Month: July 2023
Most of the 100 million people who signed up for Threads stopped using it
“We’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” Zuckerberg said.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)
Meta’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, is looking for ways to keep users interested after more than half of the people who signed up for the text-based platform stopped actively using the app, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees in a company town hall yesterday. Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with Elon Musk-owned Twitter.
“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” Zuckerberg told employees yesterday, according to Reuters, which listened to audio of the event.
Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.
Reverb’s summer sale brings deals from Korg, UAD and more
Reverb is hosting a summer sale from now until August 7th, allowing you to nab great music gear at a discount. The Summer of Savings sale boasts products from hundreds of well-regarded manufacturers, including Universal Audio, Novation, Gibson, Warm Audio and plenty more.So what are the best deals? This depends on what you’re into and whether you are more of a practicing musician or a bedroom studio producer. For budding engineers, nab the Universal Audio Volt 276 Studio Pack for $300 instead of $430, which features the well-reviewed Volt 256 audio interface, a condenser microphone and a pair of headphones. You also get a month of access to Universal Audio’s Spark subscription plug-in service.For synth-heads, there’s the ultra-premium Novation Summit polyphonic synthesizer, which you can pick up for $430 off the regular price of $2,300. Novation makes plenty of well-regarded pieces of gear, but the Summit is the company’s flagship keyboard, with 61 keys, 16 simultaneous voices, a semi-weighted keybed and the ability to combine two patches to create unique multitimbral sounds.You can also pick up entry-level Fender Squier electric guitars for $100 off and more Korg synthesizers and workstations than you can shake an oscillating stick at. There are also deals on pedals, midi controllers, bass guitars, audio interfaces and, well, just about everything else. Peruse the full list at your leisure.Just like Cinderella and her punk rock pumpkin, these deals have an expiration date. The sale ends on August 7th. In other words, make haste if you plan on beating the heat by fiddling with musical instruments behind air conditioned doors.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reverbs-summer-sale-brings-deals-from-korg-uad-and-more-180322955.html?src=rss
Reverb is hosting a summer sale from now until August 7th, allowing you to nab great music gear at a discount. The Summer of Savings sale boasts products from hundreds of well-regarded manufacturers, including Universal Audio, Novation, Gibson, Warm Audio and plenty more.
So what are the best deals? This depends on what you’re into and whether you are more of a practicing musician or a bedroom studio producer. For budding engineers, nab the Universal Audio Volt 276 Studio Pack for $300 instead of $430, which features the well-reviewed Volt 256 audio interface, a condenser microphone and a pair of headphones. You also get a month of access to Universal Audio’s Spark subscription plug-in service.
For synth-heads, there’s the ultra-premium Novation Summit polyphonic synthesizer, which you can pick up for $430 off the regular price of $2,300. Novation makes plenty of well-regarded pieces of gear, but the Summit is the company’s flagship keyboard, with 61 keys, 16 simultaneous voices, a semi-weighted keybed and the ability to combine two patches to create unique multitimbral sounds.
You can also pick up entry-level Fender Squier electric guitars for $100 off and more Korg synthesizers and workstations than you can shake an oscillating stick at. There are also deals on pedals, midi controllers, bass guitars, audio interfaces and, well, just about everything else. Peruse the full list at your leisure.
Just like Cinderella and her punk rock pumpkin, these deals have an expiration date. The sale ends on August 7th. In other words, make haste if you plan on beating the heat by fiddling with musical instruments behind air conditioned doors.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reverbs-summer-sale-brings-deals-from-korg-uad-and-more-180322955.html?src=rss
US judge tightens Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail, will consider jailing him
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submitted by /u/Nicolas-matteo
[link] [comments]
Pitch Deck Teardown: Unito’s $20M Series B deck
Even with some details omitted, we get a great picture of the company’s narrative structure.
Unito is a platform that takes a different approach to managing SaaS apps. Today we’ll take a look at how the company’s pitch deck helped it raise $20 million in Series B funding last year.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.
Slides in this deck
Unito shared its 12-slide deck, which is lightly redacted: It removed some logos for the companies it works with and left out its target companies, revenue targets and its growth chart. Still, even with these details omitted, we get a great picture of the company’s narrative structure.
