Nintendo shows off exercise-powered RPG for Switch, Ring Fit Adventure

Nintendo has been at the crossroads of video games and fitness since the famous Power Pad for the NES, and the Switch is the latest to receive a game powered by physical activity: Ring Fit Adventure. And it actually looks fun!

In the game, you’ll jog in place to advance your character, and perform various movements and exercises to avoid obstacles and defeat enemies. Your quest is to defeat an “evil body-building dragon” who has disrupted the peaceful, apparently very fit world of the protagonist. Sure.

The game comes with a pair of accessories: a ring and leg strap, each of which you slot a Joy-Con into. The two controllers work together to get a picture of your whole body movement, meaning it can be sure you’re keeping your arms out in front of you when you do a squat, and not phoning it in during leg raises.

The ring itself is flexible and can tell how hard you’re squeezing or pulling it— but don’t worry, it can be calibrated for your strength level.

Interestingly, the top button of the controller appears to be able to be used as a heart rate monitor. That kind of came out of left field, but I like it. Just one more way Nintendo is making its hardware do interesting new things.

There look to be a ton of different movements you’ll be required to do, focusing on different areas of the body: upper, lower, core, and some sort of whole-body ones inspired by yoga positions. Ingeniously, some enemies are weak to one or another, and you’ll need to use different ones for other scenarios, so you’re getting a varied workout whether you like it or not.

Meanwhile your character levels up and unlocks new, more advanced moves — think a lunge instead of a squat, or adding an arm movement to a leg one — and you can get closer to the goal.

There are also minigames and straight-up workouts you can select, which you can do at any time if you don’t feel like playing the actual game, and contribute to your character’s level anyway.

The idea of gamifying fitness has been around for quite a while, and some titles, like Wii Fit, actually got pretty popular. But this one seems like the most in-depth actual game to use fitness as its main mechanic, and critically it is simple and easy enough that even the most slothful among us can get in a session now and then at their own pace.

Ring Fit Adventure will be available October 18 — no pricing yet, but you can probably expect it to be a little above an ordinary Switch game.

You can watch the full-length walkthrough of the game below, but beware — the acting is a little off-putting.

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Patreon sells product curation site Kit to GeniusLink

Patreon, the platform for independent content creators to operate membership businesses for their core fans, announced it is selling the assets of Kit.com to localized affiliate link service GeniusLink.

Founded in 2015, Kit is a social-shopping platform where influencers curate bundles of products (“kits”) they recommend. When their fans buy products they featured in a kit, the influencer earns an affiliate fee commission. Kit has 2.3 million monthly web visitors, according to SimilarWeb.

Among the most notable content creators on Kit, YouTuber Casey Neistat curated a kit featuring his favorite camera gear and author Tim Ferriss curated kits featuring his favorite podcasting equipment and the health products recommended by interviewees in his Tools for Titans book.

Screenshot of Kit.com’s profile site for Tim Ferriss

Patreon acquired Kit in June 2018 in what Patreon’s SVP Product Wyatt Jenkins described to me during my in-depth series on the company as “close to an acqui-hire,” adding that “although Kit is a good revenue source for a lot of creators — so it’s not a shut-down of Kit — we’re maintaining it but not iterating on it.” 

Patreon acquires Kit to let creators bundle merch in subscriptions

Kit had previously raised $2.5 million in venture capital from backers like Social Capital, #Angels, Precursor Ventures, Expa, and Ellen Pao. While the Kit site remained active, the team behind it was reassigned to lead product development for Patreon’s merch offering. 

It is unsurprising that Patreon found a new home for the asset. While Kit is a tool for creators to monetize, it doesn’t enhance paid memberships for fans and that’s Patreon’s exclusive focus right now. Even Patreon’s merch product is only for offering merch as a benefit for membership tiers, not for managing an e-commerce store with one-time transactions.

In a blog post today announcing the acquisition, GeniusLink wrote that “The first order of business for Geniuslink is to migrate Kit to the Geniuslink infrastructure and work to improve speed and reliability while our operations team dives into user support. We look forward to adding additional functionality for creators to monetize their kits in the coming months.”

GeniusLink launched in 2009, originally branded as GeoRiot. The bootstrapped company has 13 employees headquartered in Seattle.

Social commerce is a popular trend right now, with other social platforms testing e-commerce integrations for users (particularly influencers) to feature products. YouTube now has a built-in merch section for a creator to sell products under their videos and Instagram lets influencers sell products directly in the app. These have the advantage of providing influencer-curated shopping experiences right where influencers and their fans already are.

Those features assume an influencer is selling their own products, however, or at least the products of a brand they’ve formally partnered with. For Kit and its affiliate link model, the focus is on influencers as trusted curators for their fans. The influencer can feature a much wider variety of products and do so immediately, without negotiating a deal with each brand. 

That’s also why the model likely doesn’t make sense for many popular influencers — they want more money for their endorsement of a product than a standard affiliate link fee, and recommending lots of products they don’t have formal deals to promote may undercut them in their negotiations with brands.

As GeniusLink adds more monetization features to Kit, perhaps it will make it a more lucrative business activity for small and large influencers alike. 

The Patreon EC-1

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Google says it will do more to prioritize original reporting in search

Google says it’s taking new steps to ensure that original reporting gets prioritized in its search results.

In other words, articles that kick off a major news cycle should have a prominent in search results for a longer time, rather than getting buried under more recent coverage (some of which may just summarize the original story).

“While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we’ve made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting,” Google’s Vice President of News Richard Gingras wrote in a blog post. “Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer. This prominence allows users to view the original reporting while also looking at more recent articles alongside it.”

But original reporting can be a tricky concept. On the one hand, you’ve got major scoops, and on the other stories that do no reporting at all. In between, you’ve got stories with real reporting that don’t exactly break major ground. And there are publications (like TechCrunch!) and even individual articles that can combine original reporting with news broken elsewhere.

How can you teach an algorithm to understand all these distinctions? Gingras said Google is doing so through its Quality Raters, a global network of more than 10,000 individuals who offer feedback on Google’s search results, which in turn is used to improve the company’s search algorithms.

