Year: 2018

Seems like iOS gets all the love these days. And it’s easy enough to see why. The smartphone has long been the dominant device in many users’ lives, while the desktop/laptop category has been on the decline. But macOS still has some life left in it yet.

A year after introducing the more incremental High Sierra (it’s right there in the name), Apple has returned with a macOS update that’s jam-packed with new features. Unlike other recent updates, a number of the big additions here are targeted at creative professionals, as Apple refocuses its efforts on the user base that has long been a core part of its target market. In the case of features like Dark Mode and Gallery View, there’s a lot to like on that front, as well.

For the first time iOS apps have been directly ported to macOS in an effort to kickstart cross-platform development, while Stacks should go a ways toward helping users stay a bit more organized — and sane. Now that the operating system is in public beta, here’s a rundown of the biggest and best new features Mojave has to offer.

Dark mode

The biggest addition to Mojave is also one of the more interesting from a populist standpoint. Apple made it clear during its WWDC presentation earlier this month that Dark Mode is a hat tip to creative professions. It’s a category the company once owned outright, but one Microsoft has been aggressively gunning for in recent years with its Surface line.

Apple’s been knocked for a handful of decisions viewed as taking its eye off the ball for the small but loyal contingent that has formed its core user base. The company’s been making amends for this over the past year and change, with the addition of the iMac Pro and the promised return of the Mac Pro. Dark Mode is clearly a nod toward those who spend long stretches staring at bright screens in dark rooms.

Of course, it’s not just for creative pros. Dark Mode is a potential boon to all of us desk jockeys looking for some respite from eye strain. It’s also just aesthetically pleasing, and a nice visual break from a Mac desktop design that really hasn’t changed much in the past several generations.

Apple’s done a good job here maintaining consistency across its own apps. Along with darkened menus and frames, Mail, Contacts and Calendar invert to white text on a dark background. The default Mojave desktop image of a winding sand dune has also been transformed accordingly.

Better still, there’s a dynamic version of the wallpaper that will darken, based on the time of day, as the sun sets and stars come out in the desert sky. A nice touch. However, only the default wallpaper is capable of doing that at the moment. If you want the effect, I hope you don’t mind staring at sand.

The biggest issue with Dark Mode (in this admittedly still early public beta stage) is compatibility. Apple says that the mode is designed for easy adoption by third-party developers, assuming their apps are built for the macOS Mojave SDK, but there’s no guarantee the apps you use regularly will have that compatibility at launch. That means there’s a decent chance your dark desktop scheme will be regularly interrupted by a blast of white light.

This is also the case for Apple’s own apps like Safari (though iWork and other not preloaded Apple apps don’t yet have the functionality), which have implemented aspects of Dark Mode, but in which you’re going to be spending a lot of time looking at bright pages regardless.  For most of us who spend time in and out of various apps, Dark Mode’s actual functionality is pretty limited, but you’ll no doubt be compelled give it a go anyway. At the very least, it’s a nice departure from the default macOS color scheme you’ve been ensconced in for so long.

Stacks

Dark Mode may be the feature that got the biggest crowd reaction at WWDC, but Stacks is the best. No question here, really, and this is coming from someone who’s gotten fairly consistent about tidying up his desktop. This thing is worthy of a clickbait-style “One Weird Trick to Organize Your Life” headline.

This is a surprisingly cathartic act. Hover over the wallpaper of your out of control desktop, two-finger tap the touchpad and select “Use Stacks” from the drop-down. Poof, they all shoot into their pre-ordained piles on the right. The default mode categorizes files by product type, which is probably the most straightforward method of the bunch (you also can switch to category or tag). If a file is the only one of its kind on the desktop, it will maintain its name below the thumbnail; otherwise, the file kind will show off below. Unclassified files will show up in a less helpful “other” Stack.

When new files are added to the desktop, they automatically appear in their associated pile, so long as you stay in Stacks mode. When the mode is enabled, files are essentially stuck to these spots like a grid. You can drag and drop them into apps, but can’t move them around the desktop.

