Opera brings a flurry of crypto features to its Android mobile browser

Crypto markets may be down down down, but that isn’t stopping Opera’s crypto feature — first released in beta in July — from rolling out to all users of its core mobile browser today as the company bids to capture the ‘decentralized internet’ flag early on.

Opera — the world’s fifth most-used browser, according to Statcounter — released the new Opera Browser for Android that includes a built-in crypto wallet for receiving and sending Bitcoin and other tokens, while it also allows for crypto-based commerce where supported. So on e-commerce sites that accept payment via Coinbase Commerce, or other payment providers, Opera users can buy using a password or even their fingerprint.

Those are the headline features that’ll get the most use in the here and now, but Opera is also talking up its support for “Web 3.0” — the so-called decentralized internet of the future based on blockchain technology.

For that, Opera has integrated the Ethereum web3 API which will allow users of the browser to access decentralized apps (dapps) based on Ethereum. There’s also token support for Cryptokitties, the once-hot collectible game that seemingly every single decentralized internet product works with in one way or another.

But, to be quite honest, there really isn’t much to see or use on Web 3.0 right now, the big bet is that there will be in the future.

Ethereum, like other cryptocurrencies, in a funk right now thanks to the bearish crypto market, but the popular refrain from developers is that low season is a good time to build. Well, Opera has just shipped the means to access Ethereum dapps, will the community respond and give people a reason to care?

Pessimism aside, this launch is notable because it has the potential to get blockchain-based tech into the daily habits of “millions” of people, Charles Hamel — Opera’s product lead for crypto — told TechCrunch over email.

While Opera can’t match the user base of Apple’s Safari or Google Chrome — both of which have the advantage of bundling a browser with a mobile OS — Opera does have a very loyal following, which makes this release one of the most impactful blockchain launches to date.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

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Apple plans major US expansion including a new $1 billion campus in Austin

Apple has announced a major expansion that will see it open a new campus in North Austin and open new offices in Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles as it bids to increase its workforce in the U.S. The firm said it intends also to significantly expand its presence in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years.

The Austin campus alone will cost the company $1 billion, but Apple said that the 133-acre space will generate an initial 5,000 jobs across a broad range of roles with the potential to add 10,000 more. The company claims to have 6,200 employees in Austin — its largest enclave outside of Cupertino — and it said that the addition of these new roles will make it the largest private employer in the city.

Beyond a lot of new faces, the new campus will include more than 50 acres of open space and — as is standard with Apple’s operations these days — it will run entirely on renewable energy.

Apple already has 6,200 employees in Austin, but its new campus could add up to 15,000 more

The investment was lauded by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

“Their decision to expand operations in our state is a testament to the high-quality workforce and unmatched economic environment that Texas offers. I thank Apple for this tremendous investment in Texas, and I look forward to building upon our strong partnership to create an even brighter future for the Lone Star State,” he said in a statement shared by Apple.

But Austin isn’t the only focal point for Apple growth in the U.S.

Outside of the Austin development, the iPhone-maker plans to expand to over 1,000 staff Seattle, San Diego and LA over the next three years, while adding “hundreds” of staff in Pittsburgh, New York, Boulder, Boston and Portland, Oregon.

More broadly, Apple said it added 6,000 jobs to its U.S. workforce this year to take its total in the country to 90,000. It said it remains on track to create 20,000 new jobs in the U.S. by 2023.

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Apple plans major US expansion including a new $1 billion campus in Austin

Apple has announced a major expansion that will see it open a new campus in North Austin and open new offices in Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles as it bids to increase its workforce in the U.S. The firm said it intends also to significantly expand its presence in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years.

The Austin campus alone will cost the company $1 billion, but Apple said that the 133-acre space will generate an initial 5,000 jobs across a broad range of roles with the potential to add 10,000 more. The company claims to have 6,200 employees in Austin — its largest enclave outside of Cupertino — and it said that the addition of these new roles will make it the largest private employer in the city.

