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View File Zynith SEO Plugin v10.5.2 Zynith SEO Plugin: A Comprehensive Guide In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains a critical component for online success. WordPress, being one of the most popular content management systems, offers a plethora of plugins to enhance SEO efforts. Among these, the Zynith SEO Plugin stands out as a powerful tool designed to optimize your website for search engines. This article delves into the features, benefits, and usage of the Zynith SEO Plugin. What is the Zynith SEO Plugin? The Zynith SEO Plugin is a comprehensive SEO tool for WordPress websites. It provides a range of features designed to improve your site’s visibility on search engines, thereby driving more organic traffic. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced webmaster, Zynith SEO offers functionalities that cater to all levels of expertise. Key Features of Zynith SEO Plugin Here are some of the standout features of the Zynith SEO Plugin: Keyword Optimization: Helps you identify and optimize for the best keywords relevant to your content. Content Analysis: Analyzes your content for SEO best practices and provides actionable recommendations. XML Sitemaps: Automatically generates XML sitemaps to help search engines index your site more effectively. Meta Tags Management: Allows you to easily manage meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page. Social Media Integration: Optimizes your content for social media sharing, ensuring better visibility across platforms. Link Building Tools: Provides tools to help you build high-quality backlinks to improve your site’s authority. Performance Reports: Offers detailed reports on your site’s SEO performance, including keyword rankings and traffic data. Benefits of Using Zynith SEO Plugin Using the Zynith SEO Plugin offers numerous benefits: Improved Search Engine Rankings: By optimizing your site for relevant keywords and following SEO best practices, you can achieve higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Increased Organic Traffic: Higher rankings lead to more visibility, which in turn drives more organic traffic to your site. Better User Experience: The plugin helps you create content that is not only SEO-friendly but also user-friendly, enhancing the overall user experience. Time-Saving: With automated features like XML sitemaps and content analysis, you can save a significant amount of time on manual SEO tasks. Comprehensive Reports: The detailed performance reports provide valuable insights into your SEO efforts, helping you make informed decisions. How to Install and Set Up Zynith SEO Plugin Installing and setting up the Zynith SEO Plugin is a straightforward process. Follow these steps: Log in to your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to the Plugins section and click on “Add New”. Search for “Zynith SEO Plugin” in the search bar. Click on “Install Now” and then activate the plugin. Once activated, go to the Zynith SEO settings page to configure the plugin according to your needs. Optimizing Your Content with Zynith SEO Plugin Optimizing your content is crucial for achieving better search engine rankings. Here’s how you can use the Zynith SEO Plugin to optimize your content: Keyword Research: Use the keyword optimization tool to find relevant keywords for your content. Focus on long-tail keywords for better targeting. Content Analysis: Run your content through the content analysis tool to identify areas for improvement. Follow the recommendations to enhance your content’s SEO. Meta Tags: Ensure that each page has unique and descriptive meta titles and descriptions. Use the meta tags management feature to easily update these elements. Internal Linking: Use the link building tools to create internal links within your content. This helps search engines understand the structure of your site and improves user navigation. Social Media Optimization: Optimize your content for social media sharing by adding relevant meta tags and images. This increases the likelihood of your content being shared, driving more traffic to your site. Advanced Features of Zynith SEO Plugin For those looking to take their SEO efforts to the next level, the Zynith SEO Plugin offers several advanced features: Schema Markup: Add structured data to your content to help search engines understand the context and improve your site’s visibility in rich snippets. Advanced Analytics: Get in-depth insights into your site’s performance with advanced analytics. Track keyword rankings, traffic sources, and user behavior to refine your SEO strategy. Competitor Analysis: Analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies to identify opportunities and stay ahead in the game. Local SEO: Optimize your site for local search results by adding location-specific keywords and creating Google My Business listings. Mobile Optimization: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly with tools that help you optimize for mobile search engines. Common Issues and Troubleshooting While the Zynith SEO Plugin is designed to be user-friendly, you may encounter some common issues. Here are solutions to a few of them: Plugin Conflicts: If you experience issues after installing the Zynith SEO Plugin, check for conflicts with other plugins. Deactivate other plugins one by one to identify the culprit. Slow Site Speed: Ensure that the plugin is not affecting your site’s speed. Optimize images, use caching plugins, and consider upgrading your hosting plan if necessary. Incorrect Meta Tags: Double-check your meta tags for accuracy. Ensure that each page has unique meta titles and descriptions. XML Sitemap Errors: If your XML sitemap is not working correctly, regenerate it from the Zynith SEO settings page and submit it to search engines. Conclusion The Zynith SEO Plugin is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your WordPress site’s SEO. With its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface, it caters to both beginners and advanced users. By leveraging the capabilities of the Zynith SEO Plugin, you can improve your search engine rankings, drive more organic traffic, and ultimately achieve your online marketing goals. Whether you’re looking to optimize your content, manage meta tags, or gain insights into your site’s performance, the Zynith SEO Plugin has got you covered. Install it today and take the first step towards a more optimized and successful website. Submitter ceacer Submitted 05/05/2025 Category Wordpress Plugins Null  

View File Chauffeur v8.5 - Booking System for WordPress Limo service, taxi operator, car hire. No matter which of these businesses you choose, Chauffeur Taxi Booking System is the first choice when it comes to a booking solution. The most popular and #1 selling WordPress Plugin for companies of all sizes provides a simple reservation process with online payments, notifications, WooCommerce and Google services integration. Designed for: luxury limousine service, chauffeur, for any website related to private and shuttle transfers like airport taxi, sightseeing tours or hotel transfers. For limo service, limousine hire, taxi service and taxi booking. For bus, van and taxi cab. Consider the plugin for a wedding limo, driver hire or charter service. It will also work well as a taxi calculator, in event transportation or party buses. Submitter ceacer Submitted 05/05/2025 Category Wordpress Plugins Null  

Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.” In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, and Merchant said there was another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, contractors (first translators, then writers) were replaced with AI. Merchant also noted reporting in The Atlantic around the unusually high unemployment rate for recent college graduates. One explanation? Companies might be replacing entry-level white collar jobs with AI, or their spending on AI is simply “crowding out” the spending for new hires. This crisis, Merchant wrote, is really “a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations,” and it’s manifesting as “attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.” “The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse — it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of ‘an AI-first strategy,’” he added.

