Posts

As per a Google employee (via 9to5Google), Maps usage was three times higher as of last week. Since February 23, worldwide traffic has been significantly higher than the daily average. Meanwhile, usage of Google Groups rose 10x last week. But usage of productivity-oriented services like Google Sheets and Docs were three times lower than usual as life came to a standstill in most parts of Ukraine. Services like YouTube, Search, and Gmail didn’t experience any drastic fluctuations in usage....

The agency published a detailed report on the semiconductor supply chain, covered by The Washington Post and Bloomberg (via Engadget). “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods” with the supply chain issues, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said. While the issue has hit the tech industry en masse, the report claims it has particularly impacted car manufacturers, broadband providers, and medical device producers. Going into more detail, the report claims the median chip inventory for a client company fell from 40 days in 2019 to less than five days in 2021....

The Meta-owned messenger app is totally dedicated to developing new features and keeping pace with rivals like Telegram. We already reported that WhatsApp is working on group polls, but today we noticed the messaging app is also developing an in-app survey chat to collect users’ feedback. The survey option was first intended for the iOS app. However, the company is now expanding it to Android to gather more feedback. The feature is known as “WhatsApp Survey” and lets users provide the company with feedback regarding the features and products....

In its current form, multi-device support on WhatsApp can’t pair with multiple phones on a single phone number. WhatsApp allows one phone and four other devices, ranging from computers, tablets, or the Facebook Portal. While this is technically multi-device support, the inability to pair another smartphone is currently missing. The folks over at WABetaInfo (via) dug within the app’s code to find hints indicating support for a secondary smartphone. This comes weeks after WhatsApp enabled end-to-end encryption for chat backups This comes weeks after WhatsApp enabled end-to-end encryption for chat backups...

Spencer also calls the whole thing an “inevitability.” And really that’s not too far off the mark. The success of Xbox Game Pass is known far and wide by a large portion of the gaming community. Both by gamers and people in the industry that create games. That includes Sony, who has been routinely killing it when it comes to console hardware sales. But there’s no denying the success and value that Game Pass offers, while Sony’s own PlayStation NOW has been less liked by the masses....