Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Decrypted: How Twitter was hacked, GitHub DMCA backfires

• October 26, 2020
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One week to the U.S. presidential election and things are getting spicy. It’s not just the rhetoric — hackers are actively working to disrupt the election, officials have said, and last week they came with a concrete example and an unusually quick pointing of blame. On Wednesday night, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe blamed

One week to the U.S. presidential election and things are getting spicy.

It’s not just the rhetoric — hackers are actively working to disrupt the election, officials have said, and last week they came with a concrete example and an unusually quick pointing of blame.

On Wednesday night, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe blamed Iran for an email operation designed to intimidate voters in Florida into voting for President Trump “or else.” Ratcliffe, who didn’t take any questions from reporters and has been accused of politicizing the typically impartial office, said Iran had used voter registration data — which is largely public in the U.S. — to send emails that looked like they came from the far-right group the Proud Boys. Google security researchers also linked the campaign to Iran, which denied claims of its involvement. It’s estimated about 2,500 emails went through in the end, with the rest getting caught in spam filters.

The announcement was lackluster in detail. But experts like John Hultquist, who heads intelligence analysis at FireEye-owned security firm Mandiant, said the incident is “clearly aimed at undermining voter confidence,” just as the Russians attempted during the 2016 election.

 

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THE BIG PICTURE

Twitter was hacked using a fake VPN portal, New York investigation finds

The hackers who broke into Twitter’s network used a fake VPN page to steal the credentials — and two-factor authentication code — of an employee, an investigation by New York’s Department of Financial Affairs found. The state tax division got involved after the hackers then hijacked user accounts using an internal “admin tool” to spread a cryptocurrency scam.

In a report published last week, the department said the hackers called several Twitter employees and used social engineering to trick one employee into entering their username and password on a site that looked like the company’s VPN portal, which most employees use to access the network from home during the pandemic.

“As the employee entered their credentials into the phishing website, the hackers would simultaneously enter the information into the real Twitter website. This false log-in generated a [two-factor authentication] notification requesting that the employees authenticate themselves, which some of the employees did,” wrote the report. Once onto the network using the employee’s VPN credentials, the hackers used that access to investigate how to access the company’s internal tools.

Twitter said in September that its employees would receive hardware security keys, which would make it far more difficult for a repeat phishing attack to be successful.

Open-source YouTube download tool hit by DMCA takedown, but backfires

News: Mailman’s new Gmail assistant aims to tame your inbox

• October 26, 2020
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A new startup, Mailman, recently launched an email assistant that helps Gmail users to get better control over their inbox. Unlike many email startups, which require users to switch to a new platform or even adopt a new email address, Mailman works along with your existing Gmail account to do things like block annoying emails,

A new startup, Mailman, recently launched an email assistant that helps Gmail users to get better control over their inbox. Unlike many email startups, which require users to switch to a new platform or even adopt a new email address, Mailman works along with your existing Gmail account to do things like block annoying emails, batch email delivery, configure VIPs who can bypass filters, and even silence your inbox for a period of time.

The service is the latest in a long line of email startups that have arrived over the years, promising an upgraded email experience — the most recent being Basecamp’s Hey, a new app offering a hosted email service with an expanded set of tools to declutter your inbox.

But many people don’t want to switch to a new email platform or client app, and they don’t generally want to adopt a new email address. They just want their tame their existing inbox. That’s where Mailman comes in.

The service works by authenticating with your Google account, where you give it permission to manage mailbox labels as well as basic email settings (like moving mail to a snoozed folder). You also give Mailman the ability to view and modify but not delete email.

That latter permission is worth noting and considering carefully. Anyone with sensitive information in their inbox may not want to grant a third-party access to manage their email inbox. But arguably, any truly sensitive material shouldn’t be moving over email to begin with, as any security expert would tell you.

For what it’s worth, Mailman says it doesn’t store any data that’s not directly used by the customer in the Mailman interface and it doesn’t monetize your email data — the way that Gmail itself does. It also claims to only read the timestamp, sender’s address and subject line, not the body of your emails, when it assists you in managing your inbox. Mailman additionally claims to encrypt the data it stores in its database, on servers located in the U.S., Canada and India. And it’s GDPR-compliant — meaning you can delete all your data permanently with a click of a button.

Regardless, you’ll have to weigh the risks with the potential benefits of using any email add-on, due to its need to gain inbox access in order to function.