Once everything is sorted, clicking on the top of the stack will spread it out so you can once again view everything all once. Click the top of the pile again, and poof, everything goes back into the pile. You also can hover over the top with the cursor and swipe the trackpad left or right with two fingers to scrub through the list. I find the method a bit less useful, but some will no doubt prefer it.

If you decide the whole cleanliness thing isn’t for you, two-finger tap the wallpaper again. Click “Use Stacks” and poof, everything gets sent back to its original entropic position on the desktop. Good on Apple for letting users revert back to the madness.

Apple’s added a LOT of different features — from Launchpad to Tags — designed to help users get better organized. For my part, I’ve largely tried and failed to incorporate them into my daily usage. Stacks, on the other hand, is a genuinely useful addition and a strong contender for the most useful feature Apple has brought to macOS in recent memory.

Desktop

Gallery View is an interesting addition for similar reasons as Dark Mode. The feature is a spiritual successor to the familiar Cover Flow. It’s less dynamic, relying on a bottom scroll bar, rather than large images up top. It puts meta data front and center much more than before. This is especially apparent when dealing with images, giving you an almost light-room level of detail on photos.

The information includes, but is not limited to: dimensions, resolution, color space, color profile, device make, device model, aperture value, exposure time, focal length, ISO speed, flash, F number, metering mode and white balance. It’s lot for most users. In fact, it’s probably overkill for a majority of us, but it’s clearly another indication that Apple’s working to maintain its hold on the creative professional category by building that intense level of detail directly into the Finder.

Tucked down in the bottom-right corner of Finder windows are Quick Actions. There are a handful of handy features for editing images and PDF docs, including Rotate Left (as found in the iOS Photos app), markup (as found in Adobe Acrobat), Add Password and Create PDF, which turns files into PDFs, as advertised.

It’s an interesting system-level embrace of Adobe’s file format, and also makes the need for Preview somewhat redundant, as it’s baked directly into Finder. The options are dependent on file type — so, if you have, say, an audio or video file, you can trim it directly in the Finder window. For most tasks, you’ll probably want to open an editing app, but I would love to see more personalized actions down here. For my own needs, something like file cropping and resizing would be great to have built directly into the Finder window, saving me a trip to Photoshop or some online editing tool. I realize my needs aren’t the same as everyone’s — but all the more reason to offer some manner of customization down there, akin to what Apple offers with the MacBook Touch Bar.

Screenshots

File previews are getting a lot of love here, throughout. I’m not sure how often normal people use screenshots, but I take them all the damn time, so any addition here is welcome. Beyond general usefulness, I suspect a lot of people simply don’t take screenshots because the key command is fairly convoluting. Shift-Command-5 isn’t exactly easier to remember than other, similar combinations, but it does bring up a hand control window overlay.

From there, you can choose to capture a full screen, a window, a selection you outline yourself, record a video of the entire screen (which I used for the above Stacks GIF) or record a video of a selection. It certainly saves from having to memorize all of the different commands. The new screenshots also make it possible to set a timer of five or 10 seconds before snapping a photo.

Apple’s taking a play from iOS, offering up a small window in the right-hand corner of the screen once the screenshot has been snapped. You can click directly into that, or just wait for it to disappear. From there, you can markup the file, drag and drop it it into a document or have it automatically sent to the desktop, documents, Mail, Messages, Preview or a Clipboard, so they don’t all wind up in the same spot.

Continuity Camera

Not sure how often this feature will actually prove handy for most users, but it’s a cool feature, nonetheless. Continuity Camera essentially uses an iPhone as a surrogate camera for the desktop. It’s a clever bit of cross device synergy.

Say you’re in Page. Go to Edit > Insert from Your iPhone and choose Photo. Take a shot, approve it on the device, and it will automatically insert itself in the doc. It works like a charm. The scan feature also works surprisingly well here. I took a shot of a crumpled receipt and it looked pretty pristine, regardless. As someone who recently went through a lengthy visa process, I wish I’d had access to this thing a few weeks back.

