Tech News Today for June 20, 2017
Tech News for Tuesday June 20, 2017
Amazon is really concerned with the way you dress, so it's launching a new service for Prime Members called Prime Wardrobe. Users pick three or more items of clothing that they want to potentially buy, and they will be added to a box that will be delivered to the user’s home with seven days to try them on and free returns for anything they don’t want to keep. The kept items are then charged to the Amazon account, with discounts tied to the amount of items kept from a shipment. Prime Wardrobe is in beta at the moment. Read more at recode.net
If you're still using Uber, you can now tip your driver without carrying cash. Gizmodo reports that starting today it will roll out a tipping option in the app. The longstanding policy of not allowing a tipping option has been confusing for riders, many of whom assumed that a tip was included — it was not. Uber has been sued in California and Massachussets for not allowing this option and they had clarified their policy that it was acceptable to give your driver a cash tip. Uber had defended their reasoning in the past by saying that they had prided themselves on having a cashless experience. The update to the app is part of Uber's 180 days of change campaign. Read more at gizmodo.com.
OnePlus announced its latest flagship Android device, the OnePlus 5, with Qualcomm’s top of the line Snapdragon 835, 8GB of RAM, 128gb of storage, and is running Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box. OnePlus went with a dual rear facing camera setup that, let’s be real, looks almost identical to the design of the iPhone 7 Plus. Those cameras allow for on-the-fly bokeh style photos as well as offering 2x optical zoom. As OnePlus always does, they are releasing a relatively top tier device for a competitive price starting at $479. Read more at 9to5google.com.
Instagram and Snapchat, fellow travelers in the fight for eyeballs, both reached different milestones today and Axios says it points to their very different strategies. Instagram Stories reach 250 daily active users today after launching only 10 months ago. Whereas Snapchat has only 166 million DAUs as of earnings report last May and was first passed by Instagram back in April. Meanwhile, Snapchat, originally designed for sexy selfies, has been awarded the distinguished Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding achievements in electronic journalism. Read more at axios.com.
Google is launching a new search feature built for job seekers that taps into a number of job boards as well as job listings posted on company homepages. Searching for something like “jobs near me” will pull up the new interface with controls for refining the results based on industry, recency, location and specific employer. Read more at techcrunch.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Sean Hollister of CNET to talk about Apple's giant leap into augmented reality with ARKit. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.