If you choose to proceed and Mailman is granted access to manage your inbox, you can then opt to use any of its features to stem the flow of email.

One of the biggest issues with email is that it continually arrives throughout the day, as soon as emails are sent. That means you end up responding to emails on the sender’s schedule instead of your own.

Mailman introduces a couple of options to address this problem.

If you would like to carve out some email-free time to work without being bothered by incoming email, you can set up a Do Not Disturb schedule that holds back your email during the window you specify.

Another feature lets you choose to receive emails in batches at a set number of times per day, or at specific times you configure. In this case, Mailman holds back the emails from your inbox until these delivery slots — allowing you to set times where you’ll work on email, instead of allowing email to pull your focus throughout the day.

The service also lets you prioritize important email and block others. You can add senders, domains and even keywords to a “VIP” list that lets those emails bypass filters so you always see urgent emails. This could help you to ensure that you don’t miss critical emails from your boss or an important client, for example, even as you use other tools to tame your inbox.

Unimportant emails, meanwhile, can be blocked automatically as Mailman can block newsletters, notifications, and emails from senders you’ve never interacted with before. It doesn’t delete these emails, however. Instead, you’ll receive a daily digest that lets you choose how to treat those emails in the future — whether they should be automatically blocked from now on, for example, or immediately sent through.

Over time, this can help train Mailman to ensure you’re getting your important email with fewer distractions.

You don’t have to use all the tools Mailman provides — you can pick and choose those you need while leaving others off, the company notes. And because all the filtering is being done within the Gmail service itself, you can continue to use whichever email client you prefer.

The startup was founded by serial entrepreneur Mohit Mamoria, now Mailman CEO, and Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab’s founder who now invests and partners with startups through Tiny. Mailman is incubating under Tiny’s umbrella, where it gets help with marketing, UX, and early customer acquisition, among other things.

Explains Mamoria, he and Wilkinson were both in search of different ways to tame their inbox. Mamoria had built a script called Duggo to do it. When he saw a tweet asking about inbox tools from Wilkinson (below), he reached out.

The two decided to collaborate and ended up launching Mailman into beta August 2020, where it has already gained just under 3,000 users. As of last week, Mailman became available to the public. It was announced via a Product Hunt post where it was endorsed by a number of fellow entrepreneurs and founders. Some have also contributed testimonials to the Mailman website.

To some extent, you can use Gmail’s own filters to manage your inbox today, but they aren’t as user friendly. And email services don’t offer tools to configure batch deliveries or quiet times, leaving users to tend to silence their interruptions by snoozing push notifications on their devices instead. Because of email apps’ failure to innovate, new services like Hey, Superhuman and others have popped up, hoping to deliver a better experience for power users.

Mailman, like some rivals, generates revenue through subscriptions — it costs $10 per month or $96 per year. That’s more affordable than the newly popular email service Superhuman, which manages Gmail through its $30 per month client, but it has been called out at too expensive.

The co-founders believe that Mailman has the potential to reach a broader audience than other inbox-taming startups because it respects that users want to keep their existing email and client app.

“Almost everybody who has tried to solve the inbox overload has gone in the direction of building an email client,” explains Mamoria. “[Basecamp’s] Hey went a step further to build an email service altogether. What they miss is that changing email clients or services is easier said than done. It requires huge behavior change and is usually the biggest hurdle to cross for an average user,” he says.

Mailman is available today and exclusively works with Google accounts. It may roll out support to other email providers in the future, but nothing is currently planned in that area.

News: Hubilo raises $4.5 million, led by Lightspeed, to focus on virtual events

• October 26, 2020
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Earlier this year, the founders of event analytics platform Hubilo pivoted to become a virtual events platform to survive the impact of COVID-19. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $4.5 million seed round, led by Lightspeed, and says it expects to exceed $10 million bookings run rate and host over one million attendees

Earlier this year, the founders of event analytics platform Hubilo pivoted to become a virtual events platform to survive the impact of COVID-19. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $4.5 million seed round, led by Lightspeed, and says it expects to exceed $10 million bookings run rate and host over one million attendees over the next few months.

The round also included angel investors Freshworks chief executive officer Girish Mathrubootham; former LinkedIn India CEO Nishant Rao; Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle; and Helpshift CEO Abinash Tripathy.