FaceTime

This one definitely wowed the crowd. FaceTime’s macOS/iOS-only is the main thing that’s hampered my own use of the service, but there are some really nice additions here that are making me rethink the decision. The ability to add up to 32 users is far and away the most fascinating, and Apple’s done a good job managing that kind of unruly number.

Similar to services like Google Meet, the system automatically detects who’s speaking and places them front and center in the app. Also like Meet, you can manually prioritize the users on whom you’d like to focus.

Other users will shrink down and eventually populate the carousel at the bottom. You can get the list of participants by clicking the Info button. And invitations for more users can be extended while the chat is in progress.

iOS apps

Apple made a point of addressing longtime rumors of a convergence between the company’s desktop and mobile operating systems, flashing a giant “No” onstage. That said, the two OSes are getting even more shared DNA. The biggest news on this front is the porting of three iOS apps to the Mac. This is clearly the first step toward a larger convergence of some kind, but more to the point, it’s a way to start getting app developers to port their iOS apps to the desktop.

Sure, macOS had a huge head start, but iOS has been getting all of the developer love in recent years. Making it easier to create apps cross-system means devs don’t have to decide. It also means that the app that come to macOS through this method will be more likely to do so through the Mac App Store — a distribution method Apple clearly prefers over more traditional downloads, for myriad reasons.

To start, Apple has brought over News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Home. In my time with Mojave thus far, News is the one I now use pretty regularly. I was a bit hesitant to move to a more walled approach to news delivery, but I do appreciate having a centralize hub of the trusted news sources I visit regularly, coupled with alerts that populate the Notification Center at right.

It’s probably not going to replace my use of TweetDeck for work-related news, as, among other things, it just seems to update more slowly. But it’s a nice tool to have churning in the background, along with a check-in once or twice a day, to make sure I haven’t missed a moment of the horror show that is news in 2018. Fun!

Voice Memos probably has the most limited scope of the bunch. I’ve switched over from various third-party tools I use to record meetings from time to time, and it’s nice having that sharing across devices. Students will likely find it handy for lectures as well, but beyond that, it’s probably not going to get a ton of play for most users.

Home is the most interesting addition of the bunch. Certainly it makes sense, as Apple makes a bigger push to remain competitive against the likes of Amazon and Google in the smart home. The Mac isn’t designed to be a hub in this case — that’s still the job of Apple TV and HomePod, so far as the company is concerned. But the desktop OS does make for a nice control panel, and it’s handy to be able to check in on your place remotely from the comfort of your MacBook.

Given that they are, in fact, ports, not much has changed from a design standpoint. That means it’s essentially the same layout as the one you’ll get on your iPad, with a grid of tidy little boxes representing your various connected home devices. It’s pretty hard to shake the compulsion to reach out and touch the things. Apple, of course, has taken a hard-line against incorporating touch into its laptops and desktops, so reaching out won’t get you very far in this particular case.

Odds and ends

• The Mac App Store gets an overhaul here, including search filtering and new content categories. Apple’s also added the kind of editorial curation it’s had on iOS and other apps.
• More privacy permissions is always a good thing. In addition to the standard access to Contacts, Calendar Photos and Reminders, Apple’s added notifications for apps accessing the camera, mic and sensitive data. That means more pop-ups to click through, but more importantly, some extra peace of mind.
• The system now does “password auditing,” to make sure you don’t reuse the same passwords over and over again.
• Siri gets a couple of additions on the desktop here, including the ability to add passwords with voice.

 

Silicon Valley, for better and oftentimes worse, provides an uncanny valley view of the ups and downs of IRL Silicon Valley.

The HBO series has shown what it’s like to deal with an incumbent who steals an idea or IP, the humiliation of saving the day, only to be fired as CEO by your VC, or the fear and exhilaration of competing on the Startup Battlefield stage — a familiar spot for those who have been to Disrupt.

TechCrunch is helping create another Silicon Valley meta moment. Silicon Valley co-creator Mike Judge will join us on stage at TC Disrupt SF.

