Year: 2018

One of the keys to OnePlus’ success has been focusing on one phone at a time — and aside from cases and, of all things, a backpack, the company hasn’t strayed too far from phones. Along with this week’s release of the OnePlus 6, however, the company’s adding another key piece of hardware to its arsenal.

Following in the footsteps of Apple, Samsung, Google and, well, just about every other hardware manufacturer on the planet, OnePlus is launching Bullets Wireless. The name derives from the wired version of the company’s cheaply priced Bullet earbuds, though this version looks decidedly less like ammunition.

The Bluetooth buds feature the yoked design that’s pretty popular among lower-cost hardware. And, indeed, $69 is a pretty tough price to beat for Bluetooth headphones. They might not be as pretty as some of the competition, but they get the job done, while sounding pretty solid.

And, bonus, the earbuds have magnets, so they snap together like a necklace shutting off the music when not in use. In a release, the OnePlus CEO says the company’s been working on the things for about two years now, and the result is pretty solid for something that’s a fraction of the price of the competition.

The big thing here, aside from price, is the fast-charge tech, borrowed from the company’s handsets. Using a standard USB-C cable, you should be able to get a full five hours of use with just 10 minutes of charging.

The headphones are also water-resistant and feature fins to keep them in place during a workout. Whether or not that behind the neck style is suitable for your own fitness routine, on the other hand, is entirely up to you. The button on the back of the neck will also pull up Google Assistant with one long press.

The Bullets Wireless are due out at some point next month. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that the company is still embracing the headphone jack with its new handset, the OnePlus 6, so consider these a bit of futureproofing.

Microsoft’s always taken a premium approach to its Surface line, showing users what its operating system can do when run on top of the line hardware. It’s a model that makes sense for a company with so many ties to third-party hardware manufacturers. But the line that’s been so focused on the high-end needs of “creative professionals” may be getting a budget addition in the near future.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Microsoft is eyeing the end of the year to release a $400 version of the Surface designed to compete more directly with Apple’s ubiquitous tablet. Of course, many have tried and largely failed to take on the iPad — including Microsoft itself.

The company launched the Surface RT half a decade ago, without making much of a splash. These days, the tablet herd has thinned a bit, and Microsoft has established itself as a maker of premium first-party hardware.

The new device is said to sport a 10-inch screen, putting it in direct competition with Apple’s lower-priced iPad. At $400, Microsoft’s entry would run $70 more than the budget iPad’s starting price, but would still run considerably less than the $799 Surface Pro. And this being Microsoft, there are expected to be multiple SKUs. The devices reportedly won’t ship with a keyboard cover — one of the Surface’s biggest selling points — though they’ll all sport a kickstand and feature a USB C port for charging.

Microsoft, naturally, won’t respond to queries about the device, which is reportedly set for a release in the second half of this year. Given the company’s recent push with Windows 10S, the product could certainly make sense as part of the company’s push into low priced devices for the education market.

Twitter is giving developers more time to adjust to its API platform overhaul, which has affected some apps‘ ability to continue operating in the same fashion. The company clarified this morning, along with news of the general availability of its Account Activity API, that it will be delaying the shutdown of some of its legacy APIs. That is, APIs originally slated for a June 19, 2018 shutdown – including Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message Endpoints – will now be deprecated on Wednesday, August 16, 2018.

The news follows an announcement from Favstar that said it will end its business when the older APIs are shut down for good. And it follows the relaunched Mac app from Tweetbot, which includes a list of changes as to how the app will work when the API changes go into effect.

Twitter had said back in April that it would delay the scheduled June 19th deprecation date, but didn’t announce a new date at that time. That may have led some developers to believe that a longer reprieve was in order while Twitter rethought its plans.

Today, Twitter says that’s not the case.

With the public launch of the Account Activity API, developers can transition to the new API platform.

Plus, the beta that only offered Direct Messages is being shut down on August 16th, 2018, Twitter says. (Migration details on that are here.)

Twitter is also reducing the number of subscriptions from the 35 accounts allowed during the beta to 15 free subscriptions for its Premium Sandbox of the API – the free tier meant as way for developers to experiment. The paid Premium tier offers up to 250 accounts, and Enterprise pricing is available, too. (See chart below).

But developers will have to reach out to Twitter directly to receive enterprise pricing details.

In addition, Twitter makes it clear that any apps that rely on the older Site Streams and User Streams APIs, will have to live without that functionality after August 16th. It claims this won’t affect most apps – only a small percentage.