Specifically, Google has changed its guidelines so that articles providing “information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it” are rated as highly as possible. The guidelines also ask raters to take into account a publication’s general reputation (based on “prestigious awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize award, or a history of high quality original reporting”).

Gingras added that we can expect these efforts to “constantly evolve as we work to understand the life cycle of a story.”

This is part of a broader effort at Google to find new ways to work with the news industry, most notably with a $300 million News Initiative announced last year.

Google launches a new real-time data product for journalists

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Google Photos adds a time-traveling version of Stories, plus more sharing and printing options

Google Photos is getting its own version of Stories. But instead of focusing on what you’re doing now, as Stories on other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat offer, Google Photos is adopting the format to help you take a trip down memory lane. The feature is one of several updates coming to the photo-sharing service that focuses on helping you reconnect with your old photos that often get forgotten after upload.

Its unique take on Stories is, perhaps, the most interesting update, as it’s the first time we’ve seen the format used as a way to rewind time.

In Google Photos, the feature is more appropriately called “Memories,” as is designed to help users relive their life in a more meaningful way.

The company said it came up with the idea by watching user behavior on its app.

“We see users browse their photos and scroll all the way down to look at pictures from five years ago,” explained Google Photos Lead, Shimrit Ben-Yair. “We see them searching for moments and having a good experience with that. But we thought, how can we make that even easier?”

The Memories feature, she continued, is meant to accomplish that by helping users “better reminisce digitally.”

Most users will already know how to use Google Photos Memories, given the broad adoption of Stories across various platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, YouTube, and even surprising places like Netflix. As with some other implementations, the feature places small, rounded icons at the top of the Google Photos gallery, which you can tap to launch and advance through.

Except, in this case, each Story circle is taking you back in time — for example, a year ago, two years ago, three, and so on.

 

However, the feature isn’t just a variation on “Rediscover this Day,” because it’s not as tightly tied to a particular date. It’s more like a showcase of what you were doing around the same time as in years prior — like around the same week. It lets you look back without having to swipe through the badly shot photos and duplicates.

To help users from reliving more sensitive memories — like deaths they’re still grieving or breakups they’d rather forget, for example — you’ll also be able to block certain people or places from showing up in the Memories feature, to better personalize your highlight reel.

Another key difference is that Google Photos’ Memories are not put on public display.

“Even though it is the Stories format — which we lean into because we feel it creates a more immersive experience for reliving your life — this is only your library. It’s your private content,” noted Google Photos Engineering Lead, James Gallagher, when demoing the feature, pre-launch, to TechCrunch.

In a few months’ time, however, Google Photos plans to let you share these old photos — or any others you come across in your library  — in a more direct and more personal way. Through an enhancement to the sharing feature, you’ll be able to send a photo directly to friends or family, where it’s then adding to an ongoing and private conversation that will eventually become a stream of all your chats and shares.

And Google Photos is expanding its options for getting photos off your phone and into the real world.

It’s partnering with Walmart and CVS for 4×6 photo prints that can be picked up in about an hour at over 11,000 U.S. locations. These prints will cost the same as if you ordered through the retailers directly at $0.25 from Walmart and $0.33 from CVS. You’ll also be able to turn photos into wall art of various sizes, in the U.S. This follows Flickr’s recent expansion into the area of prints and wall art, which rolled out last month.

In Google Photos’ case, you’ll be able to select canvas prints in three different sizes, 8×8 ($19.99), 11×14 ($29.99), and 16×20 ($44.99), which can be customized with either black, white, or photo wrap borders. The canvases also come with a wire hanger on the back to make mounting easier.

This feature will generate revenue, though Google outsources the actual work to a network of printing partners across the U.S. It joins an existing feature that lets users turn photos into photo books in just a few steps.

One final feature, though not necessarily related to reminiscing, is an improvement to search that will now help you find photos or screenshots with text — like a recipe.

This feature, prints, and the Memories feature are rolling out now. Direct sharing is coming in a few months.

The additions are part of many enhancements to Google Photos since its spin-out from Google+ just over four years ago. The company has rapidly improved its photo-hosting and sharing service with A.I. functionality to clean up users’ vast photo libraries and automatically create photo edits and mini-movies, among other things. And it continues to improve with features like support for Lens’ visual search and an expanded array of A.I.-powered photo fixes, for example.

Thanks to these features and its integration with the Android operating system, Google Photos now has over a billion monthly users.

 

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Google Photos adds a time-traveling version of Stories, plus more sharing and printing options

Google Photos is getting its own version of Stories. But instead of focusing on what you’re doing now, as Stories on other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat offer, Google Photos is adopting the format to help you take a trip down memory lane. The feature is one of several updates coming to the photo-sharing service that focuses on helping you reconnect with your old photos that often get forgotten after upload.

Its unique take on Stories is, perhaps, the most interesting update, as it’s the first time we’ve seen the format used as a way to rewind time.

In Google Photos, the feature is more appropriately called “Memories,” as is designed to help users relive their life in a more meaningful way.

The company said it came up with the idea by watching user behavior on its app.

“We see users browse their photos and scroll all the way down to look at pictures from five years ago,” explained Google Photos Lead, Shimrit Ben-Yair. “We see them searching for moments and having a good experience with that. But we thought, how can we make that even easier?”

The Memories feature, she continued, is meant to accomplish that by helping users “better reminisce digitally.”

Most users will already know how to use Google Photos Memories, given the broad adoption of Stories across various platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, YouTube, and even surprising places like Netflix. As with some other implementations, the feature places small, rounded icons at the top of the Google Photos gallery, which you can tap to launch and advance through.

Except, in this case, each Story circle is taking you back in time — for example, a year ago, two years ago, three, and so on.

 

However, the feature isn’t just a variation on “Rediscover this Day,” because it’s not as tightly tied to a particular date. It’s more like a showcase of what you were doing around the same time as in years prior — like around the same week. It lets you look back without having to swipe through the badly shot photos and duplicates.