President Donald Trump has already delayed a TikTok ban twice, and he said Sunday that he’s willing to do it again. Axios reports that during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said that if a deal isn’t made to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to American owners before the current June 19 deadline, he would grant the company another extension. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I have a little warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” he said. Congress passed a law last year banning TikTok if its parent company ByteDance did not sell the short-form video app, and TikTok briefly disappeared when the ban took effect in January. Trump then declared that he would delay the ban for 90 days and suggested that he’d like to see a joint venture with U.S. ownership. When the next deadline rolled around in April, Trump gave the company another 75-day extension, noting that the Chinese government (which must approve the deal) was “not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting its own official company town. Residents of an area around SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in southern Texas voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to incorporate as a city — also named Starbase. According to results posted online by the Cameron County Elections Department, there were 212 votes in favor and only six against. In a post on his social media site X, Musk wrote that Starbase, Texas “Is now a real city!” The new city’s residents are believed to mostly be SpaceX employees. On Saturday, they also voted to elect three current and former Starbase employees — Bobby Peden, Jordan Buss, and Jenna Petrzelka — who ran unopposed to serve, respectively, as Starbase’s mayor and two commissioners. The Associated Press reports that SpaceX hasn’t shared many specifics about why it wanted to incorporate the area. The company said it already manages the area’s roads, utilities, and “the provisions of schooling and medical care,” and it’s also looking to shift authority from the county to the new city government to close the nearby Boca Chica beach and state park for launches. Musk — who recently said he would be reducing his role with the Trump administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency to a “day or two” per week — announced last year that he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters from El Segundo, California to the Starbase facility in Texas. At the time, Musk said he’d “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building” and that the “final straw” was a California bill that prohibits schools from disclosing students’ sexuality or gender identity without consent. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW After last night’s election, a new X account representing the town posted, “Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space.”

While many tech companies are mandating that their employees return to their offices, and putting an emphasis on building in-person teams, they are also turning in droves to Latin America to find developer talent — especially for post-training AI models. Revelo, a full-stack platform of vetted developers in Latin America, is seeing a new surge in demand for engineers that can help with LLM training, Revelo co-founder and CEO Lucas Mendes, told TechCrunch. Revelo has more than 400,000 developers on its platform and facilitates the hiring and payment process for its U.S. customers. Mendes said this recent surge of demand for Revelo’s talent is driven by the next phase of the AI revolution: post-training LLMs. “There’s a race for data, and especially expert human data, that can actually help LLMs be better at very specific high-value tasks,” Mendes said. “Coding is one of those tasks. And what happened last year is that we saw a surge in demand from [companies] building foundational models that are looking for engineers that can be effective experts and that can provide that human data to help their LLM code better.” LLM training hires accounted for 22% of Revelo’s revenue in 2024. Mendes added that often this demand looks like companies coming to them to find experts in specific coding languages to help fill gaps in the post-training they are already doing. Revelo is supplying workers to U.S. enterprises Intuit, Oracle, and Dell, among others, including “nearly every major hyperscale AI provider.” Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Revelo is not the only company looking to connect U.S. companies to programmers in Latin America; other companies like Terminal, Tecla and Near are just a few with the same goal. This demand for developers skilled in post-training is just the latest hiring trend that Revelo has been able to ride since it was founded in late 2014. Mendes said he launched Revelo alongside co-founder Lachlan de Crespigny because the war for talent was tight at the time, and they thought if they created a network of vetted talent in Brazil, companies would be able to find the talent they needed. The demand was there and Revelo went on to raise more than $48 million in venture funding from firms including Social Capital, FJ Labs and Valor Capital Group. The company also expanded out of Brazil and into broader LatAm. The Covid-19 pandemic expanded Revelo’s potential reach “massively,” Mendes added. “All of a sudden we started getting inbound from U.S. companies who suddenly realized that you can actually have really high-quality distributed teams and have some of those engineers are in Latin America,” Mendes said. “So what would happen usually is that they would hire one or two and really like the quality and especially the quality cost tradeoff and say, ‘Hey, I want more of these, where do I find them?’” While the rise of distributed and remote work has largely started to fade as companies return to in-person work, Revelo has still managed to keep growing. Mendes joked that he hates to be the guy that goes against the buzz, but the demand for their LatAm talent has not diminished despite tech’s movement back to the office. Mendes said he thinks that the demand from U.S. companies for these developers in Latin America has remained because these developers fall more into the “nearshoring” category of workers outside the U.S. as opposed to “offshoring.” He believes the fact that Revelo’s talent is located in the same time zones as their client companies makes these hires a lot more attractive. Revelo is seeing enough demand that it has acquired five other competitors focused on LatAm talent in the last 30 months including Alto and Paretisa, which were announced in March. “We’re building that global talent backbone for the age of AI and there will be more acquisitions in the future,” he said.