“As a few developers have noticed, there’s no streaming connection capability or home timeline data, which are only used by a small amount of developers (roughly 1% of monthly active apps),” writes Twitter Senior Product Manager, Kyle Weiss, in a blog post. “As we retire aging APIs, we have no plans to add these capabilities to Account Activity API or create a new streaming service for related use cases.”

Boom.

Well, at least the announcement addresses developers’ complaints about a lack of information from Twitter regarding the pricing of the new APIs, and how long before all the changes kick in, given the news of a delay.

As Favstar’s creator Tim Haines explained when announcing the app’s shutdown, the lack of information made running its business too difficult.

““Twitter… [has] not been forthcoming with the details or pricing. Favstar can’t continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty,” he told TechCrunch earlier this week.

As for those 1 percent of apps that use the soon-to-be-depracated APIs – like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings or Twitterific – the plan was to switch over to the Enterprise Account Activity API. But they were frustrated that Twitter wasn’t saying how much it would cost; so they didn’t know if it would be an affordable option to sustain their business. It looks like they’ll now get those details.

But as those developers pointed out recently, there were broader concerns that the API changes were meant to actively discourage “client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream consumer client experience,” as Twitter had once said. Unfortunately for end users, the company’s decision is especially frustrating, given that Twitter shut down its native Mac app. 

It does appear that Twitter is looking to impact the functionality of these “1 percent” of apps, given that it will no longer let them stream in tweets as they’re posted (it’s making the statuses/home_timeline endpoint available instead – which is not streaming). And other notifications will be delayed by a couple of minutes, in some cases, as Tweetbot’s creator, Paul Haddad, explained yesterday.

Along with the news today, Twitter shared links to resources to help developers migrate to new APIs and learn more – including the developer portal, a migration guide, a resources page that outlines these changes, and Twitter’s community forums.

 

Food delivery startup Deliveroo is feeling generous today. The company is handing out equity to all full-time staff members. In other words, 2,000 employees are going to receive the equivalent of $13.5 million in Deliveroo shares.

“Our phenomenal growth and success has been made possible thanks to the hard work, commitment and passion of the people who make this company what it is,” co-founder and CEO Will Shu told Reuters. “And that deserves recognition which is why I want all employees to be owners in Deliveroo and to have a real stake in the company’s future as we expand and grow.”

This is a great way to prove that you care about your employees. And yet, there are a few caveats.

First, the company is currently worth over $2 billion. In total, Deliveroo is just handing out 0.675 percent of the company to its employees. I’m sure plenty of early employees already have equity.

But those who joined more recently aren’t likely to get rich over this — it represents a $6,750 equity bonus per employee on average. And shares usually vest after a certain amount of time.

Second, this is the perfect example of the gig economy. In addition to the usual benefits, full-time employees are getting rewarded once again. If you’re a self-employed rider, Deliveroo doesn’t want to thank you.

Arguably, Deliveroo still thinks that riders are disposable. They might be the ones who pick up food in restaurants and hand it to customers, but they will never be full-time employees.

Sure, Deliveroo and Uber Eats are now providing free accident insurance coverage, but it mostly covers hospital bills. Riders have been asking for better rights, and this insurance package is just a good way to ease the pressure.

Working with contractors at scale is the backbone of Uber, Deliveroo and many other on-demand startups. This way, startups don’t have to pay the minimum wage or expensive benefits. Startups can also terminate their relationships with their ‘partners’ without any consequence.

It’s a great way to pressure your contractors in working more for less money. And today’s move by Deliveroo is further proof that riders are just an afterthought.

Now Alexa’s voice apps don’t have to sound like Alexa. Amazon today is offering a way for developers to give their voice apps a unique character with the launch of eight free voices to use in skills, courtesy of the Amazon Polly service. The voices are only available in U.S. English, and include a mix of both male and female, according to Amazon Polly’s website.

Amazon Polly was first introduced at Amazon’s re:Invent developer event in November 2016, and has been steadily ramping up its capabilities in the time since. The text-to-speech service today is capable of things like whispering, speech marks, using a timbre effect, and dynamic range compression – all which make the voices sound more natural.

While the speech engine today supports a couple dozen languages, only the U.S. English voices are being offered to Alexa developers at this time.

But their addition could make some of Alexa’s skills more engaging – especially those involving different characters, like an adventure story or game, for example.

Developers today may already be using multiple voices in their skills, but the process of doing so is more cumbersome and rigid, as with mp3 file uploads.

To use an Amazon Polly voice instead, developers would use Structured Speech Markup Language (SSML) and then specify which voice they want with the “voice name” tag. This makes it easier to adjust what is said, as developers could just change the text instead of having to re-record an mp3.