Hubilo’s clients have included the United Nations, Roche, Fortune, GITEX, IPI Singapore, Tech In Asia, Infocomm Asia and Clarion Events. The startup is headquartered in San Francisco, but about 12% of its sales are currently from Southeast Asia, and it plans to further scale in the region. It will also focus on markets in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Vaibhav Jain, Hubilo’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that many of its customers before the pandemic were enterprises and governments that used its platform to help organize large events. Those were also the first to stop hosting in-person events.

In February, “we knew that most, if not all, physical events were getting postponed or cancelled globally. To counter the drop in demand for offline events, we agreed to extend the contracts by six more months at no cost,” Jain said. “However, this was not enough to retain our clients and most of them either cancelled the contracts or put the contract on hold indefinitely.”

As a result, Hubilo’s revenue dropped to zero in February. With about 30 employees and reserves for only three months, Jain said the company had to chose between shutting down or finding an alternative model. Hubilo’s team created a MVP (minimum viable product) virtual event platform in less than a month and started by convincing a client to use it for free. That first virtual event was hosted in March and “since then, we’ve never looked back,” said Jain.

This means Hubilo is now competing with other virtual event platforms, like Cvent and Hopin (which was used to host TechCrunch Disrupt). Jain said his company differentiates by giving organizers more chances to rebrand their virtual spaces; focusing on sponsorship opportunities that include contests, event feeds and virtual lounges to increase attendee engagement; and providing data analytic features that include integration with Salesforce, Marketo and Hubspot.

With so many events going virtual that “Zoom fatigue” and “webinar fatigue” have now become catchphrases, event organizers have to not only convince people to buy tickets, but also keep them engaged during an event.

Hubilo “gamifies” the experience of attending a virtual event with features like its Leaderboard. This enables organizers to assign points for things like watching a session, visiting a virtual booth or messaging someone. Then they can give prizes to the attendees with the most points. Jain said the Leaderboard is Hubilo’s most used feature.

News: NASA discovers water on the surface of the sunlit portion of the Moon

• October 26, 2020
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NASA has made a groundbreaking discovery – confirming the presence of water on the surface of Moon, in the area that is exposed to sunlight. Previously, we knew that water was present as water ice on the dark part of the Moon, and that’s part of the reason that the next mission to the Moon

NASA has made a groundbreaking discovery – confirming the presence of water on the surface of Moon, in the area that is exposed to sunlight. Previously, we knew that water was present as water ice on the dark part of the Moon, and that’s part of the reason that the next mission to the Moon is to the lunar South Pole, where it’s believed that water ice could be present hidden in craters that aren’t ever exposed to direct sunlight.

This isn’t an entirely surprising discovery, because NASA scientists and researchers had previously found indications that water was potentially present on the Moon’s sunlight side. But what is new is confirmation, in the form of observational data by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that deduce water molecules in the Moon’s Clavius Crater in its Southern Hemisphere.

As you might expect since it took this long to actual verify its presence, the lunar water isn’t very plentiful. NASA says they were able to detect between 100 and 412 parts per million in an area spanning a cubic meter of soil, which is around the equivalent of a standard 12-ounce bottle of water – to put that in context, NASA points out that “the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water” vs. what SOFIA was able to detect.

Even so, the fact that it’s able to survive intact in the relatively harsh conditions of the sun-exposed lunar surface is intriguing, and will merit further study. Scientists want to find out how the date gets there, and how it manages to actually accumulate. They’ll study that, and scope for potential future use by human explorers establishing a more permanent presence on the lunar surface, through future SOFIA missions looking at different craters and sunlit areas for other water deposits.

This is definitely a landmark discovery, and one that will likely prove integral to the future of human deep space exploration. Part of those longer-term goals include establishing a scientific base of operations on the Moon from which scientists can conduct research, and eventually reach further out to destinations including Mars. Using in-situ resources, including water, could make all of that possible much quicker and without requiring much more complicated workarounds, since it forms the basis for not only human survival, but also essential resources for additional missions from the Moon including rocket fuel for launches.

News: The No-Code Generation is arriving

• October 26, 2020
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In the distant past, there was a proverbial “digital divide” that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn’t.[1] Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do

In the distant past, there was a proverbial “digital divide” that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn’t.[1] Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do productive work. Older generations were going to be wiped out by younger workers who were more adaptable to the needs of the modern digital economy, upending our routine notion that professional experience equals value.

