Amazon Is Building ‘Vesta’ Home Robot For 2019
- Amazon’s Lab126 R&D division has been secretly developing Vesta for a few years already
- Leaked information suggests that the robot is meant to accompany users to places with no Alexa devices around
- Vesta uses autonomous car technologies such as cameras and computer vision for navigation
Gaming Monetization On Mobile Flagships Hits Historical Peak
- DeltaDNA research shows that flagship users spend 270% more on games than the average mobile user
- Conversion leaders are Apple, Google, and Samsung phones
- Google Pixel 2 XL shows the highest conversion rate – 11.11%
Google Revenue Sets A New Record High
- The company reports a 26% year-over-year revenue growth with $31.16B in the last quarter
- The first quarter of the last year brought Google $24.75B.
New GitHub Learning Lab Features A Bot-Assistant
- The bot imitates a human project lead: helps users solve repository issues, pass comments on any work while checking over pull requests, etc
- The lab currently features 5 intro courses, with more soon to come.
Twitch Brings Its Virtual “Currency” To Extensions
- Earlier last year, Twitch has launched Bits as a “virtual good you can buy and use to Cheer”
- Since today, Bits can be used to power extensions (Twitch channel add-ons)
- 150 add-ons now can charge Bits to provide additional experience to the users
- Use cases include in-stream mini-games, polls, leaderboards, tickets, a priority queue for joining a creator’s game, etc.
SmugMug acquires Flickr
- The financial terms remained a secret
- The new management hopes to “revitalize” Flickr
- Flickr will remain a separate site, with no merging of user accounts or photos