Amazon has been working to make Polly more accessible to a wider audience, recently by offering a WordPress plugin that could turn your posts into podcasts.

The new Alexa skills integration, meanwhile, gives Polly another avenue of reaching consumers. It’s also another means of competing with Alexa’s rival, Google Assistant. At Google’s developer conference last week, the company announced six new voices generated by Wavent, including one from singer John Legend. These will roll out later this year, and presumably, could make their way to the Assistant developer ecosystem as well.

Cryptocurrency startup Circle has raised a $110 million funding round, which values the company near $3 billion. Cryptocurrency mining company Bitmain is leading the round.

Existing investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group and Pantera are investing more money. Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures are investing in Circle for the first time. Goldman Sachs also invested in the company in a previous round.

It’s hard to describe Circle in a few words because the company has been active on all fronts. For a really long time, the company pitched itself as a social payment company, a Venmo and Square Cash competitor. But Circle is more focused than ever on cryptocurrencies.

The company has been operating one of the largest over-the-counter trading desk for big cryptocurrency investors and exchanges. Circle Trade manages more than $2 billion a month in transactions and is able to fulfill large orders and provide liquidity.

More recently, the company launched Circle Invest, a really simple mobile app for the U.S. market. It lets you buy and sell Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Zcash and Monero in just a few taps. It’s a good way to get started with cryptocurrencies without learning about exchanges and order types. It could become a good Coinbase competitor for small cryptocurrency investors.

And Circle also acquired Poloniex, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S.

But the most interesting projects right now are probably CENTRE and a new tokenized USD coin. There are so many different cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, exchanges and wallets that it has become hard to make everything work together. Cryptocurrencies still suffer from price volatility, so bitcoin can’t be the common denominator.

That’s why Circle is creating a token that is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The USD Coin is based on an open source framework developed by CENTRE and everything should be audited regularly.

CENTRE is a Circle initiative to create a common framework to connect all electronic wallets. This protocol could let you send money to an Alipay user with your Square Cash balance.

It’s clear that Circle wants to build the infrastructure of the cryptocurrency industry. The company will need to convince multiple industry players to work with Circle. But it could help the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work.

In this day and age, either you have a side gig or you know someone who does. The type of work that’s done outside of your 9 to 5 is one thing that sets side hustles apart—the type of gear that’s used is what can help you get better.

From vlogging to graphic design to music production, accessories and must-have equipment should come with features and capabilities that enhance your projects. Here are a few of our favorite picks fit for upping your side gig skills.

Podcasting: Yeti USB Microphone

The Yeti by Blue, our top pick for USB microphones, sits above the competition because it offers the best overall audio, build and included features. It’s a good option for podcasters because its balance of bass and frequency peaks help to make a wide range of voices sound clear and captivating. It has a dial that can be set to four different pickup patterns, which comes in handy when conducting interviews with multiple people. Whether used for live or pre-recorded voice work, its zero-latency and mic-gain control features allow you to do most anything you want — and well.

Vlogging: Sony RX Mark IV Camera and GorillaPod 1K Kit Tripod

High-quality video is no longer something that’s only necessary for filmmaking. In our guide for the best vlogging camera and gear, we recommend the Sony RX Mark IV as an also great pick—and the best vlogging camera—for its small size, image stabilization and its ability to record in slow motion. YouTubers and social media video fanatics can easily create top-notch video content recorded at 4K resolution.

Use Wi-Fi and your smartphone as a remote to capture the best selfies with the camera’s flip-up screen and facial recognition feature. Coupled with the flexible GorillaPod 1K Kit Tripod, the camera can be positioned to snap difficult shots.

Video and Photo Editing: Dell XPS 15 Laptop

The ports and connections on the Dell XPS 15 Laptop accommodate all types of gear used for capturing and transferring video. In addition to having a huge 4K display, it has a powerful processor and graphics card. This means you’ll spend less time waiting around as large files load and render faster.

One reason that it’s our top pick for video and photo editing laptops is because its keyboard is comfortable enough to use during long editing sessions. The XPS’s trackpad is responsive and its touchscreen is intuitive—two features which contribute to the ease of making precise edits.

Building & Prototyping: CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit

It’s a lot easier to create hardware prototypes when you have a legitimate starting base. The Raspberry Pi 3, a mini Linux computer, can operate as a starting point and brain of a variety of gadgets. We recommend the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit to get going on building anything from a gaming console to a smart-home speaker. The included Raspberry Pi 3 Model B computer has software and general input/output pins for running added lights, sensors, or switches. The kit is also packed with everything you need to begin a project including cables, a power supply, a microSD card, and a case for convenience.