Of course, that was just a narrative. Facility with using computers was determined by the ability to turn it on and login, a bar so low that it can be shocking to the modern reader to think that a “divide” existed at all. Software engineering, computer science, and statistics remained quite unpopular compared to other academic programs, even in universities, let alone in primary through secondary schools. Most Gen Xers and millennials never learned to code, or frankly, even to make a pivot table or calculate basic statistical averages.

There’s a sociological change underway though, and it’s going to make the first divide look quaint in hindsight.

Over the past two or so years, we have seen the rise of a whole class of software that has been broadly (and quite inaccurately) dubbed “no-code platforms.” These tools are designed to make it much easier for users to harness the power of computing in their daily work. That could be everything from calculating the most successful digital ad campaigns given some sort of objective function, or perhaps integrating a computer vision library into a workflow that calculates the number of people entering or exiting a building.

The success and notoriety of these tools comes from the feeling that they grant superpowers to their users. Projects that once took a team of engineers some hours to build can now be stitched together in a couple of clicks through a user interface. That’s why young startups like Retool can raise at nearly a $1 billion and Airtable at $2.6 billion, while others like Bildr, Shogun, Bubble, Stacker, and dozens more are getting traction among users.

Of course, no-code tools often require code, or at least, the sort of deductive logic that is intrinsic to coding. You have to know how to design a pivot table, or understand what a machine learning capability is and what might it be useful for. You have to think in terms of data, and about inputs, transformations, and outputs.

The key here is that no-code tools aren’t successful just because they are easier to use — they are successful because they are connecting with a new generation who understands precisely the sort of logic required by these platforms to function. Today’s students don’t just see their computers and mobile devices as consumption screens and have the ability to turn them on. They are widely using them as tools of self-expression, research and analysis.

Take the popularity of platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. Easily derided as just a generation’s obsession with gaming, both platforms teach kids how to build entire worlds using their devices. Even better, as kids push the frontiers of the toolsets offered by these games, they are inspired to build their own tools. There has been a proliferation of guides and online communities to teach kids how to build their own games and plugins for these platforms (Lua has never been so popular).

These aren’t tiny changes. 150 million play Roblox games across 40 million user-created experiences, and the platform has nearly 350,000 developers. Minecraft for its part has more than 130 million active users. These are generation-defining experiences for young people today.

That excitement to harness computers is also showing up in educational data. Advanced Placement tests for Computer Science have grown from around 20,000 in 2010 to more than 70,000 this year according to the College Board, which administers the high school proficiency exams. That’s the largest increase among all of the organization’s dozens of tests. Meanwhile at top universities, computer science has emerged as the top or among the top majors, pulling in hundreds of new students per campus per year.

The specialized, almost arcane knowledge of data analysis and engineering is being widely democratized for this new generation, and that’s precisely where a new digital divide is emerging.

In business today, it’s not enough to just open a spreadsheet and make some casual observations anymore. Today’s new workers know how to dive into systems, pipe different programs together using no-code platforms, and answer problems with much more comprehensive — and real-time — answers.

It’s honestly striking to see the difference. Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might (and strong emphasis on might) put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools together to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform, and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services. And it’s all reproducible, since it is in technology and code and not produced by hand.

There are two important points here. First is to note the degree of fluency these new workers have for these technologies, and just how many members of this generation seem prepared to use them. They just don’t have the fear to try new programs out, and they know they can always use search engines to find answers to problems they are having.

Second, the productivity difference between basic computer literacy and a bit more advanced expertise is profound. Even basic but accurate data analysis on a business can raise performance substantially compared to gut instinct and expired spreadsheets.

This second digital divide is only going to get more intense. Consider students today in school, who are forced by circumstance to use digital technologies in order to get their education. How many more students are going to become even more capable of using these technologies? How much more adept are they going to be at remote work? While the current educational environment is a travesty and deeply unequal, the upshot is that ever more students are going to be forced to become deeply fluent in computers.[2]

Progress in many ways is about raising the bar. This generation is raising the bar on how data is used in the workplace, in business, and in entrepreneurship. They are better than ever at bringing together various individual services and cohering them into effective experiences for their customers, readers, and users. The No-Code Generation has the potential to finally fill that missing productivity gap in the global economy, making our lives better while saving time for everyone.

[1] Probably worth pointing out that the other “digital divide” at the time was describing households who had internet access and households who did not. That’s a divide that unfortunately still plagues America and many other rich, industrialized countries.

