We'll say it now: the iPhone 12 needs to be a huge change to Apple's smartphone. The iPhone 11 range brought very little in terms of an upgrade. With new camera tweaks and some more power inside, they were modest updates to the popular iPhone range.
So what will the next iPhone - the first of a new decade -
Read more: iPhone 12 release date, leaks and what we're expecting
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Write comment (94 Comments)Snapchatmost popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. Ita massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories where they were being squandered to date.
Creating original in-house shows for its Discover section that can&t be copied could help Snapchat differentiate from the plethora of short-form video platforms out there ranging from YouTube to Facebook Watch to TikTok. Bitmoji TV could also up the quality of Discover, which still feels like a tabloid magazine rack full of scantly clad women, gross-out imagery, and other shocking content merely meant to catch the eye and draw a click.
With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly-scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceship to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies. The trailer Snapchat released previews an animation style reminiscent of NetflixBig Mouth.
TechCrunch asked Snap for more details, including how long episodes will be, how often they&ll be released, whether they&ll include ads, and if the company acquired anyone or brought on famous talent to produce the series. A Snap spokesperson declined to provide more details, but sent over this statement: &Bitmoji TV isn&t available in your network yet, but stay tuned for the global premiere soon!&
The Snapchat Show page for Bitmoji TV notes it is coming in February 2020. Users can visit here on mobile to subscribe to Bitmoji TV so it shows up prominently on their Discover page, or turn on notifications about its new content.
Snap has had a tough few years as many of its core features have been ruthlessly copied by the Facebook family of apps. Instagram Stories killed Snapgrowth for years and effectively stole the broadcast medium from its inventor. Facebook also ramped up it augmented reality selfie filters, added more ephemeral messaging features, and launched Watch as a competitor to Snapchat Discover.
Two years ago I wrote that Facebook was crazy not to be competing with Bitmoji too. Six months later we were first to report Facebook Avatars was in the works, and this year they launched as Messenger chat stickers in Australia with plans for a global release in 2019 or early 2020. But Facebookslow movement here, Googlehalf-assed entry, and Twitterlack of an attempt have given SnapchatBitmoji a massive headstart. And now Snap is finally leveraging it.
&TV& is actually a return to Bitmojiroots. The startup Bitstrips originally offered an app for customizing the face, hair, clothes, and more of your avatar and then creating comic strips for them to appear in. Snap acquired Bitstrips back in 2016 for just $64.2 million — a steal not far off from Facebook snatching Instagram for under a billion. The standalone Bitmoji app blew up as soon as Snapchat began offering the avatars as chat stickers. It had over 330 million downloads as of April according to Sensor Tower despite Snapchat now letting you create your avatar in its main app.
Eventually, Snap began expanding Bitmojiuses. In 2017 Bitmoji went 3D and you could start overlaying them as augmented reality characters on your Snaps. The next year Snap improved their graphics, then launched the Snap Kit developer platform and Bitmoji Kit. This allows apps to build atop Snapchat login and use your Bitmoji as a profile pic. Soon they were appearing as Fitbit smart watch faces, alongside your Venmo transaction, and on Snapchat-sold merchandise from t-shirts to mugs. Itpart of a wise strategy to beat copycats by allowing allies to use real thing rather than building their own knock-off. Thatfueled the &Snapback& comeback which has seen Snapshare price climb out of the gutter at $5.79 at the start of 2019 to $16.09 now.
One of Snap smartest innovations was Bitmoji Stories — the ancestor to Bitmoji TV. These daily Stories let you tap frame-by-frame through short comic strip-style interactions starring your avatar. Occasionally Bitmoji Stories would include rudimentary animation, but most frames were still images with text bubbles. Bitmoji could once again drive a narrative, rather than just being a communication tool. Still, they seem underutilized.
In 2019, Snapchat wised up. Bitmoji have become nearly ubiquitous amongst teens and Snapchat210 million daily users. They&re the Google or Kleenex of cartoonish personalized avatars. Their goofy nature is also a perfect fit for Snapchat, and a reason they&re tough for stiffer and older tech giants to convincingly copy.
In April, Snap announced its new games platform inside its messaging feature that let you play as your Bitmoji against friends& avatars in games ranging from Mario Party ripoff Bitmoji Party to tennis, shoot-em ups, and cooking competitions. Snap injects ads into the games, making Bitmoji key to its efforts to monetize its central messaging use case. Last month it launched custom and branded clothing for Bitmoji, which could open opportunities to earn money selling premium outfits or showing off brand sponsorships.
To truly take advantage of Bitmojiunique popularity, though, Snap needed to build longer-form experiences with the avatars at the center that . Stickers and Stories and games were fun, but none felt like must-see content. With Bitmoji TV, Snap may have found a way to get users to drag their friends into the app. Since everyone sees their own Bitmoji as the star, the cartoons could be more compelling then ones with impersonal characters you might find elsewhere around the web.
But Bitmoji TVsuccess will depend largely on the quality of the writing. If your avatar is constantly getting into funny, meme-worthy situations, you&ll keep coming back to watch. But Snapteen audience has a keen nose for inauthentic bullsh*t. If the Shows feel forced, too childish, or boring, Bitmoji TV will flop. Snap would be savvy to invest in great Hollywood talent to produce the episodes.
High quality Bitmoji TV shorts could rescue Snapchat Discover from its own mediocrity. There are a few strong brands like ESPN SportsCenter on the platform, and Snap has several original Shows with over 25 million unique viewers. Italso greenlit additional seasons of Shows like Dead Girls Detective Agency and new biopic clips from Serena Williams and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Still, a scroll through the Discover and Shows sections reveals plenty of trashy clickbait that surely scares away premium advertisers.
