or jump right to the QuickLook download page.
Click Get to download the app. Once it’s installed, you can preview “certain file types” (the developer doesn’t specify which) in File Explorer.
To preview a file, highlight it and press the Spacebar. It will appear in a separate window, allowing you to take a quick look at it.
Press Space again (or Escape) to close the preview.
Scroll the mouse wheel to change the volume for audio or video. Hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of images.
In the top-left, you’ll find icons for Stay on Top and Prevent Closing. These let you conveniently leave the preview up while you do other tasks.
We found QuickLook can preview images, music, videos, documents such as PDFs, and even ZIP files. It didn’t work with spreadsheets though.
You might recall that Windows has the Preview pane that shows a snippet of the file, but it falls short of QuickLook in a few ways. You can’t have the Details pane and Preview pane open at the same time, which is a problem. That little Preview area doesn’t show as much of the file as Quick Look, plus it takes up a lot of space in File Explorer which makes it hard to navigate your files.
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There are so many artists with their own little corner on YouTube. The most popular YouTube channels are easy to find, but it can be hard to discover new or smaller channels. Here are a few ways to uncover hidden gems.
YouTube doesn’t have a particularly good system to filter and find channels you might like, nor a good search function, particularly for channels. It’s better to use a third-party website that tells you about new YouTubers you might like.
Channel Crawler should really be something that YouTube builds into its own site. The site has indexed over 600,000 YouTube channels to make a simple tool that lets you filter channels easily.
You can filter by:
The categories that the channel is listed under on YouTube.
The languages that the channel uses.
The country that the channel is from.
Minimum or maximum number of subscribers.
Minimum or maximum amount of total views.
Minimum or maximum amount of total videos.
How many days it has been since the channel last uploaded a video.
You can even add keywords to your search, which work the same as Google search strings. For example, you can add “-Minecraft” to exclude Minecraft channels while searching in the video games category.
Channels Hunt (Web): Categorized List and Newest Channels
Channels Hunt has done what YouTube has been terrible at doing for so long: a neat category-wise list of all the major channels. The site has classified 1172 YouTube channels so far, across categories like sports, beauty and fashion, entertainment, gaming, science, how-to, tech reviews, food and drink, children, and so on.
Each category has a bunch of sub-categories too, each labeled with how many channels are in it. So for instance, with a couple of clicks, you can find the best channels for movie lovers.
Channels Hunt also recommends six new channels every week, usually from popular accounts with plenty of videos. It also has a list of the biggest channels added in the last 30 days, so you might find some cool new people to follow.
&Chill (Web): Public Rooms to Watch YouTube With Others
At its core, &Chill is like all those other apps to watch YouTube simultaneously with friends far away. You create a room, send a link to whoever you want to watch with, and you get a movie theater-like experience. But &Chill also features public rooms, which serves as a great discovery tool.
Go through the list of public rooms to find something others are interested in watching. It’s a good way to expose yourself to new things on YouTube that you wouldn’t see otherwise since YouTube’s algorithms only push videos it thinks you are interested in.
There’s even a chat within each room so you can send messages to the strangers you’re watching with, and make some new friends or get a few recommendations for channels to check out.
Tube Spark is trying to build a discovery engine for niche YouTube channels. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, the random link discovery engine, but only for YouTube channels that create a certain type of content.
The main page has a single video that you can watch, or skip to the next video. Once you finish viewing it, click the thumbs up or thumbs down button to vote on it, based on which the video will be shown (or not shown) to other people. If you like what you see, you can also the channel through its button under the video.
If you want recommendations from real people, you can always head to Reddit’s r/ChannelWatch community to find new channels to subscribe to. It’s not aggressively active, but you still get a few new channel recommendations each month.
The good news is that r/ChannelWatch has been around for five years now, so it has a huge repository of old posts that you can go through. Try the top posts of all time, or filter by the most controversial recommendations to find crazy YouTube channels you need to see to believe.
The moderators are pretty good at keeping the channel clean, and if you find something you like, then comment on it to ask others for similar recommendations. It’s a generally helpful community.
Binge-Watch YouTube?
The aforementioned sites should help you find some new channels to fall in love with. But if you’re looking for many hours of viewing, then we have a list of YouTube channels that are perfect for binge-watching.
This includes earmarking $25 million in Google News Initiative funding to create a working group of news organizations and media experts that will advise YouTube on new features. Members already include Vox Media, Brazilian radio station Jovem Pan and India Today, with more to be added in the coming weeks. Part of the funding will also be used for grants that will be awarded to news organizations through an application process to help them train staff and build their video production capabilities. The money will also be used on expanding the YouTube team that works with news publishers.