Spotify generates the vast bulk of its income from ads and subscriptions, but for the past few years the music-streaming giant has also been quietly building out a developer tooling business. Backstage, a project it open-sourced in 2020, has been adopted by more than 2 million developers across 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines. Backstage helps companies build customized “internal developer portals” (IDPs), bringing order to their infrastructure chaos by combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs, and documents in a single interface. Want to monitor Kubernetes, view cloud costs, or check your CI/CD status? Enter Backstage. Backstage in actionImage Credits:SpotifyThe Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which accepted Backstage as an incubating project in 2022, reports that Backstage was one of its top 5 projects last year in terms of velocity and activity. And it’s this momentum that is leading Spotify to double down, with various premium tools and services on the horizon. Oven-baked Companies can already use the core Backstage product for free, including an array of open source plugins that extend its functionality. But Spotify started selling premium plugins in 2022, such as Backstage Insights, which displays data related to active Backstage usage within an organization. And last year, Spotify got serious about its dev tools business play, announcing Spotify Portal for Backstage in beta: a premium, oven-baked incarnation for those lacking the resources (or inclination) to set everything up themselves. “Backstage in a box,” is the general idea. The fully managed SaaS product is now edging toward general availability in the coming months, with design partners and customers including the Linux Foundation and Pager Duty already on board. “We discovered that there were a lot of different customer profiles,” Tyson Singer (pictured above), Spotify’s head of technology and platforms, explained to TechCrunch in an interview at KubeCon last month. “Our original theory was that Backstage was going to be bigger for mid-size to large enterprises dealing with a lot of complexity, but we found that small companies also see these same problems. And so having a hosted version makes everything so much easier.” Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Spotify also teased a couple of new premium Portal plugins at KubeCon, including AiKA (“AI knowledge assistant”), which is basically a chatbot initially developed internally for its own employees. AiKA from SpotifyImage Credits:SpotifyThe result of a 2023 hackathon, Spotify says that AiKA is now used by 25% of its workforce weekly to query the company’s collective knowledge base. So rather than bombarding support channels in Slack, employees can just ask AiKA, which is trained on its own internal documents and data. Singer also says that AiKA’s utility — providing instant answers to questions — motivates employees to make sure all their documents are up-to-date because it makes AiKA smarter. If someone doesn’t get a good response to a question, they can see what source was used in the response, and provide feedback to ensure the source document is improved. “It [AiKA] kind of sounds simple, but it’s powerful, and we got super-high adoption very quickly internally,” Singer said. “[I think why is because] it’s not just developers that are using it — everybody in the R&D organization has gotten into it, which also brings more people into the Backstage ecosystem. But also it creates this very positive fly-wheel between quality and discovery.” Spotify has confirmed that an alpha version of AiKA is set to launch for third parties imminently. And while it won’t be at feature parity with its own internal version initially, it should go some way toward bolstering Backstage’s stickiness as a premium product in the long run. AiKA from SpotifyImage Credits:SpotifyGrowing confidence Backstage isn’t the only home-grown developer product Spotify is looking to monetize. Some 20 months ago the company announced Confidence, an A/B experimentation platform that has remained in stealth ever since. “We have a few customers who are paying [for Confidence], but we are really focused on Portal right now,” Singer said. “We’re being very selective about the customers that we let in the door.” According to Singer, Spotify will have more to say about Confidence later this year, though he did hint at potential synergies between Confidence and Portal in the form of a plugin that brings some simple feature-flagging functionality into Portal. When all is said and done, creating a developer tooling side-hustle on top of its day job as an online music emporium has surely been a major undertaking. But there has been good reason for all of this. More than a decade ago, Spotify created its own container orchestration platform called Helios to support its transition to a microservices architecture. While Spotify eventually open sourced Helios to spur wider uptake, it ultimately lost out to Google’s Kubernetes, which went on to conquer the world. Spotify ditched Helios and joined the throngs on Kubernetes — a “painful” decision at the time. And what we’re seeing now with Backstage is a response to that: an effort to ensure that Backstage is the industry standard IDP, and that its own developers aren’t forced to transition to something else that comes along. “When you have a product that gets replaced by an external product, particularly an open source one, that migration cost is just tremendous,” Singer said. “And so we decided that we don’t want that to happen to a product that is literally the foundation of how we do development at Spotify.” While Spotify went some way toward heading off that problem when it open-sourced Backstage in 2020, the premium stuff that’s now following is really to ensure that it sticks. “We’re a business — and we also want to build a healthy business on top of all this,” Singer said. “We’re not just trying to cover costs. At the end of the day, we have a lot of value trapped inside Spotify right now.”

Chinese retailer Temu has shifted strategy in the face of U.S. tariffs. Through executive order, President Donald Trump has ended the so-called de minimis rule, which allowed goods worth $800 or less to enter the country without tariffs. He’s also increasing tariffs on Chinese goods by more than 100%, forcing both Chinese companies like Shein and American giants like Amazon to adjust plans and hike prices. CNBC reports that Temu was affected as well, with U.S. shoppers seeing “import charges” between 130% and 150% added to their bills. Now, however, the company is no longer shipping goods directly from China to the United States. Instead, it only displays listings for products available in U.S. warehouses, while goods shipped from China are listed as out of stock. “Temu has been actively recruiting U.S. sellers to join the platform,” a Temu spokesperson said. “The move is designed to help local merchants reach more customers and grow their businesses.”