[2] Important to note that access to computing is still an issue for many students and represents one of the most easily fixable inequalities today in America. Providing equal access to computing should be an absolute imperative.

News: This startup wants to fix the broken structure of internships

• October 26, 2020
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Internships are an opportunity for students to experiment with new career paths and land a full-time offer ahead of graduation. For companies, the weeks-long programs help recruit and train job-ready hires. While the stakes are high, the coronavirus-spurred office closures and market volatility made a number of tech companies slim down or cancel their internship

Internships are an opportunity for students to experiment with new career paths and land a full-time offer ahead of graduation. For companies, the weeks-long programs help recruit and train job-ready hires.

While the stakes are high, the coronavirus-spurred office closures and market volatility made a number of tech companies slim down or cancel their internship programs. Similar to remote schooling, the startups that kept their programs had a huge hurdle to face: How do you teach and train students across the world about your company?

That’s where Symba, a Techstars alum, comes in. The 12-person startup created a white-label software tool to help companies, including Robinhood and Genentech, create an online space to communicate and collaborate with their now-distributed interns.

“Every year, organizations are reinventing the wheel and starting their internship program from scratch,” Ahva Sadeghi, CEO of Symba, said. “It’s like, you’re spending so much money, this is a core part of your recruitment, but you’re not invested in an infrastructure to make sure it’s sustainable.”

Symba sells a plug-and-play workspace for both interns and managers. Interns sign into Symba through a branded landing page and are brought into a workspace. They can then toggle between feedback, community, profiles and projects. There’s also an entire area for onboarding tutorials and company history.

Sadeghi is joined by co-founder and CTO Nikita Gupta, who built the entire site from scratch.

Symba was built with a big focus on creating channels for feedback between interns and managers. There is a tab dedicated solely to feedback, where managers can consistently rank their direct reports on a five-star rating scale across various skills. Interns are also able to request feedback.

Each user is invited to create a profile so other interns can reach out and learn about their cohort. While Symba wants to be where interns live during their internship, there’s no direct messaging mechanisms within the web-based platform. Instead, Symba has embedded a Slack integration for users who want to talk directly.

Managers, on the other hand, are able to log in, assign tasks and check on progress for their direct reports. Feedback is also tracked during the entirety of the internship, to help see who has made progress and deserves a potential return offer.

Because interns come in for only eight to 12 weeks, she says the traditional internship onboarding process — which includes bringing them all onto a company’s full-time tech stack — could create chaos for the organization. Symba wants to be a low-lift alternative.

Sadeghi says that customers have been attracted to the alumni features in their platform, which allow managers to engage interns after the program is complete. The applicant-tracking system works to keep potential hires in the fold of the company.

So far, Symba is optimistic that the tool is working. Users log into the product an average of six to nine times per day, and there have been more than 15,000 intern-projects created on Symba.

The company declined to disclose revenue, citing the stage of its business, but said that it charges companies $30 to $50 per user per month for the product. The average size of a Symba cohort is 80, but they have had customers who bring more than 2,000 interns onto the product. It only works with companies who pay their interns.

A hurdle of Symba will be the seasonality of its revenue. Because most internships are in the summer, Symba will likely find most growth opportunities during that three-month period.

Symba’s early growth is directly related to the pandemic, as the fear of the virus closed offices, and, in turn, shuttered internship programs. Symba’s success will hinge on if the team can convince companies that an online workspace for interns is a necessary product even when offices reopen.

Beyond translating into a post-pandemic world, Symba wants to be a solution for clients such as bootcamps, accelerators or fellowships. If it’s able to land year-round clients, it will be able to balance the seasonality of its current revenue of summer internships.

The success so far is promising: Early momentum has helped Symba raise $750,000 from a number of investors, including 1517 Fund, January Ventures and Hustle Fund.

News: What would Databricks be worth in a 2021 IPO?

• October 26, 2020
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TechCrunch recently covered Databricks’ financial performance in 2020, contrasting its recent performance to some historical 2019 data that the company shared. The data-and-analysis focused unicorn grew its annual run rate 75% to $350 million, compared to its year-ago quarter, meaning that the firm is growing well at scale. TechCrunch described it as “an obvious IPO

TechCrunch recently covered Databricks’ financial performance in 2020, contrasting its recent performance to some historical 2019 data that the company shared.

