When some American users opened TikTok on Thursday morning, they were met with a full-screen message encouraging them to call Congress and say no to a TikTok ban.
“Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”Below the message, users can click a red “call now” button.
Last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress for five hours, addressing lawmakers’ concerns about Chinese authorities accessing American data (TikTok, an American company, is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company).
Chew has repeatedly stated that TikTok and ByteDance are not conduits for the Chinese government.
The bill’s sponsors are urging TikTok to sever its ties with ByteDance to avoid this fate, or else it could lose its 170 million American users.
It’s been over two years since a key piece of the tracking-ads’ industry’s consent collection apparatus was found to breach European Union’s data protection laws.
A simple ‘yes or no’ to ad tracking is as much friction web users should get.
Critics dub the whole cynical approach compliance theatre: An attempt by the ad industry to evade data protection law and keep tracking and profiling web users en masse by packaging systematic non-compliance inside an industry standard framework.
However action requiring reform of the framework was suspended pending a final court ruling on the IAB’s appeal.
Plus the European Data Protection Board is due to weigh in with guidance soon.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out the ability for users to save a draft and take photos within the app.
The new features shape Threads into more of a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), which has had drafts and a camera shortcut for as long as we can remember.
However, Threads only lets you save one draft at a time, whereas X lets you save multiple.
Threads users can now start writing out a post that they may want to share later, and then swipe down to save it as a draft.
The launch of the camera shortcut comes as app researcher Nima Owji indicated that X might be looking to adopt Threads’ carousel format for displaying images.
Uber Eats is adding a live location sharing capability to help couriers find customers in difficult-to-find locations, including public places such as campus courtyards, parks, and playgrounds.
Uber Eats is available in over 11,000 cities across six continents.
Uber Eats stops sharing the location once the order is delivered.
The company hopes its new live location sharing feature will help solve a major challenge that many couriers face, especially in the warmer months when people are spending more time outdoors, ordering food for birthdays and other events.
“We’re thrilled to bring location sharing to Uber Eats and help consumers ensure greater reliability with every delivery they receive,” Divya Dalapathi, Director of Product Management at Uber, said in a statement.
Smart fitness ring maker Oura announced a partnership with Amazon today to sell its products through the e-commerce site.
The Heritage ring starts from $299 and the Horizon ring starts from $399.
The most distinctive difference between the two is that Heritage rings have a flat top and Horizon rings don’t have that.
Since Oura launched the Oura Ring 3, India-based startup Ultrahuman released two rings including Ultrahuman Air last year.
Last year, Oura launched the Circles feature to encourage users to share their stats with friends and family.
Adobe is making it easier for users to create and publish social content on mobile, as the company announced today that it’s launching the latest version of the Adobe Express app in beta.
With this update, Adobe is bringing its Firefly AI models directly into the app, allowing users to quickly create and edit social content using generative AI tools.
The Adobe Express app lets you preview and publish content to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Since Apple restricts the number of beta users in apps, iOS users need to sign up to get access to the beta app.
Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Adobe and TikTok announced that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express.
The NYT Games app is debuting a new redesign to help users discover games and track their progress more easily.
The redesign comes nearly a year after the New York Times renamed its games-focused app from “NYT Crosswords” to “NYT Games” to better represent its growing family of games.
NYT Games principal product designer Lian Chang told TechCrunch that the redesign caters to both old and new players.
Chang says the redesigned game cards incentivize players to come back to a game and finish it.
The idea behind the redesigned game cards was to not only be inviting for discovery purposes, but also be functional.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users on the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them into business accounts by paying a monthly fee.
Some of the other features for business accounts involve organizing chats with color labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick replies.
On his channel, Durov said that Telegram plans to launch more business features this month including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats.
Telegram is trying to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features.
Catalan startup Showee, which is building smart showers with accessibility in mind, is one such company.
Here’s a video showing how it works:More than the hardware, Showee won awards and praise for the social impact it’s trying to make.
The company’s CTO, Eloi Mirambell, admitted that the smart shower’s price will have to go down before it has a real chance at B2C.
The startup says its shower uses 50% less water than a regular shower.
In its FAQ, the startup says that all shower units are sold out, but Showee will be available again starting April 2024.
Notably, the experience is free for Sling TV and Sling Freestream customers, and they can play games while simultaneously watching live TV content — providing entertainment during commercial breaks.
Sling TV also allows users to expand the Arcade row on the home screen to have a more immersive playing experience.
Sling TV says that 10 games will be available at launch, with new titles to be added regularly.
Sling didn’t say if it would partner with other gaming companies to expand its gaming library, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Dish, which recently merged with EchoStar, reported a loss of 65,000 Sling TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023, bringing the total to 2.06 million.