Legendary investor Warren Buffett announced today that he will ask the Berkshire Hathaway board to have Greg Abel replace him as CEO at the end of 2025. “I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end,” Buffett said at the end of the company’s annual shareholder meeting, ahead of its board meeting Sunday. At the same time, Buffett, who is 94 years old, said that he would “hang around” in some capacity. He and Abel told CNBC that they would use Sunday’s board meeting to discuss what Buffett’s formal role will be after he steps down. Buffett had previously identified Abel — currently Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman for non-insurance operations — as his successor, but he hadn’t said when Abel would take over. While technology is just one of many areas where Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway invest, it’s made big bets on the industry. Even after selling half its Apple stock last year, the company represents more than 20% of its portfolio.

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got lots of news for you today: Amazon earnings, Apple earnings, ChatGPT sycophancy, Alibaba’s AI models, and much more. Let’s get to it! Well? During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Tim Cook revealed that the company paid $900 million in tariffs last quarter. But despite this, the CEO didn’t announce any price increases — yet. Big bucks: Defense tech startup Mach Industries, which was founded by 21-year-old Ethan Thornton, is about to close a fresh $100 million in financing, sources told TechCrunch. This new funding should bring the startup’s total funding to about $185 million to date. More models: Alibaba announced this week that it’s releasing a family of AI models, called Qwen3, that it claims can outperform OpenAI and Google. According to Alibaba, the Qwen3 models are “hybrid” models, and they’re not yet available for download. This is TechCrunch’s Week in Review, where we recap the week’s biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. News Image Credits:AmazonShoot for the stars: Amazon’s effort to create a space-based internet network began in earnest this week: The company fired off its first 27 internet satellites on Tuesday. The first half of the network needs to be deployed by mid-2026 to meet the FCC deadline. AI in your pocket: Meta is rolling out a stand-alone AI app, which it unveiled at the company’s first LlamaCon event on Tuesday. The app allows users to access Meta AI in an app, similar to the ChatGPT app and other AI assistant apps. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Blocked: A judge in India blocked the encrypted email provider Proton Mail across the country. This was in response to a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates, which alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail. Cheaters never win: Cluely went viral recently for its bold claim of helping people cheat on everything. But some startups are claiming they can catch Cluely’s users. Alexa+: Amazon’s new digital assistant aims to let users talk with it in a more natural style and eventually have agentic abilities that allow it to use third-party apps on a user’s behalf. During Amazon’s earnings call this week, CEO Andy Jassy says that 100,000 users now have Alexa+. AI where it matters: Airbnb seems to be taking a more measured approach with AI. It started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month. CEO Brian Chesky said in February that the company would use AI for customer service before it started implementing it for other uses like travel planning or booking tickets. Epic ruling: Epic Games has notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from imposing anticompetitive pricing. As a result, Fortnite could be back on iPhones as soon as next week. LOL: Following the Epic Games ruling, Stripe shared documentation that shows iOS developers how to avoid the Apple commission. Check your settings: Meta emailed Ray-Ban Meta owners on Tuesday with a notice that AI features will now be enabled on the glasses by default. This means Meta’s AI will analyze photos and videos taken with the glasses while certain AI features are switched on. Yikes! OpenAI said it was “rolling back” the latest update to the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o, after complaints about strange behavior, in particular it being overly agreeable and validating. According to OpenAI, the update, which was intended to make the model’s default personality “feel more intuitive and effective,” was informed too much by “short-term feedback.” Now the company pledges to make changes that would prevent this from happening in the future. Before you go Image Credits:Bryce Durbin / TechCrunchOh the drama: We read through the 80-page Epic v. Apple decision to pull out the judge’s juiciest, fieriest comments. Here’s one to get you started: “Apple engaged in tactics to delay the proceedings. The Court later concluded that delay equaled profits.”

Google’s most expensive AI model seems to have crossed a major milestone: Beating a 29-year-old video game. Last night, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted triumphantly on X, “What a finish! Gemini 2.5 Pro just completed Pokémon Blue!” To be clear, the Gemini Plays Pokemon livestream was created by (in his own words) “a 30 year old software engineer unaffiliated with Google” who goes by Joel Z. But Google executives have been cheering the effort on. For example, Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for Google AI Studio, posted last month that Gemini was “making great progress at completing Pokémon” and had “earned its 5th badge (next best model only has 3 so far, though with a different agent harness),” leading Pichai to joke, “We are working on API, Artificial Pokémon Intelligence:)” Why Pokémon? Back in February, Anthropic highlighted progress that its Claude AI models were making in “Pokémon Red,” writing that Claude’s “extended thinking and agent training” gives it “a major boost” on “more unexpected” tasks, like playing a classic game. (“Pokémon Red” and “Blue” are different versions of a GameBoy title first released in 1996 and tied to the long-running Pokémon franchise). There’s even a Claude Plays Pokemon Twitch channel that Joel Z cited as an inspiration. Despite its progress, Claude does not appear to have beaten “Pokémon Red” yet. Does that mean Gemini is objectively better at the game? On his Twitch page, Joel Z urged viewers, “Please don’t consider this a benchmark for how well an LLM can play Pokemon. You can’t really make direct comparisons — Gemini and Claude have different tools and receive different information.” And both AI models need help to play the game — that’s where the aforementioned agent harnesses come in, providing the models with game screenshots overlaid with additional information, allowing the model to decide how to respond (which may involve calling specialized agents), and then pressing the button that corresponds with the AI’s instruction. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Joel Z acknowledged that there were other “dev interventions” to help Gemini complete the game, but insisted that it’s not cheating. “My interventions improve Gemini’s overall decision-making and reasoning abilities,” he says. “I don’t give specific hints — there are no walkthroughs or direct instructions for particular challenges like Mt. Moon. The only thing that comes even close is letting Gemini know that it needs to talk to a Rocket Grunt twice to obtain the Lift Key, which was a bug that was later fixed in Pokemon Yellow.” Plus, he said, “Gemini Plays Pokémon is still actively being developed, and the framework continues to evolve.”