Beyond a lot of new faces, the new campus will include more than 50 acres of open space and — as is standard with Apple’s operations these days — it will run entirely on renewable energy.

Apple already has 6,200 employees in Austin, but its new campus could add up to 15,000 more

The investment was lauded by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

“Their decision to expand operations in our state is a testament to the high-quality workforce and unmatched economic environment that Texas offers. I thank Apple for this tremendous investment in Texas, and I look forward to building upon our strong partnership to create an even brighter future for the Lone Star State,” he said in a statement shared by Apple.

But Austin isn’t the only focal point for Apple growth in the U.S.

Outside of the Austin development, the iPhone-maker plans to expand to over 1,000 staff Seattle, San Diego and LA over the next three years, while adding “hundreds” of staff in Pittsburgh, New York, Boulder, Boston and Portland, Oregon.

More broadly, Apple said it added 6,000 jobs to its U.S. workforce this year to take its total in the country to 90,000. It said it remains on track to create 20,000 new jobs in the U.S. by 2023.

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Capture lets you grab real 3D models with your iPhone X’s powerful camera

Three-dimensional modeling used to be hard. It used to require something at least as big as the Xbox Kinect to get really high-quality scans, and you needed high-powered laser sensor systems. Now all you need is your phone and Capture.

Capture is a proof-of-concept for a company called Standard Cyborg led by Jeff Huber and Garrett Spiegel. These Y Combinator grads have worked in a number of high-profile vision startups and raised $2.4 million in seed from folks like Scott Banister and Trevor Blackwell.

They launched the app on December 3 and it’s already making 3D waves. The tool, which uses the iPhone X’s front camera and laser scanning system to create a live color point cloud, can create 3D models that you can view inside the app or in an AR setting. You also can export them into a USDZ file for use elsewhere. The app is actually a Trojan horse for the company’s other applications, including a programming framework for 3D scanning.

“We are at the bleeding edge — deploying 3D dense reconstruction and point cloud deep learning on mobile devices,” said Huber. “We package up this core technology for developers, abstracting away all the math and GPU acceleration, and giving them superpowers in just three lines of code.”

I’ve tried the app a few times and the resulting scans are still a little iffy. You have to take special care to slowly scan all facets of an object and if you move, as you see below, you end up with two noses. That said, it’s an amazingly cool use of the iPhone’s powerful front-facing sensors.

I am so lovely pic.twitter.com/s4XtO6pEbd

— John Biggs (@johnbiggs) December 11, 2018

“Standard Cyborg is building the API for the physical world,” said Huber. “We make it easy for developers to build 3D scanning, analysis, and design into their applications. Our Capture app is a showcase of our technology that makes it easy for anyone with a FaceID-enabled iPhone to play with the technology and share scans with their friends. Our scanning SDK is launching in January and is currently in beta with a few enterprise-level sporting goods companies.”

While you won’t be scanning your loved ones into a TRON remake with this thing just yet it’s cool to think about how far we’ve come from flailing around in our living rooms with a clunky Kinect next to our TV.

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Android users can now donate to charities through the Google Play Store

The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon. Apple for years has collected donations for the American Red Cross in the wake of natural disaster like the California wildfires hurricanes, for example.

Google’s implementation, however, isn’t a launch tied to a single event. And it’s rolling out support for several charities, not just the Red Cross.

Users in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and Indonesia will soon see the option to make a donation to a number of organizations, including also charity:water, Doctors Without Borders USA, Girls Who code, International Rescue Committee, Room to Red, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Food Program USA, and World Wildlife Fund US, in addition to the American Red Cross.

To access the feature Android users canb head to play.google.com/donate to read about the organizations or to make a donation using the payment card they have on file for the Play Store. Google says 100 percent of the contributions users make go directly to the nonprofits – it’s not taking a cut.

To be clear, this is about the Play Store itself collecting charitable donations, not allowing Android app developers to do so.