Music Production: Arturia MiniLab MkII MIDI Keyboard Controller

Listening to music is a favorite pastime for many, creating it is possibly a curiosity for more. You don’t have to break the bank when buying gear that’ll help you take a stab at music production. The Arturia MiniLab MkII is our top pick for MIDI keyboard controllers for beginners and it’s perfect for making electronic music or playing it live. Its compact design is a plus and its pads offer the responsiveness you need, especially when paired with its included software. The MiniLab Mkll comes preconfigured but it’s functions can be customized through a separate app.

Digital Art: Wacom Intuos Draw

There are endless graphic design software options and it’s helpful to have a tool that seamlessly pairs with them. The Wacom Intuos Draw, our top pick for drawing tablets for beginners, comes with its own software (Art Rage Lite), and it’s compatible with Windows, macOS and top-rated art programs. Artists who are just starting out will find the tablet’s grid pattern useful.

It connects to other devices via USB and also comes with a comfortable, customizable pen that can be used for drawing and painting. We like the tablet’s pressure sensitivity and the precision of its pen which will allow for easier detailing and add to the overall quality of your creations.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter.

Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

Facebook’s future rests on convincing the developing world to adopt Stories. But just because the slideshow format will soon surpass feed sharing doesn’t mean people use them the same way everywhere. So late last year, Facebook sent a team to India to learn what features they’d need to embrace Stories across a variety of local languages on phones without much storage.

Today, Facebook will start rolling out three big Stories features in India, which will come to the rest of the world shortly after. First, to lure posts from users who don’t want to type or have a non-native language keyboard, as well as micropodcasters, Facebook Stories will allow audio posts combining a voice message with a colored background or photo.

Facebook Stories will get an Archive similar to Instagram Stories that automatically saves your clips privately after they expire so you can go back to check them out or re-share the content to the News Feed. And finally, Facebook will let Stories users privately Save their clips from the Facebook Camera directly to the social network instead of their phone in case they don’t have enough space.

“We know that the performance and reliability of viewing and posting Stories is extremely important to people around the world, especially those with slower connections” Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “We are always working on ways to improve the experience of viewing Stories on all types of connections, and have been investing here — especially on our FB Lite app.”

Facebook has a big opportunity to capitalize on Snapchat’s failure to focus on the international market. Plagued by Android engineering problems and initial reluctance to court users beyond U.S. teens, Snapchat left the door open for Facebook’s Stories products to win the globe. Now Snapchat has sunk to its slowest growth rate ever, hitting 191 million daily users despite shrinking in March. Meanwhile, WhatsApp Status, its clone of Snapchat Stories has 450 million daily users, while Instagram Stories has over 300 million.

As for Facebook Stories, it was initially seen as a bit of a ghost town but more and more of my friends are posting there, in part thanks to the ability to syndicate you Instagram Stories there. Facebook Stories has never announced a user count, and Hayes says “We don’t have anything to share yet, but performance of Facebook Stories is encouraging, and we’ve learned a lot about how we can make the experience even better.” Facebook is hell-bent on making Stories work on its own app after launching the in mid-2017, and seems to believe users who find them needless or redundant will come around eventually.

My concern about the global rise of Stories is that instead of only recording the biggest highlights of our lives to capture with our phones, we’re increasingly interrupting all our activities and exiting the present to thrust our phone in the air.

That’s one thing Facebook hopes to fix here, Facebook’s director of Stories Connor Hayes tells me. “Saving photos and videos can be used to save what you might want to post later – So you don’t have to edit or post them while you’re out with your friends, and instead enjoy the moment at the concert and share them later.” You’re still injecting technology into your experience, though, so I hope we can all learn to record as subtly as possible without disturbing the memory for those around us.

The new Save to Facebook Camera feature creates a private tab in the Stories creation interface where you can access and post the imagery you’ve stored, and you’ll also find a Saved tab in your profile’s Photos section. Unlike Facebook’s discontinued Photo Sync feature, here you’ll choose to save imagery one at a time. It will be a big help to users lacking free space on their phone, as Facebook says many people around the world have to delete a photo just to save a new one.

Facebook wants to encourage people to invest more time decorating Stories, and learned that some people want to re-live or re-share their clips that expire after 24 hours. That’s why its built the Archive, a hedge against the potentially short-sighted trend of ephemerality.

