Tingle Tech

Roblox, the gaming platform that is immensely popular amongst young players, said on Twitter Sunday evening that it is back online worldwide.

The recovery came after an outage that lasted three days, a somewhat rare streak of blackout for a tech firm of Roblox’s colossal size. The company said earlier that the cause was an “internal system issue.”

Rumors had it that a promotional partnership between the gaming platform and Chipotle, which planned to give out $1 million worth of free burritos to Roblox players around Halloween time, led to the crash. Roblox denied in a tweet that the disruption was caused by any “experiences or partnerships” on the platform.

The Roblox crash also came on the heels of Facebook’s rebranding announcement to become Meta. Roblox, which allows users to build and play games, is often seen as the emblem of metaverses.

The outage is not just causing impatience among young users over Halloween weekend but also Roblox’s millions of developers who make money by touting games to kids and teens. Roblox had more than 43 million daily active users as of August.

It remains to be seen whether the three-day disruption will dent Roblox’s investor confidence in the company’s technical capabilities once the market opens on Monday.

via Tingle Tech

On the last Gang recording session in early October before the birth of our first grandchild, I tried to stir the pot by attacking Democratic Progressives for capsizing the second of two Infrastructure bills. The moderates, led by the recalcitrant Joe Manchin and his silent sidekick Kyrsten Sinema, were successfully gumming up the Democrats’ best chance for holding control of the House and perhaps Senate. What else is new, you say?

In tech news, Facebook was busily exploiting the tone deaf policy of getting slightly irritated with growing pressure from whistleblowers, former venture capital critics who built their careers on the company’s early success, and a two-fisted teamup from a Congress in over its head and the media looking for a good story to replace Donald Trump’s devolution as credible threat. Today, Facebook ads talk of reforming Section 230 and otherwise providing rules for the company to follow. Infrastructure bingo has whittled down the cost by 60%; the plan is to get it passed in time to influence the election of the Governor of Virginia.

As I write this, it’s the end of October. I went to Ray Wang’s CCE conference down the coast in Half Moon Bay. The Ritz exists in a time warp, where the details of the outside world fade into the sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping up against the gentle lawns. Like the Ritz, conferences are testing the principles of the last economy against the shimmer of the next one. We could call it Work from Anywhere or Build Back Better or the last Beatle record, but I suggest we dig in to the fundamental shift and play in the surf of a new reality.

It’s a reality where each of us with a little coin in our pockets and a phone can participate in the new media. It’s not quite an even playing field, as accumulating a meaningful audience is not provided with the available cloud tools. But what is provided is plenty to start with: a free newsletter tool, free social audio tools to broadcast and evangelize the newsletter’s editorial agenda, and tickets to a dazzling array of services and streaming choices to distribute your stuff. So, a few freemium products to jumpstart things and then look out, hold on to your wallets. The net result of this is called the creator economy by vendors and prospective producers, but it’s more likely a consumers economy.

We saw this with blogs and then podcasts, born out of RSS and its attachment extension. The RSS readers gave us civilians the ability to aggregate the stuff we wanted in what looked like an email client but also a newsgroup. Twitter added a layer of social graph which broad- or narrowcast our preferences to an emerging social cloud, a sphere of influence that both aggregated media and inserted us into that media flow on equal terms. As someone who was lucky enough to find access to the technology press pre-blog, I knew full well what a powerful hand-hold this new technology proffered. I can see the same fingerprints in this new economy as certain newsletter nodes create a pecking order for what I and our virtual cohort deems valuable. Social signals provide clues and notification trails to identify, amplify, and negotiate tickets to what I perceive as the new post-pandemic conference.

At CCE, a Salesforce colleague allowed as how he’s stopped watching the Gang because our Trump talk is too depressing. Of course, who really needs another podcast anyway. To be fair, Trump has been largely replaced by Manchin, but the pain point is more and more the media’s difficulty in defining a rationale for coverage that doesn’t descend into picking fights and promoting a lifestyle of anxiety and anger for ratings. This should be good news for the new economists, but secretly we all want to become the “real” media and are subverted into a similar editorial model. So my complaining about conflict of interest in the media is about as inconsequential as worrying about Trump. If I don’t like it, build it back better.

