TikTok is rolling out its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, in select markets.
The app is available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Canada and Australia, the company said.
Starting today, TikTok Notes is available for download and limited testing in Australia and Canada.
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) April 17, 2024“We hope that the TikTok community will use TikTok Notes to continue sharing their moments through photo posts.
Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that the Bytedance-owned company’s Instagram competitor is likely to be named TikTok Notes.
The company has rebranded to “Limitless,” and is now offering an AI-powered meeting suite and a hardware pendant that can record your conversations.
Company co-founder Dan Siroker first posted the idea of a conversation-recording pendant last October and started accepting orders at $59.
Siroker posted the final design this week, along with the news of the company’s pivot.
It’s a web app, Mac app, Windows app, and a wearable.
We plan to reimplement many of our user’s favorite Rewind features directly into Limitless,” Siroker said.
UPI, built by a coalition of Indian banks, has become the most popular way Indians transact online, processing over 10 billion transactions monthly.
In February, a parliamentary panel in India urged the government to support the growth of domestic fintech players that can offer alternatives to the Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay apps.
The NPCI has long advocated for limiting the market share of individual companies participating in the UPI ecosystem to 30%.
The RBI is also weighing an incentive plan to create a more favorable competitive field for emerging UPI players, another person familiar with the matter said.
Indian daily Economic Times separately reported Wednesday that the NPCI is encouraging fintech companies to offer incentives to their users, promoting the use of their respective apps for making UPI transactions.
The lack of charging infrastructure is a major barrier to entry for those looking to convert gas-powered vehicles to electric.
Founded by Louis Tremblay, FLO is looking to build robust EV charging infrastructure that will create a reliable web for drivers to get to where they need to go.
Since then, however, the company has raised more than $334.4 million and become Canada’s largest EV charging provider.
“Hardware is important because it’s the infrastructure that lasts [and] software is to make a great experience,” said Tremblay.
It seeks to keep chargers up-to-date and has a suite of charging software that provides valuable data to — and about — drivers.
Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union from today.
Apple’s walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past.
An Apple rep described this as a baseline safety and security standard which they said iOS users expect to help ensure their device is protected from external risks.
Given Apple has only just started implementing web distribution for iOS apps it remains to be seen whether the EU will step in for a closer look at this aspect of its DMA compliance too.
It’s also unclear how much demand there will be among iOS developers for direct web distribution.
Amazon is trying to keep live shopping relevant with the launch of an “Amazon Live” FAST (free ad-supported TV) channel on Prime Video and Freevee.
Previously only available as a feature on desktop, mobile, and Fire TV, the new live channel will give customers in the U.S. more ways to engage with interactive, shoppable content.
Viewers can browse and buy the items influencers show off by using the Amazon Shopping app on their mobile device.
Amazon Live launched in 2019 as a QVC-like shopping experience to help brands get their products discovered and for talent to interact with fans.
According to the company, more than 1 billion customers in the U.S. and India streamed Amazon Live’s shoppable videos in 2023 alone.
A new social media app called Indaband lets musicians and vocalists collaborate with others and make music with people all over the world.
You can record and mix unlimited video tracks in different sessions using the app’s multi-track video studio and share them with your community.
The app is the brainchild of CEO Daniel Murta, CTO Andrews Medina, Head of Engineering Helielson Santos and Design Leader Emerson Farias.
They all used to get together to play music during happy hours after work, and once the pandemic hit, they came up with the idea for Indaband so they could still play music together while in quarantine.
Circles will allow users to build their own communities on the app and possibly even hold live events.
That’s a different strategy from just about every other market, where Google has been merging Wallet and Pay experiences together under a single Wallet app.
We’re continuing to invest in the Google Pay app to give people easy, secure access to digital payments,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Then, it tried to replace the Wallet and its Android Pay app with Google Pay.
In 2022, Google relaunched the Wallet app as its digital wallet platform for Android, Wear OS and Fitbit OS.
However, in February this year, the search giant announced it would replace Google Pay with the Wallet app in the U.S.
Apple has removed iGBA, a Game Boy emulator app for the iPhone, after approving its launch over the weekend.
First launched on Sunday, iGBA was an ad-supported copy of the open-source project GBA4iOS that offered a Game Boy game emulator for iOS.
The new app worked as described, allowing users to download both Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color ROMs from the web and then open them in the app to play.
The Cupertino-based tech giant has been pushed to make the App Store more open thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Following an update to its App Store rules to comply with the new regulation, Apple had announced it would also allow streaming game stores globally.
Today, four out of 10 Formula 1 teams use an evolution of that same technology.
However, where Formula 1 cars rely on 1,000-horsepower hybrid V6 engines, Baqué’s first practical application of the technology was human-powered.
At its core, NCS helps engineers avoid potential aerodynamic pitfalls while pushing them into directions they might not have considered.
NCS will then dig into its neural network to suggest improvements or modifications, possible paths in a 3D game of choose-your-own-adventure.
But like in most sports, success is cyclical for Formula 1 teams, and right now, Williams is very much in a rebuilding phase.
