Odds and Ends 

This Week in Apps: Zoom has issues, Pinterest founders new COVID-19 research app, record Q1 spending

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry saw a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544…

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Odds and Ends 

White House teams up with Google to build coronavirus screening site

During a press conference at the White House, President Trump today announced that the government is working with Google to build an online screening website for COVID-19. The announcement was short on details, but the idea, it seems, is to give users the ability to enter their symptoms and see if they need additional testing. None of this sounds extremely complicated, but according to Trump, Google has 1,700 engineers working on this. According to Debbie Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, users will have to log into this new…

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Odds and Ends 

Self-driving car engineer Anthony Levandowski files motion to force Uber into arbitration

Anthony Levandowski, the star self-driving car engineer who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit, has filed a motion to compel Uber into arbitration in the hopes that his former employee will have to shoulder the cost of at least part of the $179 million judgment against him. The motion to compel arbitration filed this week is part of Levandowski’s bankruptcy proceedings. It’s the latest chapter in a long and winding legal saga that has entangled Uber and Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a…

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Odds and Ends 

Guy Hacks Google Maps With 99 Phones and a Little Red Wagon

Artist Simon Weckert transported 99 smartphones in a little red wagon to generate a virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. He was able to turn a virtual ‘green’ street ‘red’, which impacted the physical world by navigating cars using Google Maps on another route to avoid being ‘stuck’ in traffic. Check out the video below and scroll down to learn more about this project. The advent of Google’s Geo Tools began in 2005 with Maps and Earth, followed by Street View in 2007. They have since become enormously more technologically…

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Headlines 

Google’s Giving Out Security Keys to Help Protect Campaigns

Malign foreign influence operations during the 2016 United States presidential election season raised awareness about the need for some improvement, many are still "You’ve got to get people to take the time to actually turn it on, so we’re going to be working with campaigns and helping them," says Michael Kaiser, president and CEO of Defending Digital Campaigns. "Hardening your accounts is really something that every campaign needs, and not only the campaign workers themselves, but the spouse of the candidate, friends, family. There are a lot of different folks…

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Odds and Ends 

Google acquires AppSheet to bring no-code development to Google Cloud

Google announced today that it is buying AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform. The company had raised more than $17 million on a $60 million valuation, according to PitchBook data. The companies did not share the purchase price. With AppSheet, Google gets a simple way for companies to build mobile apps without having to write a line of code. It works by pulling data from a spreadsheet, database or form, and using the field or column names as the basis for building an app. It is integrated with Google Cloud…

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Odds and Ends 

Google backtracks on search results design

Earlier today, Google announced that it would be redesigning the redesign of its search results as a response to withering criticism from politicians, consumers and the press over the way in which search results displays were made to look like ads. Google makes money when users of its search service click on ads. It doesn’t make money when people click on an unpaid search result. Making ads look like search results makes Google more money. It’s also a pretty evil (or at least unethical) business decision by a company whose…

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Odds and Ends 

Discount student tickets available for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

“Revolutionary” may be an over-used adjective, but how else to describe the rapid evolution in mobility technology? Join us in San Jose, Calif., on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. Our second annual day-long conference cuts through the hype and explores the current and future state of the technology and its social, regulatory and economic impact. If you’re a student with a passion for mobility and transportation tech, listen up. We can’t talk about the future if we’re not willing to invest in the next generation of mobility visionaries.…

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Odds and Ends 

Amazon and Google double down on hands-free recipes to help sell their smart displays

Amazon and Google have identified a solid use case for their smart speaker devices, powered by Alexa and Google Assistant, respectively: recipes. The companies this week have both announced new product features that aim to help users cook hands-free while guided by the voice assistant. Amazon this week rolled out a new feature integration in partnership with BuzzFeed’s recipe site Tasty to offer step-by-step voice and video instructions to Alexa users. Meanwhile, Google partnered with entrepreneur and chef Ayesha Curry to bring her recipes to Google Assistant. Curry’s recipes will…

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