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If you&ve been using Windows 10 for a while, you probably know about Cortana and OneDrive. But there are other, powerful features built into Windows 10 that you might not know about or have thought to use. These tools can help you jump right into a document or web page you accessed in the past, organize your opened applications, take notes that you can view and edit on your smartphone, and more.
Snip - Sketch: Capture and edit screenshots like a pro
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Read more: 5 hidden Windows 10 features you should be using
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Itthe waning days of the dot-com era, and this pilot fish is working at a startup whose codebase is maintained on a Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) server. Until the day it goes missing.
A programmer had decided to completely refresh his desktop computer development workspace by deleting the workspace files and then doing a resync with the VSS server version of the codebase. But for some reason all VSS users have root access on the server, and the programmer somehow manages to purge the entire codebase. Oh, did we mention that no backup was being done on that VSS server?
From the things-could-be-worse files, we can tell you that other programmers had a copy of the codebase on their desktop computers in various states of revision, allowing them to rebuild the codebase on the server — which from then on had limited root access.
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Write comment (97 Comments)Disney plans to bring its on-demand video streaming service to India and some Southeast Asian markets as soon as the second half of next year, two sources familiar with the companyplans told TechCrunch.
In India, the company plans to bring Disney+catalog to Hotstar, a popular video streaming service it owns, after the end of next yearIPL cricket tournament in May, the people said.
Soon afterwards, the company plans to expand Hotstar with Disney+ catalog to Indonesia and Malaysia among other Southeast Asian nations, said those people on the condition of anonymity.
A spokesperson for Hotstar declined to comment.
Hotstar leads the Indian video streaming market. The service said it had more than 300 million monthly subscribers during the IPL cricket tournament and ICC World Cup earlier this year. More than 25 million users simultaneously streamed one of the matches, setting a new global record.
However, Hotstarmonthly userbase plummets below 60 million in weeks following IPL tournament, according to people who have seen the internal analytics. The arrival of more originals from Disney on Hotstar, which already offers a number of Disney-owned titles in India, could help the service sustain users after cricket seasons.
The international expansion of Hotstar isn&t a surprise as it has entered the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. in recent years. In an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year, Ipsita Dasgupta, president of Hotstarinternational operations, said so far the platforminternational strategy has been to enter markets with &high density of Indians.&
In an earnings call for the quarter that ended in June this year, Disney CEO Robert Iger hinted that the company, which snagged Indian entertainment conglomerate Star India as part of its $71.3 billion deal with 21st Century Fox, would bring Star India-operated Hotstar to Southeast Asian markets, though he did not offer a timeline.
Disney+, currently available in the U.S, Canada and the Netherlands, will expand to Australia and New Zealand next week, and the U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain on March 31, the company announced last week.
Price hike
Disney, which debut its video streaming service in the U.S. this week and has already amassed over 10 million subscribers, plans to raise the monthly subscription price of Hotstar in India, where the service currently costs $14 a year, one of the two aforementioned people said.
A screenshot of Hotstarhomepage
The price hike will happen towards the end of the first quarter next year, just ahead of commencement of next IPL cricket tournament season, they said. The company has not decided exactly how much it intends to charge, but one of the people said that it could go as high as $30 a year.
In other Southeast Asian markets, the service is likely to cost above $30 a year as well, both of the sources said. The prices have yet to be finalized, however, they said.
Even at those suggested price points, Disney would be able to undercut rivals on price. Until recently, Netflix charged at least $7 a month in India and other Southeast Asian markets. But this year, the on-demand streaming pioneer introduced a $2.8 monthly tier in India and $4 in Malaysia.
Hotstar offers a large library of local movies and titles syndicated from international cable networks and studios Showtime, HBO, and ABC (also owned by Disney). In its current international markets, Hotstarcatalog is limited to some local content and large library of Indian titles.
In recent quarters, Hotstar has also set up an office in Tsinghua Science Park in Beijing, China and hired over 60 engineers and researchers as it looks to expand its tech infrastructure to service more future users, according to job recruitment posts and other data sourced from LinkedIn.
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Read more: Disney+ to launch in India, Southeast Asian markets next year
Write comment (93 Comments)The rebirth of the Razr has been rumored for several months now. And honestly, such a product is a bit of a no-brainer. The Lenovo-owned company is embracing the burgeoning (if sputtering) world of foldables with the return of one of its most iconic models.
While ittrue that Motorola kept the Razr name alive in some form or another well into the Android era, everything thatcome since has failed to recapture the magic of the once mighty brand.
From the looks of things, however, the newly announced Razr is a lovely bit of symmetry. The product, which was announced earlier today in Los Angeles, leans into the lackluster criticism that foldables are simply a return of the once-ubiquitous clamshell design.
