Japanese video game maker Nintendo's profit dropped 19% in the first half of its fiscal year from the previous year, when it received a big lift as people stuck at home by thecoronavirus pandemic turned to its products. The company reported Thursday a 171.8 billion yen ($1.5 billion) profit for the April-September period, down from 213 billion yen in the same period the previousyear.
Apple's SharePlay lets you watch movies and TV shows, listen to music, play games, and work out while video chatting with your friends and family over FaceTime, a new extension for FaceTime that lets you remotely watch and listen with the people you love without having to jump through hoops or install different browser extensions.
The orange dot is telling you that your iPhone microphone is being used by an app. It'll appear when you use voice memos, maybe briefly after you close out of your camera, or if you're using any app that exclusively records your voice. The green dot is telling you that your iPhone camera is being used by an app. You'll see it when opening your camera, or taking pictures on Instagram, Snapchat, or any social media app that allows you to take pictures and post them.
Pinterest is launching a livestream commerce craze with the launch of Pinterest TV, featuring weekly episodes from top creators, including Tom Daley, Christian Siriano, and comedian Robyn Schall. The livestream market is expected to reach $25 billion by 2023, according to Coresight Research.
Uber is preparing to relaunch its carpooling service as a way to combat price increases, shuttered in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and remained so even as vaccines became widely available and customers returned to the app. However, that could soon change, according to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who hinted that a new shared rides product could be released soon.
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down after three years at the company, returning to his startup roots. He originally joined Microsoft after the company acquired Xamarin, and then took over as the head of GitHub when Microsoft acquired GitHub three years ago. He has been quick to respond to the firing of a Jewish employee earlier this year, admitting that "significant mistakes were made."
Twitter has been updating its rebuilt API following its mid-2020 relaunch, adding support for Twitter Spaces to its developer platform, launching new end points that allow you to tweet, delete tweets, post polls, use Reply settings and tag people in images. While bots that post spam are unwanted, Twitter has made it clear that it sees other bots as helpful.
Google is working on winning a contract with the Pentagon, even though some of its previous Department of Defense work sparked major backlash from employees. The company has reassigned engineers to work on a proposal for Google to contribute to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, which the DoD describes as an attempt to "achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains"
McDonald's is attempting to translate the appeal of Friendsgiving, where friends gather for a casual meal a week before the official Thanksgiving holiday, into the livestreaming sphere with the Friendsgaming concept, which has proved popular with millennials and other young adults. The Friendsgaming promotion is the first major piece of a tie-up with FaZe Clan struck in August.
Facebook announced on Tuesday that it intends to disable Facebook's facial recognition features, a massive win for privacy activists and users, but the move does not preclude the company from using future forms of facial recognition tech on its billions of users. The company will continue to work on these technologies and engage outside experts.
The FCC has approved Boeing's application to launch a satellite broadband constellation, which would serve home, business and government customers in the US and worldwide. The company hasn't said when its satellite network would launch or what capabilities it would offer. The satellites would sit talk to each other as well as the ground, although the FCC rejected Boeing's bid to use certain frequencies for satellite-to-satellite chatter.
