It’s that time of year again — time for Steam Replay. Similar to Xbox Year in Review and PlayStation Wrap-Up, Steam Replay 2024 looks back over your gameplay stats for the entire year, showing you what you’ve played, how long you’ve played it, and the feats you’ve accomplished along the way. As usual, Steam Replay runs through the end of the year, so if you want to view your Replay and unlock the exclusive Steam Replay 2024 badge, you’ll need to sign in soon. Thankfully, you can save your Steam Replay to your profile as a featured showcase, as well…
Author: Olsi
Threads is introducing a new way to reshare photos and videos on its social network. Instead of quote posting the original post and then adding commentary, Threads users will instead be able to click a new option, “Use Media,” allowing them to just reshare the photo or video directly to a new post where they can add their own text. The image or video will still be credited to the original poster, however. The feature was announced on Wednesday by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a post on Threads. He noted that the new option would be a “quick, easy…
GPS tracking firm Hapn is exposing the names of thousands of its customers due to a website bug, The Tech Spot has learned. A security researcher alerted The Tech Spot in late November to customer names and affiliations — such as the name of their workplace — spilling from one of Hapn’s servers, which The Tech Spot has seen. Hapn, formerly known as Spytec, is a tracking company that allows users to remotely monitor the real-time location of internet-enabled tracking devices, which can be attached to vehicles or other equipment. The company also sells GPS trackers to consumers under its…
Successful tech companies follow a typical pattern: from product to platform where other startups build businesses on top of theirs. To spur that, they often launch a fund. Fast-growing social media site Bluesky, which now claims 25 million users, is on that path. On Wednesday it announced a new fund, with an initial $1 million warchest, run by open source and Python big wig Peter Wang. Bluesky, the decentralized social app from Jack Dorsey (though Dorsey left the Bluesky board in May), was launched five years ago and has really taken off as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. The…
ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we can,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said during a livestream. Today, we’re taking the next step and bringing ChatGPT to your telephone.” The experience is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI’s real-time conversational feature for ChatGPT — minus the multimodality. ChatGPT responds to the…
Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access. GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023. “My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told…
Alphabet’s Wing announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its partnership with DoorDash to bring drone delivery to customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Customers in the area will now be able to order food from 50 merchants located in Stonebriar Centre in Frisco and Hulen Mall in Fort Worth. Wing says its drones can “deliver items and meals to doorsteps in as little as 15 minutes.” The drones can navigate to the customer’s residence at a speed of 65 mph and a cruising height of about 150 feet. When customers with an eligible address in Dallas-Fort Worth place an order…
The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by Apple’s App Store as Google Play spending declined, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. Though spending was up, there was another worrying sign about the overall health of the app ecosystem. This year, global app downloads were down by 2.3%, compared with…
Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “A Japanese garden, with rich, green foliage,” Explorer can generate an interactive, real-time scene. Odyssey claims its tool is “particularly tuned” for creating photorealistic scenes. That’s largely a consequence of the startup’s technical approach; the AI powering Explorer was trained on real-world landscapes captured by the…
Regulators have given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship for the seventh time, although the company has not yet announced when that mission may take place. While the exact launch date is unclear, SpaceX engineers have been as busy as ever at the company’s massive launch site near Boca Chica, Texas. In recent days, the company performed test fires of the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage (which is also called Starship), though the two stages have yet to be stacked at the launch tower. The most recent Starship test took place on November 19 with president-elect Donald Trump as…