Like virtually every sector in the business world, the secondhand industry is grappling with the ramifications of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. However, based on the comments made by eBay and Etsy earlier this week, both don’t appear to be overly concerned. The companies recently reported Q1 2025 earnings results, both addressing the pressing topic of tariffs. eBay and Etsy are resilient to an extent, largely due to their sellers’ approaches to sourcing products. In contrast to import-reliant rivals like Temu and Shein, which recently raised prices in response to tariffs, many eBay and Etsy sellers in the U.S. mainly source their products locally, often selling used, vintage, or handmade items. The companies provided data during their earnings calls to demonstrate the minimal exposure to tariffs. eBay’s CEO Jamie Iannone said, “Our greater China to U.S. quarter makes up about 5% of total [gross merchandise value] for us. And China overall is a little less than 10%.” Similarly, Etsy’s CFO, Lanny Baker, said, “At present, Etsy’s direct tariff exposure appears to be relatively low given that just over 1% of [gross merchandise sales] comes from U.S. imports of items purchased from sellers in China.” Etsy’s CEO, Josh Silverman, added, “Most are solo entrepreneurs working from their home with 90% sourcing their supplies domestically.” Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Having sellers with local sourcing strategies can provide a significant advantage over competitors like Temu, Shein, and Amazon. However, secondhand companies still have to deal with the challenges that come with the ongoing economic uncertainty and consumer spending habits. Etsy appears to be slightly more vulnerable when it comes to this. Etsy’s core business model focuses on handcrafted and vintage goods, which tend to be priced higher. So, while Etsy sellers may not feel the effects of tariffs, customers are still hesitant to spend, leading to a 3.4% year-over-year decline in active buyers, bringing the total to 88.5 million. The number of habitual buyers was down 11%, totaling 6.2 million. Additionally, Etsy reported an 8.9% decline in gross merchandise sales (GMS) for the marketplace to $2.3 billion. On a positive note, Etsy continues to benefit from its ownership of Depop, a secondhand fashion platform that remains popular amid the looming recession. Since acquiring Depop in 2021, the platform has achieved record-high GMS. The company didn’t disclose specific figures. “Etsy has a strong track record of navigating turbulent macroeconomic conditions, and we’re confident in our ability to keep adapting,” Silverman said. In contrast, eBay is in a stronger position because more price-conscious shoppers are choosing used and refurbished goods, which the company said accounts for over 40% of its inventory. The company reported that customers eager to avoid tariffs have increased their spending, giving eBay a solid start to the quarter. “We have observed healthy volume trends due to strength in our focus categories and what could be a modest pull forward of demand from consumers worried about increased costs and complexity at U.S. customs in the near future,” said eBay’s CFO, Steve Priest. The company’s gross merchandise volume (GMV) grew to $18.8 billion, while revenue increased over 1% to $2.58 billion.

If you’re someone who likes to bookmark a bunch of things that you find interesting or want to come back to later, it can be hard to manage everything you have saved. There are a number of great bookmark apps on the market that can help you organize all these sorts of links, articles, and whatever else you come across on your mobile phone and browser. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best to help you find one that’s right for you. Raindrop.io Image Credits:Raindrop.ioRaindrop is an easy-to-use bookmark app that lets you clip things like articles, photos, videos, songs, books, and pages from the web and apps. You can organize your bookmarks into collections with tags and filters and personalize these collections with icons and photos to find them easily. Raindrop saves the entire web page of what you’re saving, which means you don’t have to revisit the link. Raindrop also lets you share your collections with friends, family members, or the entire web. Raindrop is available as a Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge extension. Or, you can download the Raindop.io apps for web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, and Android. The free version of the service gives you unlimited bookmarks and collections, the ability to upload 100MB of files per month, access to more than 2,600 integrations, and more. The Pro version of the app costs $28 per year and comes with AI suggestions, the ability to upload 10GB of files per month, daily backups, and more. Pocket Image Credits:PocketPocket may be one of the best-known bookmark apps on the market, and that’s because it’s simple and gets the job done. You can use the app to bookmark the latest news, magazine articles, videos, recipes, how-tos, and basically anything else you come across online from any publisher. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW You can use the app to curate a space for topics that you’re interested in to get recommendations for other similar articles you may enjoy. Pocket is available on iOS, Android, the web, and through browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. The app’s basic functionality is available for free. You can upgrade to Premium for $45 per year to unlock an ad-free experience with additional features, such as suggested tags, advanced search, permanent backup, and more. GoodLinks Image Credits:GoodLinksGoodLinks is a bookmarking app that lets you save articles without web advertisements and other distractions so you can read them later in an easy-to-read format. You can also highlight text in articles to find important passages at a later time. You can use tags to organize articles by topic and search your bookmarks based on their title, description, and content. GoodLinks is available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices. The app also offers browser extensions to save links directly from Safari, Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. You can download GoodLinks via a one-time purchase of $9.99. You can choose to pay $4.99 for an annual feature upgrade, which gives you access to new features that were introduced within one year of your initial purchase. Matter Image Credits:MatterMatter is an aesthetically pleasing app that lets you save articles, social media threads, and PDFs so you can come back to them later. You can also save YouTube videos and podcast episodes, after which Matter will transcribe them to time-synced text. Plus, you can get all of your newsletters sent straight to Matter if you’re on the paid version of the service. As with the other apps on this list, you can organize your bookmarks with tags and share links directly with others. The app is available on iOS and macOS and through a web app. It’s also available through a Safari extension. The free version of Matter includes an un-capped read-later library, unlimited tags, and the ability to save all types of content. The paid version, which costs $7.99 per month or $59.99 per year, comes with HD text-to-speech for all your articles, the ability to sync your newsletters and send content to your Kindle, and more. MyMind Image Credits:MyMindIf you don’t want to manually save and organize things, MyMind could be a good fit for you. The app uses AI to organize your bookmarks and automatically tags them so you can find them later. It will also give you a brief summary of what you have saved. MyMind then groups related content into “Spaces,” which gets rid of the need to manually sort your bookmarks. You can search for what you’re looking for using keywords, brand, date, or even color. The app is available on iOS, Android, and the web, as well as through extensions for Safari, Chrome, and Edge. MyMind offers two different subscription tiers. The “Student Life” tier costs $6.99 per month and comes with unlimited cards, spaces, intelligent bookmarks, and more. The “Mastermind” tier costs $12.99 per month and unlocks advanced AI, video support, AI summaries, a reading mode, and more.

