Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing its free audiobooks perk to Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Users in these markets will be able to access 15 hours of free monthly audiobook listening time.
Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.
If you run out of listening hours, you can purchase additional 10-hour allocations for CAD $14.99, IRE €12.99, and NZD $19.99.
Spotify recently launched a $9.99 per month plan that allows its free users to access its audiobooks collection in the U.S.
Now, it appears Meta is using its Quest VR store to demonstrate how it thinks devices with app stores should approach online age verification.
Since it’s easy to lie about someone’s age when entering only a birthdate, Meta says it’ll require people who accidentally enter a wrong birthdate to verify with an ID or credit card.
Meta has previously told developers that, starting in March 2024, it will require them to identify their app’s intended age group (preteens, teens or adults).
It also announced the launch of its user age group APIs, which officially launched last month.
Meta first added parental supervision tools to its VR headset in 2022.
“Building data models is best done in Python, but many of my team members only understood spreadsheets,” Kircos told TechCrunch.
“Quadratic is on a mission to build the best tool for understanding data,” Kircos said.
“Quadratic is a brand-new type of spreadsheet, not an Excel clone,” Kircos said.
There’s Sourcetable, whose headlining features include real-time document collaboration, data syncing with business apps and an editor for querying large data sets.
Neptyne, which launched in March 2023, is building a Python-powered spreadsheet targeting data scientists.
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020.
“I can confirm we had an anomaly on the launch pad,” Alaska Aerospace CEO Mark Lester told local reporters at the time.
At the time, Astra was taking such failures in stride.
The deal is expected to close sometime this quarter, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.
Astra did not return a request for comment on the 2020 launch failure.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
“SpaceX has made rockets reusable, Orbit Fab makes satellites reusable,” he said.
“In this world today, if you’re running a rocket company, and you’re not working towards reusable rockets, you’re working to a dead end.
The same is true of satellites: If you’re not making your satellites reusable, you’re just putting preordained junk into orbit.”I learned a lot from this deep dive into China’s struggles to bring on international partners to its International Lunar Research Station initiative.
On April 1, 1960, THE VERY FIRST weather satellite was launched by NASA.
OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven’t bothered making an account.
Instead, you’ll be dropped right into conversation with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users.
You can chat to your heart’s content, but be aware you’re not getting quite the same set of features that folks with accounts are.
You won’t be able to save or share chats, use custom instructions, or other stuff that generally has to be associated with a persistent account.
OpenAI offers this helpful gif:More importantly, this extra-free version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies.” What does that mean?
The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store.
Valkey is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap.
AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open-source fork together.
At the time, Redis said that despite this change for the modules, “the license for open-source Redis was never changed.
This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account.
In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
Climate change.
The UK will be even better off, gaining 40 outdoor days by the end of the century.
Illinois will lose more than a month of outdoor days by the 2080s as the summers grow unbearably hot.
Nigeria’s summers will grow even hotter and longer, lopping off nearly two months of outdoor days.
Both Nigeria and India would only lose one month of outdoor days, and more northerly regions retain some of their added outdoor days.
TikTok ban could harm Amazon sellers looking for alternatives The ban could prematurely end TikTok's e-commerce dream and hit sellers seeking new channelsIn March, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could force ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban in U.S. app stores.
Research from Jungle Scout, an Amazon data intelligence provider, provides some idea of TikTok’s e-commerce impact, however.
It found that 20% of Amazon sellers, brands, and businesses have plans to expand to TikTok Shop this year.
TikTok isn’t the only platform on the list for merchants looking for more channels beyond Amazon to expand their customer bases.
But if TikTok Shop’s strategy is mainly focused on bringing offline businesses online for the first time, that could be a very big move.