Interestingly, Judge joined a team from HBO at Disrupt well before Silicon Valley ever aired, doing research for the then-forthcoming series. And, of course, Season 1 ended with the Startup Battlefield stage.

The cycle continued in 2016, when Judge came on stage to discuss what it’s like to parody Silicon Valley culture.

And round and round we go.

Judge has been in the entertainment industry for a long time, creating Beavis and Butt-head, co-creating King of the Hill, and serving as writer and director for classic films like Office Space and Idiocracy.

As Silicon Valley heads into its sixth season, we’re excited to chat with Judge about the direction of the show and the evolution of the media industry as a whole.

And hey, maybe we’ll hear a few spoilers for the upcoming season.

Tickets to the Disrupt SF 2018 are available right here.

Instagram’s latest assault on Snapchat, FaceTime and Houseparty launches today. TechCrunch scooped back in March that Instagram would launch video calling, and the feature was officially announced at F8 in May. Now it’s actually rolling out to everyone on iOS and Android, allowing up to four friends to group video call together through Instagram Direct.

With the feed, Stories, messaging, Live, IGTV and now video calling, Instagram is hoping to become a one-stop-shop for its 1 billion users’ social needs. This massive expansion in functionality over the past two years is paying off, SimilarWeb told TechCrunch in an email, which estimates that the average U.S. user has gone from spending 29 minutes per day on the app in September 2017 to 55 minutes today. More time spent means more potential ad views and revenue for the Facebook subsidiary that a Bloomberg analyst just valued at $100 billion after it was bought for less than $1 billion in 2012.

One cool feature of Instagram video calling is that you can minimize the window and bounce around the rest of Instagram without ending the call. That opens new opportunities for co-browsing with friends as if you were hanging out together. More friends can join an Instagram call in progress, though you can mute them if you don’t want to get more call invites. You’re allowed to call anyone you can direct message by hitting the video button in a chat, and blocked people can’t call you.

Here’s how Instagram’s group video calling stacks up to the alternatives:

• Instagram – 4-way plus simultaneous browsing
• Snapchat – 16-way
• FaceTime – 32-way (coming in iOS 12 this fall)
• Houseparty – 8-way per room with limitless parallel rooms
• Facebook Messenger – 6-way with up to 50 people listening via audio

Instagram is also rolling out two more features promised at F8. The Explore page will now be segmented to show a variety of topic channels that reveal associated content below. Previously, Explore’s 200 million daily users just saw a random mish-mash of popular content related to their interests, with just a single “Videos You Might Like” section separated.

Now users will see a horizontal tray of channels atop Explore, including an algorithmically personalized For You collection, plus ones like Art, Beauty, Sports and Fashion, depending on what content you regularly interact with. Users can swipe between the categories to browse, and then scroll up to view more posts from any they enjoy. A list of sub-hashtags appears when you open a category, like #MoGraph (motion graphics) or #Typeface when you open art. And if you’re sick of seeing a category, you can mute it. Strangely, Instagram has stripped Stories out of Explore entirely, but when asked, the team told us it plans to bring Stories back in the near future.

The enhanced Explore page could make it easier for people to discover new creators. Growing the audience of these content makers is critical to Instagram as it strives to be their favorite app amongst competition. Snapchat lacks a dedicated Explore section or other fan base-growing opportunities, which has alienated some creators, while the new Instagram topic channels is reminiscent of YouTube’s mobile Trending page.

Finally, Instagram is rolling out camera effects designed by partners, starting with Ariana Grande, BuzzFeed, Liz Koshy, Baby Ariel and the NBA. If you’re following these accounts, you’ll see their effect in the Stories camera, and you can hit Try It On if you spot a friend using one you like. This opens the door to accounts all offering their own augmented reality and 2D filters without the Stories camera becoming overstuffed with lenses you don’t care about.

What’s peculiar is that all of these features are designed to boost the amount of time you spend on Instagram just as it’s preparing to launch a Usage Insights dashboard for tracking if you’re becoming addicted to the app. At least the video calling and camera effects promote active usage, but Explore definitely encourages passive consumption that research shows can be unhealthy.