News about Android is being relegated to a side show at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, next month. On Monday, the company announced it would share information about the latest updates coming to the Android ecosystem at an upcoming virtual event called “The Android Show: I/O Edition,” airing on May 13. The decision to move the Android portion of Google I/O to its own separate event ahead of the start of I/O suggests this year’s developer conference could be even more AI heavy than usual. AI news and updates were already taking up an increasingly longer portion of the Google I/O consumer and developer keynote addresses. Google, however, is framing this shift differently. Instead, the company says there were “so many new things to share” about Android that it chose to create a special event — an I/O edition of its Android Show video podcast — as another way to share the latest news and changes. It also notes that Android will continue to have a presence at I/O in keynotes and technical sessions for developers. Still, moving a bulk of the Android news to a virtual show ahead of the main event is a notable programming change for the developer conference. Whether that’s because there’s “too much news” or because Google decided Android’s news didn’t require as high a billing as in previous years remains to be seen.

Temu is adding “import charges” of around 145% in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods shipped from China, CNBC reports. The fees cost more than the products that U.S. consumers are buying, and in some cases are more than doubling the price of a standard order. For example, CNBC found that a summer dress sold on Temu for $18.47 will cost $44.68 after $26.21 in import charges. Shein has also hiked prices but isn’t implementing an import charge, it appears. The moves come a few weeks after Temu and Shein warned that they were going to raise prices for U.S. customers starting April 25 in response to the tariffs. The 145% tariff on products made in China, along with Trump’s decision to end a customs exemption that had allowed goods under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free, has disrupted the business models of both platforms.

Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play. Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, one of the most experienced and seasoned B2C founders in Europe, who built the Amen and Plazes apps. Right now, all users can do on Grouphug is export the text from a group WhatsApp chat and generate funny images from the content. However, this is just a taster of things to come. Underlying this simple exercise to acquire beta users is an app still in stealth mode. But Petersen hinted to TechCrunch that the company plans to launch a platform to generate more value out of WhatsApp groups using generative AI. “We think we’ve cracked AI humor. For now, Grouphug will create jokes based on what happened in the group. We turn your WhatsApp chats into memes. But then we have other plans for it,” he told TechCrunch. “There is this world of group chats where most of the things happening, like on Reddit or X, are conducted in public. But everything that’s in WhatsApp groups is not part of the public internet. That’s an opportunity.” The startup has already raised a €1.5 million ($1.7 million) pre-seed round led by Berlin-based Blueyard VC, alongside Tiny VC, Charles Songhurst (a Meta board member), Atlantic Labs, and others. Petersen is joined by Joseph Djenandji, who recently exited his well-known multi-channel travel brand LostIn. The third founder is Matthew Balazsi, who has worked on AI and ML for the last 10 years. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020. Spotify also reported a record-high quarterly operating income of €509 million (around $528 million). However, this was below the company’s guidance of €548 million ($625 million). Total revenue jumped 15% year-over-year to €4.2 billion ($4.8 billion). Additionally, the music-streaming giant now has a total of 678 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 423 million ad-supported MAUs. The numbers come on the heels of the company’s profitability milestone last quarter, when it reported operating income of €477 million ($509.48 million). Spotify remains a top player in the music-streaming industry, successfully beating competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music. Plus, the company has been chasing YouTube with its push into video podcasts, with 330,000 shows now on the platform. Notably, its recently launched Spotify Partner Program has paid out more than $100 million to podcast creators in the first quarter. Most recently, Spotify rolled out its AI Playlist offering to over 40 markets, including the Bahamas, Fiji, Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, Singapore, and more.

