Google recently released several new features for Android devices. Nearby share now has a self-share feature that allows users to share files between Android devices that are logged into the same Google account. The Google Drive and Google Keep widgets received functional upgrades and Gboard's Emojify button will be available to more users. Live sharing and multi-pinning features are rolling out on Google Meet. Wear OS users will soon get the option to add a Bitmoji to their watch faces and use Keep tiles for writing notes on the go. More details about the new Android features are available in the article.
The latest cohort of Y Combinator-approved founders are the second batch to receive $500,000 to develop their ideas. This year's batch shows what founders are prioritizing during an economic downturn, pandemic, high inflation, and ongoing war. This article looks at the biggest moonshots from the batch, including a faux fish brand, a startup that is developing hardware to solve logistics problems, a company working on building airplanes that are easier and safer to fly, and a firm that is letting angel investors invest in the futures of athletes.
Uber has announced a ten-year-long partnership with autonomous vehicle developer Nuro to deliver food to Uber Eats customers around the US. Texas and California will be the first states to receive the service. Nuro is the first full-autonomous vehicle developer to operate in three separate states. A video showing off Nuro's autonomous delivery electric vehicles is available in the article.
Disney+ has released a short film starring Brie Larson that features a companion augmented reality app that unlocks an extension of the movie. Viewers can download the app by scanning a QR code before watching the film. The app is only available on iOS, but Disney plans to make it available on Android devices in the future. It listens to audio cues from the movie to determine when to alert users to view the AR experience. The movie is an experiment to see if AR can enhance storytelling.
Marmot is a distributed SQLite replicator. It allows medium-traffic websites based on SQLite to easily handle loads without any problems. Marmot allows for robust recovery and replication due to its fault-tolerant consensus protocol.
The Congress.gov API allows users to view, retrieve, and re-use machine-readable data from the collections available on Congress.gov. Responses are returned in XML or JSON. Each request will return information about the API request, a count of how many total data items are contained within the response, and a list of all data items returned by the API call.
Tesla is letting the public vote on where the next Superchargers will be. The company is expanding its Supercharger network in North America, Europe, and Asia. It plans to open up its Supercharger network to other electric vehicles by the end of the year. The most popular areas so far are Alaska, Hawaii, Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and in US national parks. Tesla currently operates more than 35,000 Superchargers worldwide.
Silicon Valley is increasingly turning to economists for insights into how to solve business problems. Tech companies offer many of the same benefits of a university career without the 'publish or perish' culture. Economists tend to have a good grasp of statistics and understanding of how incentives affect human behavior and they are adept at designing experiments to identify causal relationships between variables. They offer skills that computer scientists and engineers often lack.