Therein lies the rub of Instagram’s mission and business model with its commitment to user well-being. Despite CEO Kevin Systrom’s stated intention that “any time [spent on his app] should be positive and intentional“ and that he wants Instagram to “be part of the solution,” the company earns more by keeping people glued to the screen rather than present in their lives.

Uber has about 95,000 monthly active drivers in Saudi Arabia. And right now, only one is a woman.

But that’s about to change. Uber (as well as Middle East ride-hailing rival Careem) is launching programs aimed at leveraging the sweeping cultural and economic changes afoot in the country.

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman lifted the country’s ban on women driving. It’s one of many changes spearheaded by the kingdom’s heir to the throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has encouraged reforms in Saudi Arabia in an effort to diversify the country’s economy.

Uber has spent months preparing for this moment, conducting research on the country’s demographics and developing an approach that will add to its driver ranks without veering too far from cultural norms there.

Uber says it will pilot a new feature this fall that will let women drivers in Saudi Arabia select a preference to be connected to female riders.

The pilot feature won’t guarantee that the female driver will get a female rider. But a look at Uber’s ridership numbers in the country and it’s clear the demographics favor a female driver to female rider matchup. Uber has about 1.33 million quarterly active riders in Saudi Arabia, and 80 percent of those riders are women.

Uber says market research conducted in collaboration with Ipsos helped it understand (and ultimately take advantage of) the opportunity.

The research found 31 percent of Saudi women surveyed were interested in driving as a way to earn money. The company has also discovered that 74 percent of prospective women drivers interviewed would only be interested in driving women riders.

Uber has made other changes to its operations in Saudi Arabia in an effort to attract and retrain this new batch of drivers. In March, Uber announced Masaruky — which means “your path” in Arabic — a two-year initiative that aims to increase women’s participation in the workforce through access to affordable transportation.

Uber kicked off the campaign with a pledge of SAR 1 million ($266,620) and a partnership with the Al Nahda Society to financially support women interested in obtaining a driver license. Earlier this month, Uber rolled out a registration portal called Masaruky for Saudi women interested in driving on Uber. A company spokeswoman for Uber’s Middle East operations said more than 100 Saudi women have signed up so far, expressing interest in becoming drivers.

The company also recently finished a support center for female drivers in Riyadh.

Meanwhile, Careem has received more than 2,000 applications since announcing it would recruit female drivers in Saudi Arabia. The company has a goal of hiring 20,000 Captinahs (its term for female drivers) across the Middle East by 2020.

At its I/O developer conference last month, Google previewed a major update to Google Maps that promised to bring personalized restaurant recommendations and more to the company’s mapping tool. Today, many of these new features started rolling out to Google Maps users.

The core Google Maps experience for getting directions hasn’t changed, of course, but the app now features a new “Explore” tab that lets you learn more about what’s happening around you, as well as a “For you” tab that provides you with recommendations for restaurants, lists of up and coming venues and the ability to “follow” neighborhoods and get updates when there are new restaurants and cafes that you would probably like. The main difference between the Explore and For you tabs is that the former is all about giving you recommendations for right now, while the latter is more about planning ahead and keeping tabs on an area in the long run.

While most of the other features are rolling out to all users worldwide, the new For you tab and the content in it is only available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and Japan for now. Content in this tab is still a bit limited, too, but Google promises that it’ll ramp up content over the course of this week.

Both of the new tabs feature plenty of new features. There is the “foodie list,” for example, which shows you the hottest new restaurants in an area. And if you feel completist, Google will keep track of which one of these places you’ve been to and which ones you still have to visit. Like before, the Explore tab also features automatically curated lists of good places to go for lunch, with kids or for a romantic dinner. It’s not just about food and coffee (or tea), though; those lists also include other activities, and Google Maps can now also highlight local events.

With this launch, Google is also releasing its new “Your Match” scores, which assigns a numeric rating to each restaurant or bar, depending on your previous choices and ratings. The idea here is that while aggregate ratings are often useful, your individual taste often differs from the masses. With this new score, Google tries to account for this. To improve these recommendations, you can now explicitly tell Maps which cuisines and restaurants you like.