Google announced on Tuesday that digital IDs are coming to more states and services in Google Wallet. The company also shared that Wallet is getting a way to privately verify age and that the app is expanding to 50 more countries. Residents in Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia will soon be able to save their U.S. government-issued digital IDs to Google Wallet. Plus, people in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, and New Mexico will be able to use their mobile IDs at the DMV. As the REAL ID deadline of May 7, 2025, approaches, Google notes that you can use an ID Pass created from your U.S. passport to pass through TSA security for domestic travel at supported airports, even if you don’t have a REAL ID driver’s license or state-issued ID. However, your ID pass isn’t a replacement for your physical ID, so you should still keep that with you. Users will also soon be able to use their digital ID to recover Amazon accounts, access online health services with CVS and MyChart by Epic, verify profiles on platforms like Uber, and more. In addition, Google is rolling out the ability for residents in the U.K. to create digital ID passes with their U.K. passports and securely store them in Google Wallet. As verification is required across many websites and services, Google says it wanted to create a verification system that not only verifies users’ ages but also protects their privacy throughout the process. To achieve this, Google is integrating zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology into Google Wallet. This integration will allow Google to provide fast age verification across mobile devices, apps, and websites that use its digital credential API. The company will use ZKP in other Google products and partner with apps like Bumble, which will use digital IDs from Google Wallet to verify user identity and ZKP to verify age. Google will also open source its ZKP technology to other wallets and online services. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW As for Wallet’s expansion to 50 more countries, Google didn’t provide a list of the specific countries. TechCrunch reached out to learn more.

Google’s AI-based note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM is making its Audio Overviews feature available in 76 new languages, the company announced on Tuesday. Audio Overviews launched last year to give users the ability to generate a podcast with AI virtual hosts based on documents they have shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. The idea behind the feature is to give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app. With this expansion, more people can use Audio Overviews in their preferred language. Google notes that up until now, Audio Overviews have been generated in your account’s preferred language. Now the company is introducing a new “Output Language” option that will allow users to choose which language their Audio Overviews are generated in. You can change the language at any time, making it easy to create multilingual content or study materials as needed, Google says. “For example, a teacher preparing a lesson on the Amazon rainforest can share resources in various languages — like a Portuguese documentary, a Spanish research paper, and English study reports — with their students,” Google wrote in a blog post. “The students can upload these and can generate an Audio Overview of key insights in their preferred language.” Google told TechCrunch in an email that the new supported languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Bengali, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish (European, Latin American, Mexico), Estonian, Basque, Persian, Finnish, Filipino, French (European), French (Canada), Galician, Gujarati, Hindi, Croatian, Haitian Creole, Hungarian, Armenian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, and Japanese. They also include Javanese, Georgian, Kannada, Korean, Konkani, Latin, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maithili, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Malay, Burmese (Myanmar), Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norwegian (Bokmål), Oriya, Punjabi, Polish, Pashto, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Swedish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional). Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW

Google Play’s app marketplace is losing apps. From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That’s a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that have been available to Android users globally. The decline is not part of some larger global trend, the firm also notes. During the same period, Apple’s iOS App Store went from hosting 1.6 million apps to now just around 1.64 million apps, for instance — a slight increase. In Google’s case, the decline in apps could be a relief for Android device owners who have had to sort through scammy, spammy, and otherwise poor-quality apps to find the best ones to install. The reduction could also help developers who have had to fight for visibility. Over the years, Google Play’s less stringent requirements for app review have led to the marketplace being overrun with lower-quality apps. While Apple continues to enforce strict app review measures before publication, Google often relies on automated checks combined with malware scans to speed up the app-review process. It tends to have a shorter app-review period as a result of its lighter touch in terms of human review. In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings. Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn’t install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated “limited functionality and content.” That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF-file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy policies, improved developer tools, and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. One factor Google didn’t cite was the new trader status rule enforced by the EU as of this February, which began requiring developers to share their names and addresses in the app’s listing. Those who failed to do so would see their apps removed from EU app stores. (It’s worth pointing out that Apple also began requiring trader status information in February and did not see a decline in available apps as a result.) Appfigures additionally notes it began seeing a decline in the number of apps on the Google Play Store even before the official start of the purge last summer; it doesn’t yet have an explanation for this change. However, the firm says there have been 10,400 releases on Google Play so far this year, up 7.1% year-over-year as of April.

As part of its Q1 2025 earnings release, Snap said it’s scrapping plans for a simplified version of its app. The news comes seven months after Snapchat began testing a redesigned version of the app without the Snap Map or Stories tabs. The new version consolidated the app’s navigation bar around three icons: chat, camera, and Snapchat’s TikTok competitor, Spotlight. Instead of continuing to test the simplified version, the social network is now going to begin experimenting with a “refined five-tab interface” that keeps all of the app’s existing tabs and makes it easier to access Spotlight. “In terms of the simple Snapchat design, we learned a lot from the redesign, but ultimately found that it was difficult, especially for power users, folks who really love Snapchat the way that it is who use the map and stories all the time, to really adopt the three-tab design, which made it harder to find stories and subscriptions and harder to find the map,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said on a call with investors. “So ultimately, we’re taking a bunch of learnings from the three tab simple Snapchat design and evolving the five-tab design with those learnings.” The company says it found that a more prominent Spotlight experience and the integration of Friend Stories within chats significantly boosted daily content viewership and total content views, especially among more casual users. “Our most engaged Snapchatters consistently demonstrated a preference for a five-tab layout, favoring the familiarity of tile-based content discovery and a dedicated Map tab,” Snap said in its letter to investors. “Informed by these insights, we have begun testing a refined five-tab interface that combines the best of both approaches: bringing more Stories to the messaging experience and adding easier access to Spotlight, now placed directly to the right of the Camera.” The reversal comes as Snap shares that it lost 1 million users in North America in Q1 quarter-over-quarter. Snapchat DAUs (daily active users) in North America stood at 99 million, compared to 100 million in the past quarter and 100 million in the prior year, according to Snap’s shareholder letter. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW The company also saw an increase of more than 55% year-over-year in the number of My AI daily active users in the U.S., as Spiegel teased some AI-related announcements to come later this year. “As we look at the areas where we really want to differentiate, it’s really around that visual communication,” he said. “And so as we look at the way that people are interacting with My AI, by sending snaps and either receiving snaps or a chat response in return. I think that starts to show the way that these multimodal models are going to play a powerful role in people’s lives. I think looking even longer term beyond that, the way that people are going to integrate AI into augmented reality, and I think provide a totally new user interface powered by AI is something that we’re investing a lot in. We’ll have more announcements around that later this year.” Snap reported first-quarter revenue of $1.36 billion, a 14% year-over-year increase. The company says the uptick was driven by growth of its Snapchat+ subscription service and progress that it has made with its advertising solutions. Snap also reached a new milestone: more than 900 MAUs (monthly active users) worldwide. In addition, the social network’s DAUs grew to 460 million globally, an increase of 38 million year-over-year.