Well, I’d like to, but I have to wait a while longer for the promised Record/Replay function to ship on Clubhouse, Twitter, and everywhere. I’ve had the ability to record for months, but what I’m waiting for is everybody to have access to the marketplace. Talent will out, and not just talent in words or one-directional podcasts but in marketing, analytical insights, pure promotion, and actionable ideas that shape all these domains. And this means holding these folks accountable to their promises. Clubhouse said “weeks” more than a month ago.

A day ago, Twitter announced new features for its Twitter Labs early look subscription service, unfortunately only available currently in Canada and Australia. I’d gladly pay $4.95 a month to test out new features. And more importantly, who else would? C’mon, @jack, I’ll even pay with bitcoin if I have to. But things are moving quickly: Twitter just announced record tools are now in beta and will ship to creators and listeners in a couple of weeks. Et tu, Clubhouse?

At CCE I met with Paul Greenberg, who, with his partner (and Gillmor Gang member) Brent Leary, are building a series of what he calls live streaming shows around the CRM Playaz banner. Paul says he looks forward to this column/newsletter and that I should write more and more often. I recognize what Paul and Brent are doing in live streaming as the leading edge of what this moment is about, so I understand what they mean by encouraging this work I’m doing. These tools, together with the experiences and network of colleagues and friends I’ve accumulated along the way, give me an extraordinary opportunity to extend ideas, styles, and the actual music of what we crave as the consumer economy. When what I do works, even I appreciate it, and in truth has always been my northern light in talking with an audience no matter how large or undetectable. And the rewards on the upside can be astonishing.

We all know how the Grateful Dead spawned a forest of recorders and microphones at their concerts, not just allowing but encouraging it by letting some of them plug into the group’s live mixing board. By the late Eighties, a band that was largely a touring outfit had transcended the record business and stood as the largest grossing live act on the planet. It also spawned a hit album and only Top Ten single, Touch of Grey, through the force of the Dead micro-community, not the other way around.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 29, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

via Tingle Tech

When there's something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call? Card readers, calculators, toothbrushes, a clothes iron, and a bunch of other fun junk turned into an orchestra to play the Ghostbusters theme.

The Device Orchestra YouTube channel is filled with impressive setups that transform household items into instruments that perform all kinds of tunes, but the Ghostbusters song is particularly impressive because it really sounds like these machines are not only playing music, but saying "ghostbusters." Like they actually have mouths or something. Do you think some of them might be possessed?

via Tingle Tech

If you had your sights set on buying Apple's so-called "polishing cloth" as a Christmas gift for the Apple fan who has everything, go back to the drawing board.

The much-mocked — and popular given early sales — piece of fabric is backordered until mid-January, according to Apple's website. The $19 item is also not available in store. That means you'll have to wait until 2022 to snag the fuzzy wipe.

Yes, folks were so hungry for the branded textile that its availability kept getting pushed back. Just a day after its October celebration of innovation, which arguably wasn't that innovative, the polishing cloth was backordered to November. Now it's been pushed back two more months.

Mind you, there are plenty of products out there that can be used to wipe away dust and greasy finger smudges from most iPhone, iPad, and MacBook screens that don't cost $19. Alas, there's only one with an Apple logo, and you can't snag it even if you wanted to. Take comfort, however, if you were planning to purchase it for someone with older devices. The polishing cloth may not be compatible with their older Apple wares, anyhow.

As a joke that can be read as a larger commentary on excess, iFixit, which rightfully goes after Apple for making products that are difficult to repair, recently gave the two-ply cloth a zero out of 10 for repairability.

Can't wait for the Polishing Cloth 2.

via Tingle Tech

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s message about Instagram’s impact on teenage girls was unequivocal: Facebook’s studies found that 13% of British teens said Instagram prompted thoughts of suicide, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

These statistics, however, are only one part of the bigger picture when it comes to the general safety of teenagers online.