Bitmoji TV could offer video thatnot only fun and snackable, but out of reach for competitors who don&t have a scaled avatar platform of their own. As with the recent launch of Snapchat Cameos, the company has realized that the most addictive experiences center on its users& own faces. Snapchat turned the selfie into the future of communication. Bitmoji TV could make an animated recreation of your selfie into the future of content.
Read more: Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show
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A security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in a number of Ruckus Wireless routers, which the networking giant has since patched.
Gal Zror told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities he found lie inside in the web user interface software that runs on the companyUnleashed line of routers.
The flaws can be exploited without needing a routerpassword, and can be used to take complete control of affected routers from over the internet.
Routers act as a gateway between a home or office network and the wider internet. Routers are also a major line of defense against unauthorized access to that network. But routers can be a single point of failure. If attackers find and take advantage of vulnerabilities in the routersoftware, they can control the device and gain access to the wider internal network, exposing computers and other devices to hacks and data theft.
Zror said his three vulnerabilities can be used to to gain &root& privileges on the router — the highest level of access — allowing the attacker unfettered access to the device and the network.
Although the three vulnerabilities vary by difficulty to exploit, the easiest of the vulnerabilities uses just a single line of code, Zror said.
With complete control of a router, an attacker can see all of the networkunencrypted internet traffic. An attacker can also silently re-route traffic from users on the network to malicious pages that are designed to steal usernames and passwords.
Zror said that because many of the router are accessible from the internet, they make &very good candidates for botnets& Thatwhen an attacker forcibly enlists a vulnerable router — or any other internet-connected device — into its own distributed network, controlled by a malicious actor, which can be collectively told to pummel websites and other networks with massive amounts of junk traffic, knocking them offline.
There are &thousands& of vulnerable Ruckus routers on the internet, said Zror. He revealed his findings at the annual Chaos Communication Congress conference in Germany.
Ruckus told TechCrunch it fixed the vulnerabilities in the 200.7.10.202.92 software update, but said that customers have to update their vulnerable devices themselves.
&By design our devices do not fetch and install software automatically to ensure our customers can manage their networks appropriately,& said Ruckus spokesperson Aharon Etengoff. &We are strongly advising our customers and partners to deploy the latest firmware releases as soon as possible to mitigate these vulnerabilities,& he said.
Ruckus confirmed its SmartZone-enabled devices and Ruckus Cloud access points are not vulnerable.
&Itvery important for the customers to know that if they&re running an old version [of the software], they might be super vulnerable to this very simple attack,& said Zror.
Read more: A ton of Ruckus Wireless routers are vulnerable to hackers
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Over the weekend, media and digital brand holding company IAC announced that it had agreed to buy Care.com, which describes itself as &the worldlargest online family care platform,& in a deal valued at about $500 million. Despite being the best-known marketplace in the United States for finding child and senior caregivers, Care.com has spent the past nine months dealing with the fallout from a Wall Street Journal investigative article that detailed potentially dangerous gaps in its vetting process. The companyissues not only highlight the problems with scaling a marketplace created to find caregivers for the most vulnerable members of society, but also the United States& childcare crisis.
Childcare in the United States is weighed down with many issues and arguably no one platform can fix it, no matter how large or well-known. Over the past year and a half, however, several startups dedicated to fixing specific challenges have raised funding, including Wonderschool, Kinside and Winnie.
IAC and Care.comannouncement came at the end of a year when more media attention has been paid to the difficulties American parents face in finding and affording childcare, and how that contributes to gender disparities, falling birthrates and other social issues. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world without mandated paid parental leave and childcare is one of the biggest expenses for families. Several Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have made universal childcare part of their platform and business leaders like Alexis Ohanian are using their clout to advocate for better family leave policies.
But the issue has already created deep structural problems. From an economic perspective, a September 2018 study by ReadyNation and Council for a Strong America estimated that annually, the 11 million working parents in the United States lose a total of $37 billion in earnings because they lack adequate childcare. Businesses in turn lose a total of $13 billion a year as a result, while the impact on lower income and sales tax reduces tax revenues by $7 billion. Many parents change their career trajectories after they have children, even if they did not plan to. For example, a study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 43% of women and 23% of men in STEM change fields, switch to part-time work or leave the workforce.
Read more: 2020 will be a big year for online childcare — here are 7 startups to watch
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Iteasy to see &The Witcher& as Netflix answer to &Game of Thrones,& thanks to its impressive special effects and its big movie star lead (Henry Cavill, previously best known as Superman in the recent DC films) — not to mention its willingness to put blood, guts and naked female bodies on-screen.
But in other ways, &The Witcher& feels like a throwback to an earlier generation of fantasy TV, and to shows like &Xena: Warrior Princess.& While longer storylines weave their way through the eight-episode season — and those storylines tie together quite cleverly — the show also maintains an old-fashioned devotion to self-contained storytelling, with CavillGeralt of Rivia battling different adversaries in each episode.
And as we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we both found this to be pretty refreshing. Once you get past its gray surface, &The Witcher& turns out to be delightfully unpretentious, reveling in its pulpiness and occasionally poking fun at its stoic hero with preposterously large muscles.
That sense of fun also made us more forgiving of touches like rushed plots and anachronistic dialogue.
And while the setting might seem, at first, to resemble a generic copy of George R. R. Martin, we were both won over by &The Witcher&world-building; even though neither of us could keep track of all the made-up countries going to war with each other, we were still impressed by the intricate mythology behind some of the showmonsters.
You can listen to our spoiler-free discussion in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
Read more: Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Witcher’ shows off big muscles and bigger monsters
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