The data-and-analysis focused unicorn grew its annual run rate 75% to $350 million, compared to its year-ago quarter, meaning that the firm is growing well at scale. TechCrunch described it as “an obvious IPO candidate” at the time, a little under two weeks ago.

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Since that point, Bloomberg reported that Databricks is indeed charging ahead with an IPO, a transaction that could come as soon as the first half of 2021, writing that that it “has held talks with banks but has yet to hire underwriters” for its flotation.

That is enough news for us to have fun with. So, this morning let’s collate all that we know about the company’s financial performance, mix in some current market valuation metrics, and do some light projecting of Databricks’ growth. Our question? What might the company be worth at the end of Q1 or Q2 next year.

Of course, there are some worrying signs on the horizon that the stock market is about to shift lower, but, hey, there’s no need to be a pessimist this early on a Monday morning. Let’s get into the math.

Databricks’ potential IPO valuations

Starting with some history, Databricks was worth $6.2 billion after its September, 2019 Series F round of capital. The company raised $400 million in the transaction, its largest round to-date by $150 million. That capital should get the company to an H1 2020 IPO, provided that its spending didn’t go all old-school Dropbox.

News: YouTube revamps its mobile app with new gestures, video chapter lists, and more

• October 26, 2020
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YouTube today is rolling out a series of updates to its player page on mobile devices. The changes relocate some elements, add new features — like an expanded set of gesture-based navigation options — and update existing ones, like video chapters, among other things. Video chapters were introduced in May, as an easier way to

YouTube today is rolling out a series of updates to its player page on mobile devices. The changes relocate some elements, add new features — like an expanded set of gesture-based navigation options — and update existing ones, like video chapters, among other things.

Video chapters were introduced in May, as an easier way to get to the “good part” of a video, without having to manually fast-forward. Instead, creators can apply timestamps to their videos that allow users to quickly jump to a specific section of a video or backtrack to rewatch a key part.

These chapters are automatically enabled as a line of timestamps and titles, based on chapter information the creator adds to their video’s description, beginning at segment 0:00.

Today, YouTube is extending this feature to include a new list view that lets you see a complete list of all the chapters included in the video, each with their own preview thumbnail. You can access this list view by tapping or clicking on the chapter title in the player, then jump to the part of the video you want to see by tapping the video chapter in the list.

This make chapters easier to navigate, as the thumbnails offer a visual guide to the various parts of the video.

YouTube is also today updating its player page. To make captions more accessible, it’s moving the button to a more prominent position on mobile phones. The auto-play toggle has been moved as well, so it’s easier to turn it on or off while you’re watching a video — a change that will roll out to desktop users soon, too, YouTube says.

There are other small improvements on the new player page, including a re-arranged buttons and controls that respond to your input faster than they did before.

Along with the user interface changes, navigation has been updated to include an expanded set of gesture controls. Already, you can double tap on the left or right side of a video to either fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Now, you’ll be able to swipe up to enter full screen mode and swipe down to exit full screen, too.

And if you want to see how much time is counting down versus how much time has elapsed in a video you’re watching, you can tap the timestamp to switch back and forth between these numbers.

In another change, YouTube will prompt viewers with “suggested actions” when there’s a way to have a better video experience. For example, you may be prompted to rotate your phone for a landscape video, or play a video in VR. Over time, it will roll out more suggestions, as needed.

In its announcement today, YouTube mentioned a bedtime reminders feature which actually launched earlier this year. It’s not clear why it was lumped in with the other changes, as it’s already live. (YouTube says it was just a “recap”).

Many of the other changes may not be new to all users, either, however. YouTube confirmed to TechCrunch that some users will already have these features at the time of the announcement, while others will receive them this week.

The updates will roll out across both iOS and Android, starting today.

News: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit gets unofficial remote play on Surrogate.tv

• October 26, 2020
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Readers of a certain age will no doubt remember some region variation of TV Powww. The syndicated program, which found viewers at home giving directions over the phone to an in-studio operating playing an Intellivision game. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit review Perhaps the best-known variant is New York’s TV PIXXX, wherein the player would say

Readers of a certain age will no doubt remember some region variation of TV Powww. The syndicated program, which found viewers at home giving directions over the phone to an in-studio operating playing an Intellivision game.

