Americans Are the Unhappiest They Have Been in 50 Years: Poll
(ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.) — It’s been a rough year for the American psyche. Folks in the U.S. are more unhappy today than they’ve been in nearly 50 years. This bold — yet unsurprising — conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% […]
Adobe updates its Creative Cloud apps
Adobe today announced a slew of updates to its various Creative Cloud apps, ranging from Photoshop and Lightroom to Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator and its XD design tool. Like with some of its most recent releases, the emphasis of these updates is often on bringing more AI smarts to these applications with the help […]
VESoft raises $8M to meet China’s growing need for graph databases
Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors, like Neo4j and TigerGraph, had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their […]
Zoom admits to shutting down activist accounts at the request of the Chinese government
Zoom, the wildly successful video chat service that has been a ubiquitous feature of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, said that it shut down three accounts at the request of the Chinese government for holding memorials for the victims of China’s violent suppression of peaceful protests at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. As Axios […]
Snapchat debuts Minis, bite-sized third-party apps that live inside chat
At Snap’s Partner Summit, the company shared its newest effort to entice third-party devs to Snapchat . It’s called Minis. Snap Minis are lightweight third-party programs that live inside the app’s Chat section, which users can quickly pull up alongside friends without having to deal with switching apps. Minis live alongside games inside a keyboard […]
Big tech should create a national service program to make the US more united
Kevin Frazier Contributor Kevin Frazier, a Masters of Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School and JD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Law, uses his spare time to advocate for better government. More posts by this contributor Facebook posts and tweets won’t sew the tears in our social fabric. Zoom meetings will […]
Snapchat no longer promoting Trump’s posts
Snap announced this morning that it will not be promoting content from President Trump’s Snapchat account in its Discover tab following statements from Trump last week on Twitter, which threatened that protestors could be met with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons.” The move is notable for many reasons, but is particularly interesting because social media […]
Our grimdark meathook cyberpunk now
Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch’s weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Ten years ago, the joke was: “It’s weird how, once everyone started carrying phones with cameras all the time, […]
Investors say emerging multiverses are the future of entertainment
‘The line between pop culture and gaming is going away’ The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the adoption of new technologies and cultural shifts that were already well underway. According to a clutch of heavy-hitting investors, this dynamic is particularly strong in gaming and extended reality. Unlike other segments of the startup and tech world, where […]
Coronavirus: How the advertising industry is changing
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Adverts praising the NHS have sprung up on UK billboards that may otherwise have been empty The first rule of advertising is that your adverts have to be seen to have any effect.This is why if you have managed to get out of the house recently in the UK […]