It’s worth noting that there are still some features that Google promised at I/O that are not part of this release. Group planning, for example, which allows you to create a list of potential meet-up spots and lets your friends vote on them, is not part of this release.

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The updated Google Maps for iOS and Android is now available in the Play Store and App Store.

If you’d like to read more about Google’s rationale for many of these changes, take a look at our in-depth interview with Sophia Lin, Google’s senior product manager on the Google Maps team, from I/O.

After failing to secure a renewal for a license to operate a private hire vehicle service in London last September, Uber — the controversial transportation startup valued at around $62 billion — has finally had a short reprieve. Today, a judge hearing the Uber appeal (appearing as Uber London Limited, or ULL) against the city’s transportation regulator, Transport for London, said that the company would provisionally get a 15 month license, so that it could continue to work on satisfying the conditions that TfL said that it had failed to meet previously, ahead of potentially applying for a regular, five-year license after it demonstrated that it was now playing nice.

“While ULL was not a fit and proper person… it is now a fit and proper person, and I grant a license,” said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot in her ruling. She said her decision came from seeing substantial documentary evidence that Uber has modified its practices and seems committed to trying to adhere to this. She noted that TfL went into this case noting that it would not object to Uber London Limited (ULL) getting a license per se.

It will also pay £425,000 in court charges for this case.

Uber has been in London since 2012, starting with 300 drivers in that year and now ballooning to 48,000 registered drivers in 2018. Just under 3.6 million riders used it in a 12-week period, its UK general manager Tom Elvidge said in testimony this week.

But that aggressive growth came with a dark cloud, with many saying that it failed to heed to existing safety and other regulations and best practices when doing so. “The attitude of the previous managers appeared to be grow the business, come what may,” Arbuthnot noted.

TfL grants a license “where it is satisfied that the applicant is a fit and proper person.” At issue was the fact that TfL didn’t think that it was, and Uber was appealing that.

The decision comes after two days of testimony and examinations that highlighted both how Uber is currently seeking to position itself in the eyes of the public and those who regulate it, and also the many issues that the company has had and continues to have among its critics.

The UK case and its outcome — the epitome of a tussle between a lion and a unicorn, the two animals on the UK’s coat of arms (motto: “God and my right”, pretty apt when considering Uber and its predicament) — have become a touchstone for how Uber’s regulatory scuffles might play out in other markets. The company, in essence, is not just in the hotseat for its regulatory violations in the UK but for its approach to how it builds its business at the expense of rules, safety and more.

Uber might have gone into the appeal originally asking for its full five-year license, but yesterday it laid out a case asking for a provisional / probationary license of 18 months, which today turned into a 15-month request by the time its lawyer, Tom de la Mare, was laying out his closing arguments. “Bargaining,” said Arbuthnot with a raised eyebrow.

The company has spent the last two days both admitting its many shortcomings going into the appeals process. “We did some things that were pretty stupid,” De la Mare, the lawyer representing Uber, said in his closing arguments today. But he also outlined how the company is taking steps to change its procedures and practices on every point that TfL had failed them on.

With many assuming that there would be some kind of license granted today, much of TfL’s arguments in the last two days appeared to rest on demonstrating the character of Uber and whether complying with rules was a strong enough indication of a company shifting its culture.

“Just because the instances of conduct are historical doesn’t mean they fall out of the picture,” Martin Chamberlain, the barrister representing TfL, said in his closing arguments. “Ask whether the changes that have been made adequately address those failings.”

“We’ve had five years of a very difficult relationship, where Uber has felt they didn’t require regulations in the same way that we regulate others,” Helen Chapman, TfL’s director of licensing and regulation, said today in the witness box.

This was the case, she noted, in how Uber had failed to talk to TfL in relation to a data breach that affected 57 million users globally, including some in the UK. Uber identified but then tried to keep the incident unreported, although the breach was eventually uncovered by Bloomberg. “Our frustration [was] that we identified this issue through the media rather than directly from Uber,” Chapman noted.