Motorola Razr
According to Motorola, the company has been toying around with flexible technology for some time now. Per a press release: &In 2015, a cross functional team, comprised of engineers and designers from both Motorola and Lenovo, was assembled to start thinking about how we could utilize flexible display technology.&
The device swaps the horizontal design of its best known competitor, the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The vertical form factor looks to be a match made in foldable heaven. Certainly it loses some of the uber-thin design that made the original Razr such a hit so many years back, but makes the ultra-wide (21:9) 6.2-inch screen compact enough to fit in a pocket.
As with the Galaxy Fold, thereanother a small display on the front for getting a glimpse of notifications and the like. Itanother design feature that mirrors the O.G. Razr. Predictably, the device runs Android — Android 9 (for now), to be precise.
For full throwback appeal, therealso a &Retro Razr& mode, that mimics the original metallic button design for the bottom half of the screen. Ita skin that does, indeed, double as a number pad, usable with Android messaging app. Motorola clearly put a lot of love into the design and it shows. If nothing else, the new Razr could go a ways toward proving that retro handsets can be more than just nostalgic novelty for bygone tech.
After the whole Samsung kerfuffle, you&d be right to question the devicedurability, though Motorola says itless concerned, citing an &average& smartphone timespan for the product. Only one way, to find out, I guess. Also like the Fold, price is a pretty big obstacle to any sort of mainstream adoption for this first-gen product. The Razr will run $1,499 when it launches in January of next year.
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Read more: Motorola throws back to the future with a foldable Razr reboot
Write comment (95 Comments)Peanut, an app that began its life as a match-maker for finding new mom friends but has since evolved into a social network of more than a million women, announced today it has closed on $5 million in new funding and is expanding its focus to reach women who are trying to conceive. The round was led by San Francisco and London-based VC firm Index Ventures, also backers of Dropbox, Facebook and Glossier, among others.
Other Peanut investors include Sweet Capital, Greycroft, Aston KutcherSound Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Felix Capital and Partech. To date, Peanut has raised $9.8 million.
The idea for Peanut arose from co-founder Michelle Kennedypersonal understanding of how difficult it was to forge female friendships after motherhood. As the former deputy CEO at dating app Badoo and an inaugural board member at Bumble, she initially saw the potential for Peanut as a friendship-focused matching app with swipe mechanisms similar to popular dating apps.
Over the past couple of years, however, Kennedy realized that what women needed was more of a community space. The team then built out the appfeatures accordingly, with the launch of its Q-A forums, Peanut Pages, last year, and more recently, with Peanut Groups. The latter has now become Peanutmain use case, with 60% of users taking advantage of the appcommunity features and just 40% using the friend-finding functions.
&Community is definitely becoming a very important part of what we do. Itwhere we see the users that we deem to be power users — women who are using Peanut for hours every day — they&re very much within the community section,& explains Kennedy. &We see that growth there and it actually guides the product. So we&re taking the behaviors that we see and letting that inform our roadmap,& Kennedy says.
Since around November 2018, Peanut has been growing by 20% month-over-month, as more women discover Peanutprivate and ad-free alternative to Facebook Groups. On Peanut, users are verified (by selfies!), and people have the sorts of discussions that don&t really take place in other social apps.
Even Kennedy admits she was surprised at first by what women were talking about in the app.
&The conversations were much, much more personal and intimate and more related to their lives. So whether that had to do with their sex life or relationships, it was on a deeper level,& she says. &These are conversations that women simply can&t have anywhere else. Of course, they&re not happening in Facebook Groups…these are very intimate and self-reflective moments. And [women] want to do that in a private setting in a private social network,& Kennedy adds.
The new funding, in part, will be used to grow Peanut16-person team to 22 this year, which will then double next year.
In addition, Peanut is expanding access to women who are trying to conceive, with the launch of the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community. This will offer a separate sign-up experience and access to a dedicated network of women, where members can candidly discuss the topic and ask questions. Within TTC, members can also create their own groups — like one for women on their fifth round of IVF, for example — to have conversations with others who are at the same place in their journey.
The community, today, won&t point women to other fertility-focused apps or related health services, Kennedy says, though she sees the potential for strategic partnerships further down the road. In the near-term, however, Peanut plans to generate revenue by way of the freemium model and micropayments.
&We&re incredibly excited to partner with Michelle to grow Peanut from the essential platform for mothers it is today, to a social network for women globally. Peanut is a true companion for women, bringing them together when they need each other the most,& says Hannah Seal, principal at Index Ventures, about the firminvestment. &We&ve been impressed with the response Peanut has received since launch and look forward to supporting the team as it enters into new areas such as fertility, and expands globally.&
&We want to shine a light on an often silent struggle. What has always been Peanutpoint of difference is enabling conversations women feel unable to have on any other platform. Providing a safe, inclusive space for women to discuss fertility is a natural progression for our brand as we continue to support women throughout each life stage. No woman should ever feel lonely, isolated or muted on such an important issue,& Kennedy says.
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