Spotify announced today the launch of a new tool called Line-In that will allow its community members to offer input about the music data it has on file, like genre, mood, explicitness and more. The goal is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds in correcting and expanding Spotify’s data over time, which could give it a competitive advantage against rival services like Apple or Pandora, for example. Notes Spotify in its FAQ, by […]
Apple announced today that it signed an agreement to acquire the digital magazine service Texture, which serves articles from more than 200 magazines digitally on iOS, Windows, Amazon, and Android devices for a flat monthly fee. Apple has acquired the entire company, including staff, and has assured users that the Android version of the app will still be supported. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Texture was founded in 2010 […]
About a year ago last march, a robot called the Sub1 solved a Rubik’s Cube in 0.637-seconds, earning it the Guinness World Record for being the fastest cube-solving bot. That honor now appears to be in jeopardy, however, as a pair of engineers have demonstrated a new robot that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in almost half that time: a mere 0.38 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt00QzKuNVY According to the blog that Ben Katz and […]
The Light Phone is a cellphone that was released last year with an interesting premise: strip away all the extraneous, distracting pieces of modern smartphones — like internet, texting, email, and photography — to leave the distilled essence of a phone. It could make calls and store nine phone numbers, but that was about it. It was an interesting idea, promising a life where you could remove the distractions of a […]
It turns out, one of Facebook’s biggest News Feed experiments last year only made the service worse. Last October, the Guardian reported that Facebook was testing significant changes to its News Feed. For users in six countries, Facebook moved nearly all non-promoted posts from pages and publishers out of the main News Feed into a secondary feed, called the Explore Feed. Predictably, people didn’t want to have to bounce between two feeds, […]
Canon is finally embracing 4K video with a new mirrorless camera called the M50. The petite shooter is, essentially, 2016’s Canon M5 with fewer dials and buttons and a more streamlined body. But the upgraded internals and a swivel-out screen mean this will be the company’s most video-friendly mirrorless camera to date when it ships in April. The $779 M50 uses a 24.1-megapixel APS-C sensor that’s a hair smaller than the 24.2-megapixel one found […]
When it comes to thin and light notebooks, Huawei isn't exactly a household name in the United States. The Matebook X Pro might change that. With today's reveal of the successor to 2017's MateBook X -- Huawei is proving it means serious business and intends to aggressively carve away market share from giants Dell and Apple. The MateBook X Pro is the second notebook Huawei has ever produced, so it stands to reason that name recognition is lacking in this space, […]
Siri is already in your home, in your pocket, and on your wrist, so why not in your ears as well? Apple’s AirPods wireless headphones already let you summon the voice assistant by physically tapping them, but the next iteration of them will allow you to simply say “Hey Siri,” as you would with your phone, Bloomberg reports. This improved functionality is currently being worked on for the next generation of the AirPods, which are internally […]
Facebook is losing young users even quicker than expected, according to new estimates by eMarketer. The digital measurement firm predicted last year that Facebook would see a 3.4 percent drop in 12- to 17-year-old users in the U.S. in 2017, the first time it had predicted a drop in usage for any age group on Facebook. The reality: The number of U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic declined […]