Here’s an overview of the slides:
Cover slide
Highlights/summary slide
Market context slide
Problem slide
Solution slide
Product slide
How it works slide
Product evolution slide
Growth/traction slide
Competition/positioning slide
Team slide
Summary slide
Three things to love
The slide deck is missing a lot of information that I’d have liked to see, but the information that’s there is extraordinarily clean and simple, without going too deep into the weeds. The slides’ design is simple, clean and easy to read. If you only take away one thing from this teardown, let it be: Simplify your slides!
Extraordinary team slide
At early-stage companies, “founder/market fit” is the name of the game. By the time you grow to a Series B, however, you’re on your path toward growth, and the focus of the senior team shifts toward building, growing and retaining your team. Unito’s team slide tells that story beautifully:
[Slide 11] A great team slide. Image Credits: Unito
A combination of team building, startup experience and domain expertise lays the foundation for a great story around the senior team. The Glassdoor ratings and the company’s “better workplace toolkit” shows that it practices what it preaches, and that — combined with the company’s growth trajectory — goes a long way.
A logical evolution
[Slide 3] Positioning the company in context. Image Credits: Unito
Humans are narrative-driven. Being able to tell the story of how a startup fits into the broader context is very smart. I have a particular weakness for market evolutions and seeing how verticals change over time. This is Unito’s third slide, and the company is using it to great effect, showing how it can be the obvious next evolution of how SaaS companies talk to each other.
It’s important to think about how your company fits into a historic context for your market or industry. This can be a great way to anchor a narrative to previous successful businesses and position yourself within the sector. In some cases, it can take the place of the “why now” part of your story.
Vertical expansion
Unito started by building a set of sync tools for a specific niche: keeping the tools that product managers use in sync with tools that developers use. That’s a great way to have a specific, well-defined set of tools you have to work with. From there, the company decided to start expanding:
[Slide 8] Vertical expansion is powerful. Image Credits: Unito
This type of expansion affects a lot of different things, not least the total addressable market. We usually see this type of expansion geographically: If you have a company that has built a set of solutions for Germany, you might expand to the rest of Europe or globally. Market expansions like this can be equally powerful. It means that the addressable market grows exponentially; adding marketing, contact management and social media to the sync matrix, for example, can open up huge new market opportunities and potential for growth.
It makes the same point, but more specifically, on its competition slide:
[Slide 10] The competition slide reiterates the opportunity. Image Credits: Unito
This is the type of thing you learn in business school, so it’s great to see it out in the wild. Strategically, the path Unito built makes a lot of sense, and I’m not surprised that this narrative resonated with investors.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Unito could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
NASA Launches Its Own Streaming Platform
The U.S. agency dedicated to pushing the boundaries of space exploration is finally exploring the barest edges of the modern livestreaming era. From a report: NASA has announced it’s launching a beta for on-demand streaming content through NASA+. Oh, and if you couldn’t already guess, that “+” in the logo is shaped like a little twinkling star. The agency didn’t put an exact date on launch, but said it should be coming “later this year.” To start, the new ad-free streaming service will be available on NASA’s beta site and on an upgraded NASA app. The new web page is supposed to front load the topical space news of the day such as information about the Artemis program. The agency promises to promote content from across its different web services and add new features to its science-focused site. Whenever it comes, NASA promised this new streaming service won’t require a paid subscription, and it should be available on both iOS and Android.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The U.S. agency dedicated to pushing the boundaries of space exploration is finally exploring the barest edges of the modern livestreaming era. From a report: NASA has announced it’s launching a beta for on-demand streaming content through NASA+. Oh, and if you couldn’t already guess, that “+” in the logo is shaped like a little twinkling star. The agency didn’t put an exact date on launch, but said it should be coming “later this year.” To start, the new ad-free streaming service will be available on NASA’s beta site and on an upgraded NASA app. The new web page is supposed to front load the topical space news of the day such as information about the Artemis program. The agency promises to promote content from across its different web services and add new features to its science-focused site. Whenever it comes, NASA promised this new streaming service won’t require a paid subscription, and it should be available on both iOS and Android.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Only one laptop will get AMD’s best mobile gaming processor ever, and that’s a huge shame
AMD is equipping only a single laptop with its best mobile gaming processor yet, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D.