To help users from reliving more sensitive memories — like deaths they’re still grieving or breakups they’d rather forget, for example — you’ll also be able to block certain people or places from showing up in the Memories feature, to better personalize your highlight reel.

Another key difference is that Google Photos’ Memories are not put on public display.

“Even though it is the Stories format — which we lean into because we feel it creates a more immersive experience for reliving your life — this is only your library. It’s your private content,” noted Google Photos Engineering Lead, James Gallagher, when demoing the feature, pre-launch, to TechCrunch.

In a few months’ time, however, Google Photos plans to let you share these old photos — or any others you come across in your library  — in a more direct and more personal way. Through an enhancement to the sharing feature, you’ll be able to send a photo directly to friends or family, where it’s then adding to an ongoing and private conversation that will eventually become a stream of all your chats and shares.

And Google Photos is expanding its options for getting photos off your phone and into the real world.

It’s partnering with Walmart and CVS for 4×6 photo prints that can be picked up in about an hour at over 11,000 U.S. locations. These prints will cost the same as if you ordered through the retailers directly at $0.25 from Walmart and $0.33 from CVS. You’ll also be able to turn photos into wall art of various sizes, in the U.S. This follows Flickr’s recent expansion into the area of prints and wall art, which rolled out last month.

In Google Photos’ case, you’ll be able to select canvas prints in three different sizes, 8×8 ($19.99), 11×14 ($29.99), and 16×20 ($44.99), which can be customized with either black, white, or photo wrap borders. The canvases also come with a wire hanger on the back to make mounting easier.

This feature will generate revenue, though Google outsources the actual work to a network of printing partners across the U.S. It joins an existing feature that lets users turn photos into photo books in just a few steps.

One final feature, though not necessarily related to reminiscing, is an improvement to search that will now help you find photos or screenshots with text — like a recipe.

This feature, prints, and the Memories feature are rolling out now. Direct sharing is coming in a few months.

The additions are part of many enhancements to Google Photos since its spin-out from Google+ just over four years ago. The company has rapidly improved its photo-hosting and sharing service with A.I. functionality to clean up users’ vast photo libraries and automatically create photo edits and mini-movies, among other things. And it continues to improve with features like support for Lens’ visual search and an expanded array of A.I.-powered photo fixes, for example.

Thanks to these features and its integration with the Android operating system, Google Photos now has over a billion monthly users.

 

Read Full Article

Google Photos adds a time-traveling version of Stories, plus more sharing and printing options

Google Photos is getting its own version of Stories. But instead of focusing on what you’re doing now, as Stories on other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat offer, Google Photos is adopting the format to help you take a trip down memory lane. The feature is one of several updates coming to the photo-sharing service that focuses on helping you reconnect with your old photos that often get forgotten after upload.

Its unique take on Stories is, perhaps, the most interesting update, as it’s the first time we’ve seen the format used as a way to rewind time.

In Google Photos, the feature is more appropriately called “Memories,” as is designed to help users relive their life in a more meaningful way.

The company said it came up with the idea by watching user behavior on its app.

“We see users browse their photos and scroll all the way down to look at pictures from five years ago,” explained Google Photos Lead, Shimrit Ben-Yair. “We see them searching for moments and having a good experience with that. But we thought, how can we make that even easier?”

The Memories feature, she continued, is meant to accomplish that by helping users “better reminisce digitally.”

Most users will already know how to use Google Photos Memories, given the broad adoption of Stories across various platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, YouTube, and even surprising places like Netflix. As with some other implementations, the feature places small, rounded icons at the top of the Google Photos gallery, which you can tap to launch and advance through.

Except, in this case, each Story circle is taking you back in time — for example, a year ago, two years ago, three, and so on.

 

However, the feature isn’t just a variation on “Rediscover this Day,” because it’s not as tightly tied to a particular date. It’s more like a showcase of what you were doing around the same time as in years prior — like around the same week. It lets you look back without having to swipe through the badly shot photos and duplicates.

To help users from reliving more sensitive memories — like deaths they’re still grieving or breakups they’d rather forget, for example — you’ll also be able to block certain people or places from showing up in the Memories feature, to better personalize your highlight reel.

Another key difference is that Google Photos’ Memories are not put on public display.

“Even though it is the Stories format — which we lean into because we feel it creates a more immersive experience for reliving your life — this is only your library. It’s your private content,” noted Google Photos Engineering Lead, James Gallagher, when demoing the feature, pre-launch, to TechCrunch.

In a few months’ time, however, Google Photos plans to let you share these old photos — or any others you come across in your library  — in a more direct and more personal way. Through an enhancement to the sharing feature, you’ll be able to send a photo directly to friends or family, where it’s then adding to an ongoing and private conversation that will eventually become a stream of all your chats and shares.

And Google Photos is expanding its options for getting photos off your phone and into the real world.

It’s partnering with Walmart and CVS for 4×6 photo prints that can be picked up in about an hour at over 11,000 U.S. locations. These prints will cost the same as if you ordered through the retailers directly at $0.25 from Walmart and $0.33 from CVS. You’ll also be able to turn photos into wall art of various sizes, in the U.S. This follows Flickr’s recent expansion into the area of prints and wall art, which rolled out last month.

In Google Photos’ case, you’ll be able to select canvas prints in three different sizes, 8×8 ($19.99), 11×14 ($29.99), and 16×20 ($44.99), which can be customized with either black, white, or photo wrap borders. The canvases also come with a wire hanger on the back to make mounting easier.

This feature will generate revenue, though Google outsources the actual work to a network of printing partners across the U.S. It joins an existing feature that lets users turn photos into photo books in just a few steps.

One final feature, though not necessarily related to reminiscing, is an improvement to search that will now help you find photos or screenshots with text — like a recipe.

This feature, prints, and the Memories feature are rolling out now. Direct sharing is coming in a few months.