On the team’s journey to India, they heard that photos and videos aren’t always the easiest way to share. If you’re camera-shy, have a low-quality camera, or don’t have cool scenes to capture, audio posts could get you sharing more. In fact, Facebook started testing voice clips as feed status updates in March. “With this week’s update, you will have options to add a voice message to a colorful background or a photo from your camera gallery or saved gallery. You can also add stickers, text, or doodles” says Hayes. With 22 official languages in India and over 100 spoken, recording voice can often be easier than typing.

Some users will still hate Stories, which are getting more and more prominence atop Facebook’s feed. But Facebook can’t afford to retreat here. Stories are social media bedrock — the most full-screen and immersive content medium we can record and consume with just our phones. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said that Facebook must make sure that “ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” That means Facebook Stories needs India’s hundreds of millions of users.

There will always be room for text, yet if people want to achieve an emotional impact, they’ll eventually wade into Storytelling. But social networks must remember low-bandwidth users, or we’ll only get windows into the developed world.

For more on Facebook Stories, check out our recent coverage:

Today’s the big day for the Senate’s big push to undo the FCC’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” order nullifying 2015’s net neutrality rules. A vote is scheduled for this afternoon on whether to repeal that order, though as of this writing the coalition is still one vote shy of making it happen.

The vote is an application of the Congressional Review Act, which as you might guess from the name allows Congress to review and if necessary undo recent regulations enacted by federal agencies. It’s been seldom used for decades but the current administration has been very free with it as a method of squelching rules passed in the twilight of the Obama era. Today Senate Democrats strike back with the same weapon.

A simple majority is required, but right now only a single Republican Senator, Maine’s Susan Collins, has courageously stepped across the aisle to join the Democrat-led effort. One more would pass the bill, though it would still have to get through the House and the President’s desk, making its prognosis poor.

That matters little, though: until today, many Senators will have been able to largely stay silent on the issue, and a vote to support this highly unpopular rule may come back to bite them come midterms. Net neutrality may very well be an issue constituencies care about, or at least that’s what Democratic challengers are hoping for.

On the other hand, a Democratic-led CRA is a direct, partisan attack on the administration, which has supported this FCC’s actions, and would cause return to Obama-era rules, which few Republicans would relish.

Will any Republican Senators see the writing on the wall and flip? Or will they stick to the party and leave it to be decided by a tie-breaker vote almost certain to go in their favor? Tune in to the Senate webcast to find out; the vote should happen around 3PM Eastern but as always in government timing is only approximate.

As we increasingly hear about automation, artificial intelligence and robots taking away industrial jobs, Parsable, a San Francisco-based startup sees a different reality, one with millions of workers who for the most part have been left behind when it comes to bringing digital transformation to their jobs.

Parsable has developed a Connected Worker platform to help bring high tech solutions to deskless industrial workers who have been working mostly with paper-based processes. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C cash injection to keep building on that idea.

The round was led by Future Fund with help from B37 and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Airbus Ventures and Aramco Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to nearly $70 million.

The Parsable solution works on almost any smartphone or tablet and is designed to enter information while walking around in environments where a desktop PC or laptop simply wouldn’t be practical. That means being able to tap, swipe and select easily in a mobile context.

The challenge the company faced was the perception these workers didn’t deal well with technology. Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle says the company, which launched in 2013, took its time building its first product because it wanted to give industrial workers something they actually needed, not what engineers thought they needed. This meant a long period of primary research.

The company learned, it had to be dead simple to allow the industry vets who had been on the job for 25 or more years to feel comfortable using it out of the box, while also appealing to younger more tech-savvy workers. The goal was making it feel as familiar as Facebook or texting, common applications even older workers were used to using.

“What we are doing is getting rid of [paper] notebooks for quality, safety and maintenance and providing a digital guide on how to capture work with the objective of increasing efficiency, reducing safety incidents and increasing quality,” Whittle explained.

He likens this to the idea of putting a sensor on a machine, but instead they are putting that instrumentation into the hands of the human worker. “We are effectively putting a sensor on humans to give them connectivity and data to execute work in the same way as machines,” he says.

The company has also made the decision to make the platform flexible to add new technology over time. As an example they support smart glasses, which Whittle says accounts for about 10 percent of its business today. But the founders recognized that reality could change and they wanted to make the platform open enough to take on new technologies as they become available.

Today the company has 30 enterprise customers with 30,000 registered users on the platform. Customers include Ecolab, Schlumberger, Silgan and Shell. They have around 80 employees, but expect to hit 100 by the end of Q3 this year, Whittle says.