It seems that the rumor mill was right about AMD’s latest mobile gaming processor, as the tech giant officially announced the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D. But there’s a catch.
The only caveat is that this processor will be available for a single laptop, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D. And that’s a shame as this is probably the best mobile chip ever, and the first one to use the excellent 3D V-Cache technology. It’s similar to the Ryzen 9 7945HX except that, according to PC Gamer, it has the full 64MB of L3 cache bonded on top of one of its eight-core chiplets. It also has the same TDP and the same peak 5.4GHz clock speed, if the chiplet doesn’t have the extra L3 of course.
According to AMD, the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D’s full specs are as follows: Zen 4 architecture, 16 cores and 32 threads, L2 cache of 16GB and L3 cache of 128GB, TDP between 55 and 75W, and an AMD Radeon 610M GPU.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D processor will be launching on August 22nd, 2023, which is just after Gamescom.
AMD is wasting a great opportunity
Considering how incredible the 3D V-Cache technology is, as it manages to get extra performance out of a chip without having to bump up the amount of energy or cooling that chip would normally need, it’s a shame that only one laptop will get to benefit from it.
Especially since this tech is ideal for portable machines, as it allows some of the best gaming laptops to get great performance without having to risk additional ventilation issues.
And this chip is even more valuable to AMD because it could give both the Intel Raptor Lake-HX and the upcoming 14th-gen CPU refresh a run for the money. It really seems that AMD’s Dragon Range series could be one of the best AMD processors and even one of the best processors in general. So it feels like Team Red is squandering a real chance to push Team Blue’s hold on the processor market.
And this isn’t the only time AMD has done this either. Previously it released the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D processor in limited supply only at Micro Center, which was a baffling decision to say the least. And back in 2022, the tech giant launched the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D but it was produced in low volume and was the only 5000-series chip to sport the extra cache until 2023.
Save a Massive $400 on the iRobot Roomba S9 Plus Vacuum – CNET
Check out this amazing deal on the iRobot Roomba S9 Plus, one of the best robot vacuums around.
Check out this amazing deal on the iRobot Roomba S9 Plus, one of the best robot vacuums around.
Google Maps just got a massive upgrade for drivers
Google has rolled out a secret update to Google Maps that greatly improves the speed of searching with your voice.
Using Google Maps to navigate on your Android phone just got a lot quicker, thanks to an update that Google has sneakily rolled out to your device.
Now when you boot up the app and tap the microphone icon in the search bar, you’ll be greeted by a new “faster way” to search on Maps. Just say where you want to go and a new and improved Google Assistant will be able to speedily get up directions. It may also be a little more helpful too as in our tests when we specifically asked for the fastest way to get from A to B it would automatically suggest the mode of transport that was the quickest.
Voice controls on Google Maps weren’t terrible before but they were sluggish, and it sometimes felt just as quick to type out the directions you needed. Plus, if the app misheard you you’d have to sit and wait for what felt like an eternity for it to get up the wrong directions, only for you to then correct it so you can sit through the process all over again.
Thanks to the new and improved Google Assistant implementation using your voice to ask Google Maps for directions feels a lot quicker. Best of all, as you speak you’ll see a large readout of everything you said, making it easier to spot if Google mishears or misunderstands you so you can correct it before it wastes time looking for directions you don’t need.
(Image credit: Future)
No new app install required
What’s more, there will be a list of category options onscreen you can tap instead of speaking – and they’ll instantly boot up a list of nearby services that match the description you tapped. They feel a bit superfluous as the categories are available on the main Google Maps screen, but they don’t get in the way so we’re not going to complain too much.
We’ve been testing the improved feature out and found it to be a fair bit faster than it was before. And maybe it’s just us, but it feels like using our phone’s Google Assistant to get directions in Google Maps is faster too.
The update should have already been rolled out to your phone, even if you don’t remember updating Google Maps recently. That’s because this is a server-side update on Google’s end, so there’s no new app version for you to install before you can benefit from a faster search.
The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide
submitted by /u/EmbarrassedHelp [link] [comments]
submitted by /u/EmbarrassedHelp
[link] [comments]