One of the key issues at play was how Uber was monitoring and reporting complaints on the platform, and specifically how it relays those complaints to the police in cases when they related to criminal activity. “Uber is committing to report every complaint that could be construed as criminal,” De la Mare said, describing a new reporting procedure that had been put in place that will include six-month checkups on the process to make sure it is best practice and being followed.

Another has been whether Uber had been using anything to systematically evade regulatory scrutiny.

The company was reported to have developed a service, Greyball, that it claimed to use to violate its terms of service; but was revealed in a New York Times report to be used to essentially “hide” its activities from law enforcement and regulatory officials. TfL had raised this as an issue as well — specifically, whether it was using Greyball in London. “Greyball had never been used in the UK,” De la Mare said.

Another key issue that was the subject of much discussion was the checks that Uber carries out on drivers it is onboarding and maintaining on its platform. One concerned their eyesight and health: the company had been using a remote (not in-person) healthcheck called Push Doctor (which has raised quite a bit of money, possibly on the back of lucrative contracts?).

The startup’s name was essentially dragged through the mud this week by both sides: TfL questioned whether it was an effective way of checking people out, and concluding it an example of how Uber is too perfunctory in its safety checks. Uber readily agreed and said that it was wrong to use it.

Going forward it will be worth seeing what Uber is laying out now is simply lip service, or whether the zebra really has changed its stripes. “It certainly works better when an operator is seeking permission rather than forgiveness,” Chapman said.

b8ta, the retail-as-a-service startup, has closed a $19 million Series B round led by Macy’s with participation from Sound Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Capitaland, Graphene Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Plug and Play Ventures. This round brings b8ta’s total funding to $39 million.

Macy’s decision to lead this round comes in light of its recent partnership with b8ta to enhance the retailer’s experiential-based concept called The Market. Macy’s is also expanding its partnership with b8ta to launch The Market in a larger space, entirely powered by Built by b8ta, which functions as a retail-as-a-service platform for brands that want a physical presence. b8ta’s software solution includes checkout, inventory, point of sale, inventory management, staff scheduling services and more.

“Testing a shop with them in their store and having really good success made us feel bullish that this model would work well for them,” b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby told TechCrunch.

To the outsider, there’s this idea that Macy’s is struggling — in light of a bunch of store closures. That was a conversation b8ta had internally, Norby said.

“As an example, our board was initially not certain we should do something with them but I felt like it was worth a shot,” Norby told me. “For us to get comfortable, we spent a lot of time trying to understand their business. What we found was that perception in the media didn’t really meet the reality for us. The reality is Macy’s is one of the most important companies in the country.”

Macy’s, Norby said, is also one of the largest real estate company’s in the world and owns “so much real estate in all of the best places.”

He added, “it’s not that retail itself is dying, it’s just that it’s changing. The way people want to shop is changing and we have a shared alignment on bringing that next generation of a company into the space.”

In addition to the expanded partnership with Macy’s, b8ta is opening up new flagship stores in Chicago and Tysons Corner, Va. b8ta currently has more than 78 flagship stores across the country to let consumers experience tech gadgets in real life.

It’s no secret that Google has long planned to open a cloud region in Los Angeles. The company has long said that a second region on the U.S. West Coast was in the works, after all. What we didn’t know for sure was when this new region would go live. But as Google announced today, the new Los Angeles cloud region will go live in July, making it the company’s fifth region in the U.S.

During an event in Los Angeles today, Google specifically positioned this region as the ideal region for the media and entertainment industry in the area. “The LA region will provide our media and entertainment customers with fast, scalable compute resources, so visual effects and animation studios can spend less time waiting on renders, and more time bringing their creative visions to life,” Google notes in its announcement today.

But beyond this focus on entertainment, it’s worth noting that this new region now also gives every company that best on the Google Cloud platform a second West Coast option besides its Oregon region. That’s not what Google is focusing on today, though. The company’s event and blog posts all focus on the various rendering tools like Zync Render, which Google acquired back in 2014, and Anvato, a video streaming and monetization platform it acquired in 2016.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft Azure already offers a region in Southern California, though AWS does not.