The additions are part of many enhancements to Google Photos since its spin-out from Google+ just over four years ago. The company has rapidly improved its photo-hosting and sharing service with A.I. functionality to clean up users’ vast photo libraries and automatically create photo edits and mini-movies, among other things. And it continues to improve with features like support for Lens’ visual search and an expanded array of A.I.-powered photo fixes, for example.

Thanks to these features and its integration with the Android operating system, Google Photos now has over a billion monthly users.

 

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Google to pay $549 million fine and $510 million in back taxes in France

After years of back and forth with tax authorities in France, Google has settled a fiscal fraud probe, as the financial prosecutor’s office told Reuters and AFP. Overall, Google will pay a $549 million fine as well as $510 million in back taxes (€500 million and €465 million respectively).

This is a settlement, which means that French authorities are dropping charges against Google in France. It covers activities from 2005 to 2018.

According to previous reports, the company owed around $1.3 billion in taxes. In 2014, Google started putting aside some money for a potential fine.

This is a classic story of corporate tax optimization in Europe. For multiple years, Google allegedly issued advertising contracts from its European headquarters in Ireland. Profits generated from those contracts would be taxed in Ireland.

Separately, France has been working on a tax on tech giants. In order to avoid tax optimization schemes, big tech companies that generate significant revenue in France are taxed on their revenue generated in France.

If you’re running a marketplace or advertising company that generates more than €750 million in global revenue and €25 million in France, you have to pay 3% of your French revenue in taxes.

It has generated some drama with the U.S. — President Donald Trump first said that the U.S. would be placing tariffs on French wines.

France and the U.S. eventually reached an agreement at the Group of Seven summit. The French government now hopes that the OECD finds a way to properly tax tech companies in countries where they operate in order to scrap the French tax.

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Apple tweaks App Store rule changes for children’s apps and sign in services

Originally announced in June, changes to Apple’s App Store policies on its Sign in with Apple service and the rules around children’s app categories are being tweaked. New apps must comply right away with the tweaked terms, but existing apps will have until early 2020 to comply with the new rules.

The changes announced at Apple’s developer conference in the summer were significant, and raised concerns among developers that the rules could handicap their ability to do business in a universe that, frankly, offers tough alternatives to ad-based revenue for children’s apps.

In a short interview with TechCrunch, Apple’s Phil Schiller said that they had spent time with developers, analytics companies and advertising services to hear what they had to say about the proposals and have made some updates.

The changes are garnering some strong statements of support from advocacy groups and advertising providers for children’s apps that were pre-briefed on the tweaks. The changes will show up as of this morning in Apple’s developer guidelines.

“As we got closer to implementation we spent more time with developers, analytics companies and advertising companies,” said Schiller. “Some of them are really forward thinking and have good ideas and are trying to be leaders in this space too.”

With their feedback, Schiller said, they’ve updated the guidelines to allow them to be more applicable to a broader number of scenarios. The goal, he said, was to make the guidelines easy enough for developers to adopt while being supportive of sensible policies that parents could buy into. These additional guidelines, especially around the Kids app category, says Schiller, outline scenarios that may not be addressed by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) or GDPR regulations.

There are two main updates.

Kids changes

The first area that is getting further tweaking is the Kids terms. Rule sections 1.3 and 5.1.4 specifically are being adjusted after Apple spoke with developers and providers of ad and analytics services about their concerns over the past few months.

Both of those rules are being updated to add more nuance to their language around third-party services like ads and analytics. In June, Apple announced a very hard-line version of these rule updates that essentially outlawed any third-party ads or analytics software and prohibited any data transmission to third-parties. The new rules offer some opportunities for developers to continue to integrate these into their apps, but also sets out explicit constraints for them.

The big changes come in section 1.3 surrounding data safety in the Kids category. Apple has removed the explicit restriction on including any third-party advertising or analytics. This was the huge hammer that developers saw heading towards their business models.

Instead, Apple has laid out a much more nuanced proposal for app developers. Specifically, it says these apps should not include analytics or ads from third parties, which implicitly acknowledging that there are ways to provide these services while also practicing data safety on the App Store.

Apple says that in limited cases, third-party analytics may be permitted as long as apps in the Kids category do not send personal identifiable information or any device fingerprinting information to third parties. This includes transmitting the IDFA (the device ID for advertisers), name, date of birth, email address, location or any other personally identifiable information.

Third-party contextual ads may be allowed but only if those companies providing the ads have publicly documented practices and policies and also offer human review of ad creatives. That certainly limits the options, including most offerings from programmatic services.

Rule 5.1.4 centers on data handling in kids apps. In addition to complying with COPPA, GDPR and other local regulations, Apple sets out some explicit guard rails.

First, the language on third-party ads and analytics has been changed from may not to should not. Apple is discouraging their use, but acknowledges that “in limited cases” third-party analytics and advertising may be permitted if it adheres to the new rules set out in guideline 1.3.

The explicit prohibition on transmitting any data to third parties from apps in the Kids category has been removed. Once again, this was the big bad bullet that every children’s app maker was paying attention to.

An additional clause reminds developers not to use terms like “for kids” and “for children” in app metadata for apps outside of the Kids category on the App Store.

SuperAwesome is a company that provides services like safe ad serving to kids apps. CEO Dylan Collins was initially critical of Apple’s proposed changes, noting that killing off all third-party apps could decimate the kids app category.

“Apple are clearly very serious about setting the standard for kids apps and digital services,” Collins said in a statement to TechCrunch after reviewing the new rules Apple is publishing. “They’ve spent a lot of time working with developers and kidtech providers to ensure that policies and tools are set to create great kids digital experiences while also ensuring their digital privacy and safety. This is the model for all other technology platforms to follow.”

All new apps must adhere to the guidelines. Existing apps have been given an additional six months to live in their current form but must comply by March 3, 2020.

“We commend Apple for taking real steps to protect children’s privacy and ensure that kids will not be targets for data-driven, personalized marketing,” said Josh Golin, Executive Director of Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood. “Apple rightly recognizes that a child’s personal identifiable information should never be shared with marketers or other third parties. We also appreciate that Apple made these changes on its own accord, without being dragged to the table by regulators.”

