LoopIt? Twig? MemeTree?
While apps come and go, one fan favorite that “went” is Vine, the fun 6-second video looper that was both fun and informative. Twitter snapped up the app in 2016 and promptly gutted it since it competed with its own Periscope feature. But now, Vine’s original inventor, Dom Hoffman, says he wants to launch a follow-up app that sounds like it’ll be a lot like Vine. Hoffman took to twitter recently to say he’s working on the project.
UK site The Independent says Hoffman didn’t specify many details about the new app, which likely won’t be called Vine, of course, but it could have many of its features, including the short-duration limit of what you can record. Vine was a hit after it debuted in 2012, but just four years later it was essentially dead, although Twitter has been nice enough to keep all the old Vine videos archived for your short-attention span pleasure.
It doesn’t quite fit in your pocket
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is most famous for his insanely fast electric cars, but his real passion – or at least one of them – is battery tech. So he’s probably pretty happy today as a gigantic battery system he promised could power part of South Australia went online today – a week ahead of schedule. And the timing is important, since Musk said he’d have the 100-megawatt capacity installation up and running in 100 days, or it would be free.
The giant storage system is hooked up to a nearby wind farm which will supplement the battery as well as charge it up. The region was hit with a powerful storm that knocked out power to the nearly 2 million residents, which were already struggling with an antiquated and unreliable power grid. Now, local officials say the Tesla battery system makes the region one of the world leaders in renewable energy systems – and puts them on the cutting edge of storage tech.
Electric Avenue
Multiple car companies have pegged the year 2020 as the big debut for truly driverless cars to start mixing with human-piloted traffic, but GM officials say they are planning to push that date up a year in certain cities with a self-driving ride-share program. In an 80-plus page document, GM laid out their plans to deploy self-driving Chevy Bolt electric cars in a ride sharing scheme they say would cost passengers just a third of what they now pay for Uber or Lyft.
The document makes some pretty bold claims and forecasts, including a future of “zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion,” which we assume refers to car traffic and not a cure for the common cold. GM says their plans will redefine the future of personal mobility and that electric vehicles of all types are the future. There are also some hints at next-gen “EME” battery tech that is, unsurprisingly, cheaper, smaller and more powerfl than current systems.
The presentation is loaded with graphs, Venn diagrams and all manner of future plans, and it’s a pretty interesting read, especially when it comes to the future of automated electric vehicles.
We’ve got more news on our Facebook page and YouTube channel, and be sure to tune in to this week’s DT podcasts: Trends with Benefits (general tech shenanigans) on Thursdays, and Between the Streams (movie and TV topics) every Friday.
