Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories.
It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
Apple updated its App Store rules Friday to allow emulators for retro console games globally with an option for downloading titles.
Apple’s update will probably encourage some of those developers to bring their emulators to the App Store.
With Apple having to tweak App Store rules because of regulations, these kinds of games would provide another revenue stream for the company.
Plus, it updated App Store rules at that time to support in-app purchases for mini-games and AI chatbots.
“Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini-games, streaming games, chatbots, and plug-ins.
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning.
YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
Apple has reversed its decision about blocking web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), on iPhones in the EU.
Last month, Apple reduced the functionality of PWAs as mere website shortcuts with the release of the second beta of iOS 17.4, as security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy had first pointed out.
The company then updated its developer page saying that because of security risks like malicious web apps reading data from other web apps and accessing cameras, it decided to end support for home screen apps.
Apple also said that PWAs had “very low user adoption” so there might not be a lot of impact on users.
Separately, the Open Web Advocacy group published an open letter addressed to Tim Cook to lift the ban on web apps, which was signed by hundreds of organizations and individuals including Mastodon, internet advocate Cory Doctorowand Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.
Mill, a food waste startup, is releasing an entirely new design of its bin that grinds and dries scraps, turning it into compost-like grounds that can feed plants and chickens alike.
Now, the heating elements surround the entire bin and the fan blows hot air through the food waste as it’s being processed.
That program continues nationwide, and a standards body recently certified Mill’s feed product, which should help the startup speed adoption among interested farmers.
“We’ve actually closed the loop in Phoenix,” Rogers said.
Mill may have already diverted 1 million pounds of food waste from landfills (and the associated greenhouse gasses), but it’s not enough for him.
Decentralized social network Mastodon has updated its official app for Android to let users easily share their profiles with QR Codes.
To share the QR code, users can go to their profile tab and tap the QR icon next to their name to get a code related to the profile others can scan.
Mastodon has also updated prompts for blocking and muting to explain the effects of taking those actions on a profile.
Users trying out Mastodon have complained about the complicated nature of having different servers on the ActivityPub network.
The company will have to work on making it easier for users to understand and navigate the decentralized social world.
Admittedly Apple iWatch uses have had it since October last year, but as of today at Mobile World Congress, the Doublepoint startup has launched the updated version of its popular WowMouse gesture-touch control app for Android smartwatches.
Launched at CES in January, the free app now supports Google’s Pixel Watch 2, having already garnered around 30,000 downloads by Samsung Galaxy users since CES, according to the company.
As with the iWatch gestures, the WowMouse app creates a sort of ‘wrist-based’ mouse, using taps fed via Bluetooth to the watch to allow users to control headsets, phones, tablets, computers and other devices.
On his stand at the Four Years From Now section of MWC, founder Ohto Pentikäinen told me: “Gestures are a big theme nowadays, with Apple Vision Pro coming out.
We see people doing these pinches all over the streets nowadays!
Once again, Etsy’s layoffs come as no surprise Junkification and fierce competition paint a tough path aheadRemember when we wrote that Spotify’s latest layoffs make sense?
Well, we feel the same about Etsy’s announcement that it would lay off 11% of its workforce.
This is not us being callous with employees affected by these layoffs, or making excuses for what led the NASDAQ-listed marketplace to that point and what could perhaps have been prevented.
We are just saying that this isn’t much of a surprise.
But more than quantitative, Etsy’s challenge is qualitative.
The FTC has proposed tightening up the rules protecting kids from the surveillance economy.
The updated rules would require companies to get the OK from parents before sharing data with advertisers and prohibit holding onto data for nebulous “internal operations,” among other things.
“After the FTC announced it was considering revisions to the COPPA Rule, we received more than 175,000 comments,” the agency noted in a news release.
Better justification for “nudges,” like push notifications to get kids to open an app or stay online.
The FTC rules will have to stand for a while to come.