The CCFC had a major win recently when the FTC announced a $170M fine against YouTube for violations of COPPA.

Sign in with Apple

The second set of updates has to do with Apple’s Sign in with Apple service.

Sign in with Apple is a sign-in service that can be offered by an app developer to instantly create an account that is handled by Apple with additional privacy for the user. We’ve gone over the offering extensively here, but there are some clarifications and policy additions in the new guidelines.

Sign in with Apple is being required to be offered by Apple if your app exclusively offers third-party or social log ins like those from Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon or Facebook. It is not required if users sign in with a unique account created in the app, with say an email and password.

But some additional clarifications have been added for additional scenarios. Sign in with Apple will not be required in the following conditions:

• Your app exclusively uses your company’s own account setup and sign-in systems.
• Your app is an education, enterprise or business app that requires the user to sign in with an existing education or enterprise account.
• Your app uses a government or industry-backed citizen identification system or electronic ID to authenticate users.
• Your app is a client for specific third-party service and users are required to sign in to their mail, social media or other third-party account directly to access their content.

Most of these were sort of assumed to be true but were not initially clear in June. The last one, especially, was one that I was interested in seeing play out. This scenario applies to, for instance, the Gmail app for iOS, as well as apps like Tweetbot, which log in via Twitter because all they do is display Twitter.

Starting today, new apps submitted to the store that don’t meet any of the above requirements must offer Sign in with Apple to users. Current apps and app updates have until April 2020 to comply.

Both of these tweaks come after developers and other app makers expressed concern and reports noted the abruptness and strictness of the changes in the context of the ever-swirling anti-trust debate surrounding big tech. Apple continues to walk a tightrope with the App Store where they flex muscles in an effort to enhance data protections for users while simultaneously trying to appear as egalitarian as possible in order to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

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What reading slowly taught me about writing | Jacqueline Woodson

What reading slowly taught me about writing | Jacqueline Woodson

Reading slowly -- with her finger running beneath the words, even when she was taught not to -- has led Jacqueline Woodson to a life of writing books to be savored. In a lyrical talk, she invites us to slow down and appreciate stories that take us places we never thought we'd go and introduce us to people we never thought we'd meet. "Isn't that what this is all about -- finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we've changed it before we leave?" she asks.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Yelp adds predictive wait times and a new way for restaurants to share updates

With a new feature called Yelp Connect, Yelp is allowing users to go beyond customer reviews and see “what the restaurants have to say for themselves.”

That’s according to Devon Wright, Yelp’s general manager of restaurant marketplaces. He explained that with Yelp Connect, restaurants will be able to post updates about things like recent additions to the menu, happy hour specials and upcoming events. These updates are then shown on the Yelp homepage (which is already becoming more personalized), in a weekly email and on the restaurant’s profile page.

Consumers, meanwhile, can follow restaurants to see these updates, but Yelp also shows them to users who have indicated interest in a restaurant by making a reservation, joining its waitlist or bookmarking its profile.

Of course, restaurants are already posting this kind of information on social media, but Wright said Yelp allows them to reach “a high-intent audience” — people who aren’t just browsing for updates from their friends, but are actually looking to go out for a meal.

Guang Yang, the group product manager for Yelp Reservations and Waitlist, also noted that restaurants can set end dates for their Yelp posts, which could make them more comfortable sharing things like limited-time menus.

Yelp Connect will cost $199 per month for U.S. restaurants, but is available for a limited time at a price of $99 per month.

Wright described this is part of a broader evolution at Yelp, where “you don’t just want to discover a great restaurant, you want to transact [with] that restaurant.” So the company has added things like reservations, with Connect serving as “the final piece of that journey,” allowing restaurants to continue reaching out to consumers after their visit.

In addition to launching Connect, Yelp is also announcing an upgrade to its Waitlist feature, which allows consumers to see the current estimated wait time at a restaurant, and to join the queue directly from the Yelp app.

Yang said Yelp can now use real wait time data from a restaurant to predict the average wait at a given time — so if you want to get dinner tonight at 7pm, Yelp can tell how long you’ll probably have to wait. (These estimates are based on a party size of two; you’ll enter your real party size and get an updated estimate when you actually join the waitlist.)

Yelp is also using these predictions to power an additional feature called Notify Me. If you want to get seated a certain restaurant at a certain time, you can hit a button to get a notification that will prompt you to join the waitlist at right time — if you want to eat at 7pm, and the average wait time at 7 is an hour, then you’ll get a notification at 6.

Yang said the algorithm is “pretty sophisticated,” and even incorporates some of the common situations that can confound these estimates, like kitchen closing times, or popular restaurants that have long waitlist as soon as they open.

Still, he acknowledged that there will be times where the actual is different from what’s predicted, which may be challenging when you’ve told all your friends to meet you somewhere at a given time. But in those cases, he said most restaurants “acknowledge and understand, ‘Oh, something happened, wait time changed,'” and they’ll make accommodations if you show up later.

Yelp adds portfolios and highlights to its business profiles

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ckbk pulls a ‘Spotify for recipes’ out of the beta oven

Cooking may be under sustained attack by a wave of on-demand food delivery startups, with names that can double as gluttonous calls to action (oh hey Just Eat!), but that hasn’t stopped London-based startup ckbk from pushing in the opposite direction — with a digital service that offers on-demand access to high quality recipes licensed from major publishers of best selling cookbooks.

Indeed, the ckbk platform serves up not just individual recipes but entire cookbooks for browsing in app form.

The ckbk platform, which launches out of beta today — after a Kickstarter campaign last year that raised just over $55k — is being touted by its creators as ‘Spotify for recipes’. Think ‘playlists’ of professionally programmed dishes to whip up in the kitchen.

At launch it offers access to a catalog of more than 350 cookbooks (80,000+ recipes) — a culinary library that’s slated to keep growing.

