Discovery

Spotify acquires podcast discovery specialists Podz

Spotify has acquired Podz, a startup whose technology generates preview clips of podcasts, the streaming service has announced. Unlike other services podcasters can use to manually create clips, TechCrunch says Podz automates the process of finding key moments from episodes using machine learning trained on over 100,000 hours of audio. The acquisition is aimed at… Read more

IRL is a new social network taking on Facebook groups

Do people want an app specifically for discovering events and messaging as a group? That’s the bet behind IRL, a young social network that has been quietly growing over the past year and just attracted an eye-popping amount of money to take on Facebook. The two-year-old startup is betting that a post-pandemic world will fuel… Read more

Folding@Home’s Exascale Compute Power Helped Unravel Covid’s Secrets

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock) Untold millions of people have rushed to render aid to others as the Covid pandemic has gripped the globe, but those individual contributions took different forms. Some of us did what we could and helped by donating spare computing cycles to distributed computing, which helps researchers use the power of… Read more

Spotify ‘Only You’ and ‘Blend’ features now live

Home News (Image credit: Spotify) Building on the success of its yearly ‘Wrapped’ feature, which gives subscribers a visualisation of their listening data, Spotify has launched ‘Only You’ – an in-app experience with listening statistics and personalised playlists. ‘Only You’ includes information such as ‘Your artist pairs’, highlighting a user’s diverse tastes; ‘Your Song Year’,… Read more

NASA will send two missions to Venus for the first time in over 30 years

The agency has picked two new robotic missions to explore the hot hell-world of Venus, Earth’s neighbor and the second planet from the Sun, administrator Bill Nelson announced on Wednesday. The two missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, were among four competing proposals under the latest round of NASA’s Discovery Program, which manages smaller planetary exploration missions… Read more

Some Apple Music Hi-Res Lossless content is already showing up on the service

Home News (Image credit: 0gniRincha, Twitter) With Apple Music CD-quality, Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless streaming announced at no extra charge to Apple Music users (and at an unspecified date in June) certain users have reported actual lossless and hi-res icons appearing on the streaming service ahead of its official the launch. With Apple’s annual (coronavirus permitting) Worldwide… Read more

Etsy targets Gen Z shoppers with $1.6 billion Depop acquisition

E-commerce site Etsy, best known for selling handmade and vintage wares, is buying up a cooler, younger rival, UK-based secondhand shopping app Depop. The $1.6 billion acquisition lets Etsy access Depop’s young and growing userbase. Etsy says more than 90 percent of Depop’s users are under 26, meaning they mostly belong to Gen Z, while… Read more

Fall Guys beans are the perfect height to pat Among Us beans on the head

Turns out that the bean-like Fall Guys characters would be the perfect height to pat the bean-like Among Us crewmates on the head, should they ever exist in the same universe. The Among Us and Fall Guys Twitter accounts made the discovery on Monday. How? Well, it all started with this question from Chris on… Read more

Lockheed Martin and GM are working on an electric Moon buggy

Lockheed Martin and General Motors unveiled plans on Wednesday to build an autonomous buggy-like vehicle that future astronauts can use to zip around the surface of the Moon. The two companies collaborated to pitch a conceptual Lunar Terrain Vehicle to NASA’s Artemis program, a Moon exploration campaign that calls for various robots, vehicles, and scientific… Read more

Scammy iOS app discovered that refuses to open unless you give it a good review

App developer and scam app hunter Kosta Eleftheriou’s latest discovery is a real doozy, an iOS app that refuses to function before you give it at least a 3-star review in the App Store. Although the UPNP Xtreme app — which claimed to let users stream video to their TVs — now appears to have… Read more

Rockstar has opened its own record label

When it comes to memorable soundtracks, Rockstar Games is one developer whose music comes to mind. The GTA and Read Dead Redemption studio has been celebrated in the past for its music, both original and licensed. Now the studio has announced that it is opening its own record label “CircoLoco Records,” the first EP of… Read more

Valve Reportedly Making a Switch Style Mini-PC Codenamed “SteamPal”

Home News (Image credit: Shutterstock and Valve) Valve is allegedly jumping back into hardware, working on a handheld PC similar to the Nintendo Switch, according to a new report from Ars Technica. The publication spoke to “multiple sources familiar with the matter,” who have confirmed that “the device has been in development for some time.”… Read more

Deezer

Our Verdict Its ambition is to be applauded, but Deezer falls between the two stools of Spotify and Tidal and struggles to justify itself over either For Vast catalogue and device support CD-quality HiFi tier Envelope-pushing 3D audio Against No hi-res streaming Spotify does discovery better Tidal does hi-fi better Deezer appears to be stuck… Read more

Google rediscovers RSS: tests new feature to ‘follow’ sites in Chrome on Android

Google is testing a new feature for its Chrome browser on Android that lets users “follow” sites to create an updating list of new content they publish. The feature is based on RSS, an open web standard that’s been the backbone of many popular web aggregation tools in the past. That includes Google’s own, much… Read more

Zotac Thinks That Nvidia Will Make a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti

Home News GeForce RTX 3090 (Image credit: Nvidia) If Zotac’s Firestorm software is to be trusted, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti might not be the only Ti SKU that Nvidia releases this generation: Twitter user Japanese PC mania has discovered references to a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti baked into the… Read more