Perhaps the best-known variant is New York’s TV PIXXX, wherein the player would say “PIXX” (a reference to the station’s call letters), in hopes of winning a T-shirt or U.S. Savings Bond. The game was, famously, plagued with the sorts of technical and latency issues one might expect from such an enterprise.

Technology has, thankfully, come a long way since then. Live streaming and cloud gaming in particular have finally started coming into their own in recent years. Founded in 2017, Finnish service Surrogate.tv offers a clever twist on these verticals, offering remote play versions of games with physical elements. Things like pinball, robot fighting and claw machines feature prominently. Naturally, all of that makes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit a perfect candidate for what the site offers.

Launched last week, Surrogate is currently offering users the chance to play the game remotely during a number of blocks throughout the week (keep in mind that human beings need to be present in-person on the other side). Using the service, four players at a time can control the RC karts, using feeds from the the remote Switches that offer up the AR overlay.

To accomplish the experience (which, Surrogate is quick to note, is in no way affiliate with Nintendo), the site emulated the Switch using the GitHub NSGadgetPi project, which is built with an Adafruit M0 microcontroller. Beyond that, each of the karts, meanwhile, requires the following, per Surrogate,

• Nintendo Switch – To run the game.

• Nintendo Mario or Luigi RC Kart – To be driven on the race track.

• Raspberry Pi 4 – To run SurroRTG and Surrogate’s custom image recognition.

• HDMI Capture Card – To capture the video feed.

• USB Sound Card – To capture the sound.

It’s a fun way to experience the game without spending $99 on a kart (and four times that to get the full four-player in-person experience). Though, as anticipated, there are some lag issues, as a few of our staff members who have tried it out can attest. Getting the hang of it takes a few races, and that can eat up some serious time. Depending on when you play, the waiting list gets pretty long — and getting some press coverage will likely only make matter worse.

At very least, however, things have improved tremendously since the days of TV Powww.

News: Pinterest’s new widget brings photos from favorite boards to your iOS 14 homescreen

• October 26, 2020
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As iPhone owners began customizing their iOS 14 homescreens with new widgets and custom icons, Pinterest iOS downloads and searches surged as the app became a top source for design ideas and inspiration. Today, Pinterest is more directly joining the homescreen customization trend with its own iOS 14 widget of its own. Last month, Pinterest

As iPhone owners began customizing their iOS 14 homescreens with new widgets and custom icons, Pinterest iOS downloads and searches surged as the app became a top source for design ideas and inspiration. Today, Pinterest is more directly joining the homescreen customization trend with its own iOS 14 widget of its own.

Last month, Pinterest broke its daily download record when it saw over 600,000+ downloads in a single day. Though third-party estimates disagreed on which day the new record was achieved, multiple firms saw an outsized number of new users downloading the Pinterest mobile app. The demand was directly tied to the #ios14homescreen redesign trend that was also being shared across social media as users showed off how they were using iOS 14’s new widgets, along with matching wallpapers and custom icons for app shortcuts to give their homescreen a new “aesthetic.”

During this time, Pinterest says it saw searches for ideas like “indie ios 14 homescreen” spike by 15x in the week following the iOS 14 launch compared with the week prior, while searches for “iPhone aesthetic” were up by 19x.

The trend also pushed custom widget makers — like Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, and Photo Widget — up to the top of the App Store charts, as they allowed users to add photos and other colorful widgets to their homescreen.

Similarly, the new Pinterest widget launching today could make for a good alternative to a static photo widget.

Instead of choosing a photo or album of photos saved to your Camera Roll to serve as the source for your iOS 14 homescreen photos as with other photo widgets, the new Pinterest widget allows you to select a Pinterest board as your photo source. The board can either be one of your own or one that you follow.

For example, you could add a widget that features your favorite motivational quotes or one that serves of photos of travel inspiration or style ideas. You could also create seasonal boards, like those for Halloween or fall or Christmas or winter, to make it easier to swap between different homescreen “aesthetics” with the changing seasons.

Pinterest says the new widget will update the photo it features on an hourly on daily basis, depending on your preferences. The widget can also be set either as a small photo or large one, but the company notes there’s no medium option as it’s not optimal for Pin length.

The widget is also interactive. When you tap the Pinterest widget, you’ll be launched directly to that Pin in the app.

As you find new photos that fit your homescreen aesthetic, you can add them to your board to keep a fresh set of photos appearing on your homescreen.

The updated app with the widget is rolling out to iOS users worldwide starting today, Pinterest says.