For $8.99/£8.99 per month the premium ckbk user gets to tuck in to unlimited access to this “curated collection of cookbooks” — with content selected using “recommendations from hundreds of chefs and food experts including Nigella Lawson and Yotam Ottolenghi”.

A freemium layer offers access gratis to three recipes per month.

Subscribers are essentially paying for someone else with (most likely) superior knowledge of cooking to sort the wheat from the chaff so you don’t have to do the legwork of figuring out what freebie Internet recipes are worth investing your time (and after it, teeth) in.

Not just any old recipes, editorially curated recipes is the ckbk promise.

Content partners at launch include “dozens” of major publishers — including Chronicle Books, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Rodale, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing and Penguin Random House’s Rodale and Struik imprints.

Culinary content available via the platform is billed as spanning both contemporary authors like Molly Yeh and David Tanis, to award winning authorities and Michelin starred chefs, while also dipping into old  culinary classics, such as On Food & Cooking and the Oxford Companion to Food, and offering works penned by legendary French chef and restauranteur Escoffier.

Publishers participating in ckbk’s platform are being promised a new digital revenue stream (it’s not clear what the revenue share is) — sweetened with data in the form of “new insights into patterns of cookbook recipe usage” they can use to feed into future editorial output. So of course all ckbk users are having their foodie browsing extensively data-mined.

To push its ‘premium recipes’ proposition ckbk is trailing a bunch of forthcoming promotional partnerships with kitchenware brands, food-related ecommerce brands, food events, culinary schools and publishing channels — which it says will be launching in the next few months.

It also says recipes on the platform have been optimized for integration with connected kitchen appliances.

European company BSH (whose appliance brands include Bosch, Gaggenau, NEFF and Siemens) is named as the first strategic partner for ckbk. It will be offering premium membership of the service to UK buyers of its NEFF N90 connected oven.

A subset of ‘smart’ cookbook recipes on ckbk will automatically set the correct time and oven temperature via the N90’s Home Connect system — for anyone who can’t be bothered to twiddle the dials themselves.

ckbk adds that selected recipes will be further “optimized” to make the most of features and cooking modes of the smart oven. A tidbit which might make a seasoned chef raise an eyebrow and question whether that’s heading towards recipes for robots.

The licensing project has certainly been a slow burn. The company behind ckbk, 1000 Cookbooks, has been working on getting the concept to market since 2014, per Crunchbase.

It says it’s currently raising a $2M seed funding round — having previously raised a total of $750,000 in pre-seed funding via investors, the Techstars/BSH Future Home accelerator program, and its Kickstarter campaign.

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8 Shocking Online Accounts Sold on the Dark Web

While the dark web is an active marketplace for illegal goods, did you know that your web accounts are also a valuable commodity? It goes beyond bank accounts, too; a lot of accounts you believe are useless to hackers are sold on the dark web.

Let’s take a look at the different kinds of accounts sold on the dark web.

1. Financial and Personal Accounts

Private and financial accounts are the more obvious examples of dark web account selling. These can be used to steal your identity or steal money from you, so they’re a hot commodity amongst hackers.

We’ve already discussed in detail how much your identity is worth on the dark web, so be sure to read it to learn more about how your details are sold.

2. Email Accounts for Malicious Use

Email accounts sell for around $0.70-$1.20 per account, according to LogDog. These include accounts from the larger email providers such as Yahoo and Gmail. A hacker can do a lot with an email account, from harvesting personal information to using it as part of a botnet.

If you want to know how hackers use these accounts, be sure to read about the ways scammers can exploit your email address.

3. Dating Profiles

Hackers are keen to get their hands on your dating site account. A few years ago, Adaware reported on how hackers sold on 27 million accounts from the dating site Mate1.

This trend may seem odd at first, but think about the personal information used in dating accounts. Hackers can use the user’s details and messages to create a rough personal profile for the account. They can then use this information to perform identity theft.

If they can’t do that, they can use the account to talk to the people on your account. Don’t worry; the hacker has no intention of stealing the love of your life from you.

They can, however, impersonate you and ask your potential partners for help with a financial situation. If the hacker is skilled, they can convince their target to wire money into the scammer’s bank account. This would sour your next date for sure!

Dating site accounts sell for a decent amount on the dark web. LogDog reported that eHarmony accounts sell for around $10, which made them the second-most expensive account in LogDog’s report.

4. Compromised Netflix Accounts

If you have a Netflix account, you may have experienced the lengths people go to share your account. Some people don’t like paying a monthly fee for something they could get for free. Hackers are no different, except they won’t ask you for permission before they start watching.

If a hacker gains access to your Netflix account, they can use it to watch shows without paying a penny. Compromised Netflix accounts sell for just a couple of dollars, a small price to pay versus Netflix’s monthly fee. As such, if you see any unusual activity on your Netflix viewing history, be sure to change your password.

5. Adult Website Accounts

In a similar vein, adult website accounts are a hot commodity on the dark web. Adult sites often ask for a monthly fee to access their videos, and hackers circumvent this by piggybacking off of a legitimate customer’s account.

What’s interesting is how low the price of an adult account can go. LogDog reported that Brazzers accounts fetch around $1, which is up to half the price of a Netflix account. $1 is also the going price for a social security number on the dark web, which shows how low hackers price your identity.

6. Using Airline Accounts for Free Flights

Be careful with your airline accounts or a hacker may get a free holiday from you. Uaware reported that British Airways accounts sell for £31.94, a 375 percent increase between 2018 and 2019.

A hacker can use your financial information to book themselves a trip to sunny beaches, but that can be risky. Flights don’t come cheap, so using stolen information to book a flight has a very high chance of alerting the bank.

As such, hackers are more interested in the flight points on your account, which they can spend on “reward holidays.” This tactic makes less of a financial footprint and is harder to spot.

7. Scraping PayPal Accounts

As you might expect, hackers are keen to get a hold of accounts with payment information on them. PayPal accounts are no different, but these do have an added bonus; the PayPal balance.

When a hacker gains access to a PayPal account, they’ll check to see if it has any money on it. If it does, they can then sell on the account on the dark web. How much the account sells for depends on how high the balance is.

