Google is sending Jamboard on its way to the company's ever-growing graveyard full of products and services that didn't quite work out. To continue giving teams that use its tools access to a collaborative digital whiteboard, Google is integrating FigJam, Lucidspark and Miro across its Workspace.
https://www.engadget.com/google-is-sunsetting-its-collaborative-jamboard-app-101658315.html
Month: September 2023
Meta Connect 2023: Everything you need to know about Quest 3 VR, Ray-Ban smart glasses and Meta AI
Meta’s annual Connect conference started today, and this means lots of new hardware.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/27/meta-connect-2023-quest-3-vr-everything-you-need-to-know/
Reddit to begin paying people for popular posts
Reddit has unveiled plans to pay its top contributors cash for popular posts, starting in the US on Tuesday. The social media site will split revenue with people who are awarded "gold" by other users, who pay a fee.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66925550
Neuralink Human Trials Set to Proceed, Despite Ethics Concerns
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is set to begin human trials, and the company is announcing that it’s looking for human applicants to test its controversial brain-computer interface. “The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface)…aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts,” the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjp9q/neuralink-monkey-deaths-human-trials
Hell freezes over, MS Paint adds support for layers and PNG transparency
But today Microsoft announced that it is finally adding two features that could make the app a bit more useful for power users: support for Photoshop-esque image layers and the ability to open and save transparent PNGs. The redesigned Paint is rolling out to Windows Insider testers in both the Dev and Canary channels, the two bleeding-edge and less-stable versions of Windows 11. Like other recent app updates, this appears to require Windows 11 and won't be backported to Windows 10.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/hell-freezes-over-ms-paint-adds-support-for-layers-and-png-transparency/
Unity U-turns on controversial runtime fee and begs forgiveness
Unity has done a 180 on a controversial new pricing scheme that users of its cross-platform game engine almost unanimously disparaged. A new pricing policy is still incoming, but it’s far less fraught for independent developers, many of whom threatened to leave the engine and platform behind rather than pay. Under the revised terms, there is no runtime fee whatever for any game developed with a current version of Unity, only for those developers who adopt the latest version in 2024. The free Unity Personal will stay free, and the revenue ceiling above which users must upgrade to the next tier has been raised to $200,000. And above $1 million, users will be able to choose between a per-user fee or a 2.5% revenue share, whichever is lesser.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/22/unity-u-turns-on-controversial-runtime-fee-and-begs-forgiveness/
YouTube made a video editing app — just like TikTok
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The new app could encourage more people to make Shorts, YouTube’s take on TikTok-style videos; it’s generally easier to make a TikTok video than it is to make a full-fledged YouTube video, which is a key reason why TikTok has exploded in popularity.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23883755/youtube-create-mobile-video-editing-app-tiktok-capcut