Since it launched nearly 20 years ago, Speedtest.net has been one of the most popular tools used to measure internet speeds. However, Doug Suttles, the founder and former CEO of Ookla, the network testing company behind Speedtest, felt that just measuring speed was not enough to tell people all they wanted to know about their internet connections. That’s why Suttles is now launching a new tool called Orb that measures latency, packet loss, jitter, and speed to give you a measure of how stable your internet connection is. Suttles, who started Orb with Ookla exec Jamie Steven in 2023, said Speedtest.net was the right tool for its time, but as internet speeds became less of an issue around the world, he felt people needed new, more holistic ways to assess their internet connections. “Speed tests are like the dipstick in your car, which will tell you that you ran out of oil once your car breaks down. We wanted to build a dashboard to tell you that you are low on oil, so you can fix that problem,” Suttles told TechCrunch over a call. Image Credits:Orb.netOrb checks network connections for three key variables: responsiveness, which is measured by a combination of lag, jitter, latency, and packet loss; reliability, which measures responsiveness over time and packet loss over time; and speed, which is your usual download and upload speeds. All these variables can be measured over different time intervals — one minute, five minutes, one hour, and 24 hours. Combining all three variables, the tool gives you a score to indicate how stable your network connection is. An Orb score above 80 indicates a good connection; 70-80 means you have an okay connection; and if you get anything below that, you may have noticeable problems. If your score is under 80, the app suggests steps you can take to improve the performance of the network. The startup says it uses LLMs to show descriptions of key issues and the suggestions related to solving those. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW Image Credits:Orb.netOrb has apps for various platforms, including iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The company also provides a guide for installing the tool on Raspberry Pi, Onewrt, Docker, Steam Deck, Prox Max, WLAN Pi, older smartphones, and other platforms for those who would want to monitor their connections more frequently. The startup is also working on a feature that would let users set up an Orb and share it with someone else to have them monitor your connection. Both users will receive notifications if the connection quality wavers. Image Credits:Orb.netOrb is currently free to use, and the company wants to keep it that way. Suttles said he’d like to license the technology to enterprises and ISPs so they can monitor and identify network issues with advanced alerts and analytics. The startup has so far raised $3.8 million in funding from Sidekick Ventures, as well as individual investors, including Fastly senior director Edward Bender; Netflix engineer Jana Iyengar; Big Network CEO Tom Daly; Fastly’s former head of streaming, Lee Chen; the head of strategy and operations of Oculus Studios, Jason Kay; former president of THQ and founder of Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin; and Vetro’s head of strategic initiatives, Will Cooper. Steven, who also worked on creating Down Detector, said Orb also aims to create recipes for different services that help you detect if you can access a particular site, like Zoom, Netflix, X, or Google Drive, to check if the services are working.

Instagram Threads, Meta’s X competitor, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. That’s an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024. It’s also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users. X, meanwhile, now has north of 600 million monthly active users, according to statements made by its CEO, Linda Yaccarino, on Wednesday. While Threads is still small in comparison to Meta’s other social apps — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp — its growth is helping to cement its place in the microblogging app ecosystem. In total, Meta says that more than 3.4 billion people now use at least one of Meta’s apps daily. On Wednesday’s call, Zuckerberg told investors that the growth indicates that Threads “continues to be on track to become our next major social app.” He additionally noted that there’s been a 35% increase in time spent on Threads as a result of improvements to the app’s recommendations systems.

Epic Games has notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple, as a result of which Fortnite could return to the U.S. iOS App Store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling on Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from imposing anticompetitive pricing. Apple won many of the arguments in the trial with Epic Games. One notable exception was a ruling prohibiting the iPhone maker from collecting fees on purchases made outside of apps. At the time, Apple was told to change its app store to allow developers to direct customers to their websites, where users could then make purchases. Per the ruling, Apple not only failed to comply, it did so “willfully” and with the intent of creating new anticompetitive barriers. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple,” Rogers said in the ruling. She went a step further and referred the case to the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings. An Apple spokesperson said the company would fight the court’s decision, saying “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took to X to announce his company would bring Fortnite back to the U.S. App Store as soon as next week. Techcrunch event Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 BOOK NOW As The Verge reported, Sweeney also extended a proposal to Apple: “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic,” he wrote. The ruling was celebrated by other tech companies affected by Apple’s policy. “This landmark court ruling is a victory for developers everywhere,” Spotify spokesperson Jeanne Moran said in an emailed statement. “Spotify will move quickly to submit an app update to Apple, enhancing the experience for our consumers across the United States.”