YouTube has been blamed for the proliferation of conspiracy theories about historical topics including the moon landing and news events like the 2016 presidential election and Sandy Hook and Parkland, Florida school shootings, with its search and recommendation algorithms cited in particular for pushing problematic videos to more viewers. In March, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki promised new features to make YouTube a more reliable source of information during a South by Southwest panel, stating that “this has been a year of fake news and misinformation and we have seen the importance of delivering information to our users accurately.”
Similar to Facebook’s attempts to fight fake news by adding information about publishers and articles to News Feed, YouTube said it is will add context to search results about breaking news topics to help people quickly see if a video is from a trustworthy source. Search results will also include linked previews of news articles, since journalists usually write about breaking news first before producing more labor-intensive videos, and reminders that information about developing events can change quickly.
To combat conspiracy theories, YouTube will start displaying information from third-party sources like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica next to videos about “well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation,” including the Oklahoma City bombing and the moon landing.
Other new features include ones that will surface local news in the YouTube app for TV screens across 25 American media markets and the addition of Top News and Breaking News shelves (the row of videos users see at the top of their screens) that will highlight videos from news organizations on YouTube’s homepage. The Top News and Breaking News features are already available in 17 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. YouTube says that number will double in the coming months.
The platform is also supporting MediaWise, a non-profit led by the Poynter Institute to help teens develop media and online awareness, and working with six YouTube Creators popular with young audiences, including John Green, Ingrid Nilsen and Mark Watson “to bring awareness to digital literacy and help educate teens.”
It’s going to be an exciting year for photographers — finally — as both Canon and Nikon are reportedly planning full-frame mirrorless cameras for debut before the end of 2018. It’s good news for consumers, because it means that both companies have been investing heavily in the next phase of digital photography, and that competition in the mirrorless world is about to heat up.
Photography is a difficult space right now because smartphones have been eating up the low-end and increasingly the mid-range market. Point-and-shoots are effectively extinct, and DSLRs are reserved for serious shooters — though those occupying the middle ground, such as Fujifilm with its lively X series and Olympus with its PENs and OM-Ds, have been prospering modestly.
Mirrorless cameras, which basically do away with the bulky mechanical bits of a single-lens reflex camera but have virtually no drawbacks from their absence, allow for a more compact camera that still seriously outperforms phones.
They seem quite clearly to be a big part of the future of photography, which is why every company has been investing heavily into the technology. Early results weren’t great, and it was clear that Canon and Nikon in particular have had their priorities divided: DSLR sales have been dropping, but flagship full-frame (that is, with sensors the size of 35mm film) DSLRs still represented the best of the camera world, embraced especially by professionals.
But inroads have been made, especially by Sony and Fujifilm, into even that professional space. The Alpha and X-Pro series have shown that mirrorless cameras can perform at least as well as DSLRs, and boy are they easier to carry around.
So, faced with either innovating and cannibalizing their own sales, or allowing competitors to eat their lunch, Canon and Nikon have chosen to do the former… after a couple years of the latter, anyway. We’ve seen the early results from Canon in the form of the mid-range M50, but it seems Nikon has kept theirs under wraps.
Canon Rumors and Nikon Rumors report that the companies both plan to sell full-frame mirrorless cameras by the end of the year — in Nikon’s case maybe even by the end of the month.
Going full-frame means several things:
They believe their mirrorless systems are good enough to compete with SLRs at a professional level
They believe professionals are ready to make the transition to mirrorless
They are ready to do so themselves, cannibalizing and eventually winding down SLR sales
That last point is likely the scariest for them. These are companies that have been making SLR cameras for the better part of a century — it’s not just part of their core competency but key to their identity as camera makers. This is essentially a point of no return for them. Sure, SLRs will stick around for a while longer, but sooner or later the burden of improving and manufacturing them as sales decline and mirrorless systems take over will prove too much.
What about the cameras themselves? There are supposedly two from each company. Nikon’s have lots of rumored details, the most important of which are that there will be one high and one low megapixel model, in-body stabilization (allows for smaller lenses), a new lens mount, and naturally an electronic viewfinder. Less is known (or rumored anyhow) about the Canons, but they will likely share many of these characteristics.
Don’t expect a lower cost to accompany this shift. These cameras will likely cost in the $2,500-$4,000 range, just like the SLRs they’re replacing.
This is also a chance to really go to town on the features and shooting experience; both companies need to make a big impression, not just with the customers they’ve lost to rival systems but to their own loyal shooters. So there may be other major changes, such as to the interface, layout, and so on. Expect lots of digital integration like wireless tethering as well — better than the junk they’ve been foisting on us for the last few years.
Will this reverse the tide of smartphones taking over the photography world? No, but it’s heartening to see these rather inertia-bound companies finally embrace the future. I love SLRs, and I plan to shoot on them forever in one way or another, but as an occasional serious photographer I’ll be glad to give these new systems a try.
I’ve asked both companies about the rumors, but I doubt they’ll comment. On the other hand, if the rumors are true, we won’t have long to wait before they turn into facts.