The feature’s launch has been timed with the holiday season, which often inspires charitable giving. It’s also a sort of belated nod to Giving Week 2018, the movement which encourages people to volunteer, fundraise and donate to worthy causes.  (Giving Week this year wrapped on December 5).

The donations feature may offer a different selection of nonprofits in the future, we understand, though Google is not announcing any planned additions at this time.

Google says the feature will begin to roll out to Android users in the supported markets over the next few days.

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Report: Apple’s news and magazine subscription service to launch in early 2019

Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet had said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this spring.” It also detailed some of the industry reaction, which is cautious at best.

Apple is said to be courting paywalled newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to join Texture, and is working on a new design for the magazine content. Instead of trying to mimic what a magazine looks like in print, as it does today, Apple is making the content look more like typical online news articles, Bloomberg said.

The report also noted publishers were proceeding with trepidation, in many cases. Because Apple is offering a lower pricing – $9.99 per month for all-you-can-eat news and magazine content, similar to the Netflix model – publishers are worried Apple’s service will eat into their revenues. This $10 price point, after all, is cheaper than a subscription to a single publication – like The NYT’s digital subscription – in some cases

Instead, publishers prefer a platform that lets them build their own paywalls right into Apple’s app.

But Apple’s counterpoint during negotiations has been that the subscriber growth it could bring would make up for the lost revenues from publishers’ own subscription businesses, the report also said. The company compared its potential to that of Apple Music, which is nearing 60 million users, according to the latest from Billboard.

Texture today offers access to over 200 magazines, including Vanity Fair, EW, GQ, Vogue, Forbes, Time, People, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, and many others, including Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Duck.com now points to DuckDuckGo, not Google

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name  duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL.

This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo.com.

The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus “consistently” confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)…

Google also owns https://t.co/ud1YyoqbZ5 and points it directly at Google search, which consistently confuses DuckDuckGo users.

— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 18, 2018

The domain name transfer was spotted earlier by namePros which got confirmation from DDG founder Gabriel Weinberg.

“We’re pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo,” he told it.

We reached out to DDG and to Google with questions — because, well, we have a few.

Google did not engage with the substance of our questions. Instead it emailed a statement, attributed to a spokesperson, in which it confirmed the transfer of the duck.com domain and rights — writing:

Google has agreed with DuckDuckGo, Inc. to transfer ownership and rights of the duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.

DDG also would not comment beyond Weinberg’s earlier statement.

But in an interview with the TNW back in 2012, Weinberg said he first enquired about trying to buy duck.com on 11/4/09 — only to be told shortly afterwards that “management” didn’t want to sell.

He also made the point then that while the URL of the company Google had acquired the duck.com domain from (On2) pointed to a Google explanation page about that acquisition, http://duck.com/ pointed “directly to Google search”.

So, well, … 

The timing of the transfer certainly looks interesting, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai only yesterday facing some competition-flavored questions from policymakers in Congress. (Though it’s not clear exactly when the duck.com domain name was transferred.)

In recent years Google has faced some major antitrust scrutiny and enforcement internationally, including in the European Union — where it has had to make changes to how it displays search results for products after a 2017 Commission decision that found it had abused its dominance in general Internet search to give itself an illegal advantage.

This summer the EC also found Google’s Android OS to be in breach of its competition rules, leading to further regional tweaks — in that case to licensing terms.

Google is appealing both antitrust decisions.

But the Commission has another competition probe (into Google AdSense) ongoing, and continues to eye other Google product verticals with concerns.

Meanwhile, calls for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google’s dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front.

So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.

Additionally, yesterday an even more sustained line of questioning from Congress to Google’s CEO was around privacy, with Pichai fielding questions such as whether Google’s own settings are clear enough for users to understand.

You can imagine some awkward questions could also have been asked by lawmakers about why Google.com was squatting on a domain name containing the word “duck”.

A word that not only means a waterfowl or to crouch down to avoid something but which has been intrinsic to the branding of its non-tracking rival, DuckDuckGo, since that company was founded all the way back in 2008.

So, well, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck… 

 

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