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Tesla to make India debut ‘early’ next year Dec 29, 2020

Show notes

Tesla will begin its operations in India “early” 2021, a top Indian minister said on Monday, a day after the tech carmaker said it was confident it would enter the world’s second most populated market next year. The American car company will begin operations with sales in early 2021 and then “maybe” look at assembling […]

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Samsung hasn’t announced the Galaxy S21 yet, but you can already reserve one Dec 29, 2020

Show notes

For obvious reasons, many of us are spending the final week of 2020 looking forward. Samsung is hoping some folks are looking far enough ahead to reserve a spot in line for its still-unannounced Galaxy S21 handset (not an official name, mind, but probably a safe guess). If you’re on the Samsung Mobile mailing list, […]

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Gillmor Gang: Get Back Dec 28, 2020

Show notes

Today we sat on the deck with our daughter Ella and her boyfriend Nick. Knowing of my fascination with all things Beatles, Nick gave me a Japanese 45 of Get Back flipped with Don’t Let Me Down. His gift coincided with a 5 minute cut of material from a newly authorized production of a new […]

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Music made 2020 better, but we failed to make 2020 better for musicians Dec 28, 2020

Show notes

“Are you okay?” I don’t have a good answer to the question. Knowing full well that I’m talking back to an algorithm — even one asking the same question of everyone with a different band mad-libbed in — doesn’t soften the blow. Am I? Are we? Is anyone, really? In this case, it’s referring to […]

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Elon Musk claims he tried selling Tesla to Apple but Tim Cook wasn’t interested Dec 24, 2020

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Tesla stock’s miraculously bizarre 2020 might have a gone different way had Apple’s Tim Cook agreed to a meeting in recent years, or so says Elon Musk. Reacting to Reuters’ recent news that Apple has not abandoned its electric car program and is still pursuing plans to build a physical vehicle, Musk tweeted that in […]

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Honk introduces a real-time, ephemeral messaging app aimed at Gen Z Dec 24, 2020

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A new mobile app called Honk aims to make messaging with friends a more interactive, real-time experience. Instead of sending texts off into the void and hoping for a response, friends on Honk communicate via messages that are shown live as you type, with no saved chat history and no send button. The end result […]

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TikTok launches its first personalized annual recap feature, ‘Year on TikTok’ Dec 23, 2020

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Spotify users have Wrapped and Instagram users have their Top 9. And now TikTok users will have their own year-in-review feature, too. The company today announced the launch of its first personalized annual recap feature with the launch of “Year on TikTok,” a video highlight reel that showcases individual users’ own top TikTok moments. This […]

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Google expands its cloud with new regions in Chile, Germany and Saudi Arabia Dec 23, 2020

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It’s been a busy year of expansion for the large cloud providers, with AWS, Azure and Google aggressively expanding their data center presence around the world. To cap off the year, Google Cloud today announced a new set of cloud regions, which will go live in the coming months and years. These new regions, which […]

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Gillmor Gang: Full Stream Ahead Dec 22, 2020

Show notes

Twitter is shutting down Periscope, the video app it acquired several years ago when Facebook Live threatened to lap the field. When we stream the Gillmor Gang sessions, we send them to Facebook, Twitter, and an unlisted embed on YouTube. At one point, we planned to stream the sessions live on TechCrunch, but for now […]

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Unicorn travel startup Hopper is facing a pandemic-fueled customer service nightmare Dec 22, 2020

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Mobile travel app Hopper has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic as consumers canceled their trips and airlines dropped their flights. But the complications around getting airline credits and refunds have since turned into a customer service crisis for the airfare prediction and ticket booking startup, which had been valued at $750 million back […]

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