But wait a moment; why don’t hackers take the money instead of selling the account? Sometimes, hackers don’t feel like taking the risk. PayPal keeps a close eye on transactions, so it requires a skilled hacker to extract the funds successfully.

As such, a hacker who doesn’t feel confident will sell the account onto someone with expertise in laundering. It’s like if someone knew the blueprints to a jewelry store, but didn’t have the tools to rob it. They instead sell the plans to a professional group who can do the job better.

8. Fortnite Accounts as “Mules”

This commodity may be the strangest entry out of all of them; after all, Fortnite is free to play! Why would anyone pay money for something that’s available for free?

The key is not the account itself, but what’s on it. Fortnite accounts are free to create, but you can spend money on in-game items. Some items are only obtainable if the player completes a tough challenge, such as being the last one standing out of 100 people.

Fortnite also supports upgrading accounts to unlock special features. For example, playing Battle Royale is free, but the “Save the World” game mode requires a founder’s pack. It costs $39.99 to upgrade, which makes these accounts a hot commodity on the dark web.

As such, if a hacker gets their hands on an account with rare items or the founder’s pack on it, they can flip them for a fraction of the total price paid. The more and rarer the items, the higher the price it can command on the dark web.

Hackers can also make use of accounts with little to no items. Variety reported on hackers loading up “mule accounts” with the in-game currency, V-Bucks, using stolen credit card credentials. They then sell on the account for a fraction of the cost.

For example, someone could purchase $50-worth of V-Bucks using stolen cards, then sell it on the dark web for $20. The hacker “cleans the trail” and earning themselves $20, while the purchaser gets a significant discount on in-game items.

Staying Safe From the Dark Web

People use the dark web to sell illegal goods, but it also has a bustling market for accounts. While banking and financial accounts are obvious commodities, be sure to keep your other accounts secure. Who knows how a hacker may use them!

If you’re curious about this underground marketplace, be sure to read the reasons why you should avoid the dark web.

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Learn to Invest in Stocks and Cryptocurrency With This 11-Course Bundle

Earning money is hard, so it makes sense to invest wisely. While the banks give you close to zero returns, putting your money into stocks or cryptocurrencies can deliver amazing returns. Anyone can start investing and trading — but it’s a good idea to get clued up before you dive in. The Complete Stock & Cryptocurrency Investment Toolkit Bundle shows you the ropes, with 11 courses and 54.5 hours of expert training. You can get it now for $39 at MakeUseOf Deals.

Investing Masterclass

Investing always comes with a small amount of risk. But if you work with a solid strategy, it is possible to make consistent returns on your money. This bundle shows you how to identify opportunities and increase your personal wealth.

Through 685 video tutorials, you learn the basics of finance. The courses show you how to analyze the market, evaluate risk and set a strategy. Along with stock, the training looks at forex trading and cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins. For each market, you get a step-by-step guide to buying and selling.

The bundle includes 54.5 hours of content in total, and you get unlimited lifetime access.

11 Courses for $39

Order now for just $39 to get your hands on this financial toolkit, worth $1,815.

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Zyl raises $1.1 million to resurface old memories from your photos

French startup Zyl has raised $1 million (€1 million) in a round led by OneRagtime. The company has developed an app that uses artificial intelligence to find the most interesting photos and videos in your photo library.

Now that smartphones have been around for a while, many people have thousands of unsorted photos on their iPhone or Android device. And chances are you don’t often scroll back to look at past vacations and important life events.

Zyl is well aware of that. That’s why the company does the heavy lifting for you. The app scans your photo library to find important memories and photos you may have forgotten. It has even registered patents for some of its algorithms.

But identifying photos and videos is just one thing. In order to turn that process into a fun, nostalgia-powered experience, the app sends you a notification every day to tell you that Zyl has identified a new memory — they call it a Zyl. When you tap on it, the app reveals that memory and you can share it with your friends and family.

You then have to wait another 24 hours to unlock another Zyl. That slow-paced approach is key as you spend more time looking at Zyls and sharing them with loved ones.

It’s also worth noting that Zyl processes your photo library on your iPhone or Android device directly. Photos aren’t sent to the company’s server.

Up next, Zyl plans to enrich your collection of Zyls with more photos and videos from your friends and family. You could imagine a way to seamlessly share photos of the same life event with your loved ones, even if they are currently spread out over multiple smartphones.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to improve the app and reach millions of users. Zyl already has impressive retention rates with 38% of users opening the app regularly during 5 weeks or more.

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You Can Now Share Spotify Songs on Snapchat

Spotify now lets you share your favorite music and podcasts on Snapchat. The new integration means you’ll be able to seamlessly share what you’re listening to in a Snap. And it doesn’t matter if you’re sharing a song, album, playlist, or podcast.

Spotify is making a concerted effort to let you share content on social media. Earlier this month, Spotify added the option to share songs to Facebook Stories. And now Spotify has added the option to share songs on Snapchat. And it’s surprisingly easy to do.

How to Share Spotify Songs on Snapchat

Spotify explains the process on For the Record, explaining that Spotify and Snapchat are a good combination. Spotify allows you to “listen to your favorite music and podcasts anytime, anywhere,” and Snapchat lets you “share what you’re up to instantaneously.”

Share what you’re listening to in a snap with Spotify’s new integration with Snapchat. https://t.co/ddF8OtZX1D

— Spotify News (@SpotifyNews) September 9, 2019

To share content from Spotify to Snapchat:

1. Open the content you want to share in the Spotify app.
2. Tap the three dot menu in the top-right and click “Share”.
3. Select Snapchat from the dropdown menu.
4. Snapchat will open a new Snap with the album art included.
5. Edit your Spotify-infused Snap and send it to your friends.

If a friend sends you a Snap from Spotify:

1. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
2. Tap the context card with the information about the content you’ve been sent.
3. The Spotify app will be launched, and the content will start playing.