Google is giving developers a new storage option in its cloud. Cloud Filestore, which will launch into beta next month, essentially offers a fully managed network attached storage (NAS) service in the cloud. This means that companies can now easily run applications that need a traditional file system interface on the Google Cloud Platform.

Traditionally, developers who wanted access to a standard file system over the kind of object storage and database options that Google already offered had to rig up a file server with a persistent disk. Filestore does away with all of this and simply allows Google Cloud users to spin up storage as needed.

The promise of Filestore is that it offers high throughput, low latency and high IOPS. The service will come in two tiers: premium and standard. The premium tier will cost $0.30 per GB and month and promises a throughput speed of 700 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS, no matter the storage capacity. Standard tier Filestore storage will cost $0.20 per GB and month, but performance scales with capacity and doesn’t hit peak performance until you store more than 10TB of data in Filestore.

Google launched Filestore at an event in Los Angeles that mostly focused on the entertainment and media industry. There are plenty of enterprise applications in those verticals that need a shared filesystem, but the same can be said for many other industries that rely on similar enterprise applications.

The Filestore beta will launch next month. Since it’s still in beta, Google isn’t making any uptime promises right now and there is no ETA for when the service will come out of beta.

Pinterest has set the pace for how to present visual search results to those who are looking for pictures rather than words as answers. Now, Google has taken a cue from the startup in its own search product on desktop.

It’s testing a new look for its images search on desktop that is aligning pictures vertically rather than horizontally, making the results look more like Pinterest’s. The images now have short captions and sometimes small badges describing what it is (“product” or a video, for example).

And then, clicking on the images, you now get more dynamic information about what you are seeing. For example, if it’s a product, and the site selling it has worked with Google Shopping to upload results to Google, users can see information about whether a product is in stock and go directly to ordering it, along with not one but two lists of related images underneath.

Google confirmed the test but didn’t add more detail. “We’re constantly experimenting to improve our experience with Google Images and don’t have anything further to announce at this time,” a spokesperson said. 

This is not Google’s first tip of the hat to Pinterest: the company actually added the dynamic information feature to its mobile app last year. Its Android search app also got upgraded with machine learning about a year ago to identify items in pictures and suggest related items.

In the new expanded feature item on desktop, users will now also see similar and related items, meaning some of that computer vision is also expanding to desktop.

For some context, we’re also getting image search results that are still in Google’s standard horizontally-aligned grid. These results come with smaller images to fit more into each row, and when you click on them you get a larger image on a dark background, with the ability to click through to the site, or save or share the link (as you would with Pinterest) but no product details. This is what the old basic desktop image search and the “more information” box look like:

Google’s push to update the look  its search for images is in line with how it’s gradually overhauling its whole search experience. The idea appears to be twofold: drive more engagement and clicks by making the results less static; and lead people to more conversions on purchases to help with Google’s commerce ambitions.

A visual search result with bigger pictures looks better, and those who are actually interested in buying something are more likely to use Google to do it if they are able to get more useful results from their searches. Linking up its image search with inventory and purchasing is one more step in Google controlling that experience and keeping users from simply jumping to Amazon or eBay after the search to look for and buy what they are seeking.

It’s also notable that Google has been leading on new user interfaces first on mobile before testing (and eventually rolling them out?) on desktop. When it comes to e-commerce, although mobile has made huge advances and has been seen to drive purchasing, desktop browing, with its bigger screen and presumably more sedentary experience continues to be a pull and still accounts for a significant proportion of purchases, especially in bigger-ticket items.

Earlier this year, Google launched an updated design for Google Images on mobile that includes captions on search results — which are also appearing in the test we’ve been seeing, but do not appear on current desktop search. This was on top of showing badges (like “recipe” or “product”) on visual results, which it also launched on mobile last year, and are also appearing in the test we have been seeing. 

Others seem to be getting the same test, although response — on Twitter at least — has not been very positive.