Tech News – by Arlin Schaffel

Foursquare’s founder launches a new app that talks to you about your neighborhood

After teasing its development last year, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has now launched BeeBot: an AI-powered social app for iPhones that talks to you about what’s happening nearby. In his blog announcement, Crowley says BeeBot behaves like a “personalized radio DJ” that provides location-based audio updates through your headphones, telling you about what friends are up to, local news, and events occurring in the neighborhood as you walk around. “Audio updates are meant to be short and sweet (a few sentences here and there), tailored to your interests and your social graph, and designed to both inspire and inform you,” Crowley says in the announcement. “The vibe we’re going for is more ‘Waze meets Gossip Girl,’ and less ‘Wikipedia in your ears.’”
https://www.theverge.com/news/815328/beebot-app-foursquare-founder-ai-audio-updates

Amazon and Perplexity have kicked off the great AI web browser fight

Amazon doesn’t want to be a part of Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping experience. In a post on Tuesday, the ecommerce giant says it has “repeatedly requested” that Perplexity stop allowing its Comet AI browser to buy products for customers, which Perplexity has responded to by accusing Amazon of “bullying.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/813755/amazon-perplexity-ai-shopping-agent-block

These are the new Google Photos and Maps icons with a gradient redesign

image via 9to5google.com

Following the ‘G’ and Gemini icons, Google is updating its logos for the AI era. Here’s a sneak peek at the new gradient icons for Google Photos and Maps. The gradient G also expanded beyond Search to represent “all of Google” (the brand and company). Additionally, the company said how it will “continue this update across more products, platforms and services over the coming months.”
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/02/google-photos-maps-gradient-icon/

Affinity’s image-editing apps go “freemium” in first major post-Canva update

When graphic design platform-provider Canva bought the Affinity image-editing and publishing apps early last year, we had some major questions about how the companies’ priorities and products would mesh. This week, Canva gave us definitive answers to all of those questions: a brand-new unified Affinity app that melds the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps into a single piece of software called “Affinity by Canva” that is free to use with a Canva user account, but which gates generative AI features behind Canva’s existing paid subscription plans ($120 a year for individuals).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/canvas-new-affinity-app-is-free-to-use-but-locks-ai-features-behind-a-subscription/

NPM flooded with malicious packages downloaded more than 86,000 times

Attackers are exploiting a major weakness that has allowed them access to the NPM code repository with more than 100 credential-stealing packages since August, mostly without detection. Anyone who regularly downloads packages from NPM should check the Koi post for a list of indicators that their system has been compromised through PhantomRaven. These indicators can be used in system scans to determine whether they’ve been targeted.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/npm-flooded-with-malicious-packages-downloaded-more-than-86000-times/

Grammarly is changing its name to Superhuman

AI writing aid Grammarly is now part of Superhuman, alongside Coda, Superhuman Mail, and a new AI assistant called Superhuman Go. The new Superhuman suite, including all those tools, will be available starting today for everyone with a paid Grammarly Pro subscription. After the company’s rebranding, the standalone writing tool Grammarly still exists, but it’s taking a backseat as Superhuman shifts its focus to offering an AI agent-powered work platform that works in every tab of your browser and knows enough about what’s going on to offer useful suggestions.
https://www.theverge.com/news/808472/grammarly-superhuman-ai-rebrand-relaunch

Photoshop and Premiere Pro’s new AI tools can instantly edit more of your work

Adobe has kicked off its annual Max event, giving us a first look at new and upcoming generative AI tools launching for the company’s Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Lightroom Creative Cloud apps. These include updates to Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature that aim to give creators more control over adding, removing or modifying content, and tools that can automate some of the more time-consuming elements of editing photos and videos.
https://www.theverge.com/news/807811/adobe-photoshop-lightroom-premiere-pro-ai-max-2025