A Beginner’s Guide to Spotify

Making it easier to share content to social media is a win-win for everyone involved. You get to share your favorite music and podcasts with your friends, your friends get to listen to your favorite content, and Spotify potentially gets more users.

Whether or not you make use of Spotify’s ability to share content on Snapchat, you should definitely check out our beginner’s guide to Spotify. Even if you’ve been using Spotify for years, you’re guaranteed to learn something new.

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The Best New Tech We Saw at IFA 2019

IFA is Europe’s equivalent to CES in Las Vegas. MakeUseOf reported from the Berlin-based consumer electronics show. To round off our coverage, here is are the new products that impressed us the most.

Curious about IFA’s history and what Rammstein has to do with it? Scroll all the way to the bottom for some background and trivia.

The Best New Tech Products at IFA 2019

Adidas FWD-01 Wireless Earbuds for Runners

We appreciated the elegant design of these earbuds. The collaboration between Zound and Adidas resulted in a visually pleasing product with clever features. For example, the earphones are sweat resistant and don’t block out noise entirely, which will help you stay aware of your environment when you’re out for a run.

MakeUseOf readers indirectly voted this product their most popular from IFA 2019.

Read more about the Adidas FWS-01 wireless earbuds here:

Shiftphone, the Sustainable Smartphone

Are you longing for an ethically sound and eco-friendly smartphone? The best choice today may be the Shiftphone, not the Fairphone.

SHIFT has been around since 2015. With five generations of smartphones under their belt, they are set to release a new model in 2020. And what we saw at IFA, this year, blew our mind. A fully modular phone that keeps running, even as you remove parts.

Gavin Phillips, Kannon Yamada, and James Frew picked this as their favorite product at IFA 2019. James summarized it best:

The Shiftphone is evidence that instead of flashy marketing budgets, and gimmick-based features, it is possible to create a sustainable, repairable smartphone. The company has been operational for almost half a decade, proving that an ethical business model is sustainable. The phone itself is also a wonder, and is almost as good as having your cake and eating it too.

Read our full coverage of the Shiftphone here:

Asus ProArt StudioBook One Laptop for Creatives

Asus’s latest flagship is a high-end laptop with powerful graphics, plenty of RAM and storage, and still only weighing in at 2.9 kg (6.4 pounds).

The extravagant design of this laptop will keep your hands cool at all times. Asus turned the screen into the body and removed all heat-generating components, such as the CPU, GPU, or battery, from the keyboard and trackpad area.

Ian Buckley chose this as his favorite product from IFA 2019:

Just a mad good laptop with some unique features.

Read all about the Asus ProArt StuioBook One in our short:

Smarter FridgeCam for Your Old Fridge

If you’ve been wondering how to create a smart home without buying new appliances, here’s a gadget you must have. The Smarter FridgeCam is a simple and affordable add-on that can upgrade your old fridge to a smart home appliance.

James Frew loved this product:

Fridge cameras are the kind of devices you think look cool, until you find out the price tag of the so-called smart fridge. Instead of buying a new product, Smarter lets you add smart features to otherwise durable and long-lasting products, and is a great way to avoid creating electronic waste. Smarter’s FridgeCam gives you the best of both worlds. It can be retrofit to any fridge, works on Android and iOS devices, and isn’t as damaging to your wallet. Along with the iKettle and Smarter Coffee, the FridgeCam is an affordable, accessible way to integrate smart home products into your kitchen.

Find out more about the Smarter FridgeCam.

Fossil Gen 5 Smart Watch

Fossil offers some of the most functionally sound smart watches. While they run on the same limited Android Wear OS as most other smart watches, they make great use of smart buttons. Paired with a high quality build and great designs, Fossil smart watches are a safe pick.

Joe Coburn was smitten with Fossil watches:

Fossil’s Gen 5 watch is a beautiful smart watch. This watch looks good enough to convert this analog watch fan, and the range of available colors is enough variety for anyone’s tastes. The limited Edition Michael Kors models significantly increase the bling factor (although with an increased price). Wear OS is still the black sheep of the Android family, however.

At IFA, we covered the Michael Kors Access line, which features Fossil’s Gen 5 hardware.

AGFA Realipix Square S

This 2-in-1 camera takes great photos and can print them instantly. Thanks to its integrated LCD screen, you won’t have to guess the frame and you can edit your shot before printing. Its 4-pass print technology produces superior photos.

For Kannon Yamada, this was one of the best products at IFA 2019:

It’s a strict improvement over already existing products and at EUR 100, it’s also price competitive.

Here’s everything else we found out about the AGFA Realipix Square S:

Miele Smart Kitchen Appliances

Frankly, we never thought we’d cover kitchen appliances at a technology trade show. But we wanted to try something different at IFA. And we thought Miele’s smart kitchen appliances were stunning.

Joe Coburn had this to say:

Miele’s latest smart home appliances provide a glimpse into what we can expect from our tech in the future. While anyone would expect smart home devices to communicate with each other, Miele actually designed them to. Your cooking app controls the induction hob, which in turn communicates the cooking details with the extractor fan. The future is now.

Read our full post on Miele’s smart kitchen appliances here:

That concludes our list of the best of IFA 2019. We’re already looking forward to returning to IFA in 2020! But first, MakeUseOf will head to Las Vegas in January 202o to report from CES. Stay tuned!

What Is IFA?

Originally launched in Berlin, Germany in 1924, IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung; international radio exhibit) is one of the world’s first technology exhibitions and Europe’s biggest trade show today. Every year, IFA presents the latest consumer technology, including product launches from leading electronics brands.

Unlike CES, IFA is open to the public. You’ll see a diverse audience roaming the show floors. Like other exhibitions, IFA forbids the sale of products during the show. It’s a family friendly technology show with a fair-like atmosphere. And it’s settled in Germany’s political and cultural capital.

If you’ve always wanted to attend CES but never got in, give IFA a shot.

Trivia: The video for Rammstein’s latest single Radio was shot at Messe Berlin, the venue for IFA and other international trade shows.

Read the full article: The Best New Tech We Saw at IFA 2019

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