It’s estimated that there are over 500,000 sexual predators active on the internet each day. In 2020, there were over 21.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation made to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. Online enticement reports — which detail when someone is communicating with a child via the internet with the intent to exploit them — increased by more than 97% from the year before.

Reports of online predators are on the rise, but predatory behavior online is as old as Netscape.

My family got our first PC in 1999. I started on gaming platforms like Neopets and Gaia Online. Soon, I was posting thoughts and communicating with other users on Myspace and Tumblr. As my online world expanded, I encountered old men pretending to be preteens. At one point, I began a “relationship” with a 17-year-old boy when I was just 12 years old. Of course, I didn’t talk about any of this, mostly out of shame. I didn’t know I was being groomed — I had never heard the word used until I started doing gender-based violence work myself.

Grooming is subtle, and for a teen unfamiliar with it, undetectable. An individual grooms to build trust and emotional connection with a child or teen so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. This can look like an older teen asking to webcam and slowly prodding a child or teen to do inappropriate things such as spin around for them or change clothes to something “cuter,” or a digital “friend” pressuring someone to engage in cybersex. Predators sometimes pretend to be a young person to obtain personal details such as photos or sexual history; they then weaponize this information for their own pleasure.

I only recently realized that there is CSAM — or child sexual abuse material — of me out there on the internet. Footage of me may still reside on someone’s old cell phone or on a hard drive collecting dust. It could one day be shared onto private Discords or Telegram channels.

My individual experience as a teen girl on the internet is part of what led me to build a nonprofit online background check that allows anyone to see if someone they are speaking with has a history of violence — ideally before the first in-person meeting. We recently made the decision to allow users as young as 13 to access our public records database in the future. While we may never be able to entirely stop children and teens from being exploited online, we can at least arm them with tools and technology to understand whether someone they meet online has a record of bad behavior.

Of course, a background check is only one tool in the safety arsenal — people frequently lie about their names and identities. If a child is being groomed, or an adult is exploiting them, they are often doing so in ways that are anonymous, isolated and secret.

This is why educating young people about avoiding the dangers that lurk online is key. This can involve teaching them to identify early red flags like love bombing, extreme jealousy, pushing boundaries, etc. We can also communicate to young people what a healthy, safe, consensual relationship looks like — with “green flags” as opposed to red ones.

There are various practical skills that we can incorporate into kids’ education as well. Teach them to be selective about what photos they share and whose follow requests they accept and to bring an adult if they meet people they know online in real life.

When the adults in their lives discuss the dangers of online dating and internet communication openly and consistently, children and teens learn how to recognize the risks. This can go a long way toward preventing serious trauma. Conversations about safety online, like sex education, are often left to parents, while parents assume kids are having them at school. It can be difficult to navigate these discussions, especially for parents who don’t always understand online culture, but it is essential that parents seek out resources to educate themselves.

As Haugen pointed out, online platforms also have a responsibility. Trust and safety departments at online platforms are relatively new, and there’s still a lot to learn and improve on.

On most digital platforms, content moderators are understaffed, underpaid and undertrained. Online platforms need to put protection over profit and invest in additional training and support for the mental health of those responsible for keeping their platforms safe. By giving safety teams the tools and time they need to think critically about questionable content, they can execute on their mandate effectively and with care.

Though the internet can create environments that lead to abuse, it can also be a powerful tool in educating young people about early warning signs and the realities of the world, including arming them with access to information about who they’re talking to online.

Reactive measures to combat abuse — from the criminal justice system to platform moderators — are a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound. Preventing sexual abuse before it happens is the best protection we can give our kids. By taking responsibility — whether as platforms, politicians or parents — for the potential harm caused online, we can begin to create a safer world for all of us.

via Tingle Tech

Angel investing has traditionally been mostly open to men, who travel in certain circles and have access to certain networks, but Amanda Robson, a principal at Cowboy Ventures, is attempting to change that by building an informal network of women and non-binary folks who have the means to write checks, but for whatever reason have not been able to easily move into this type of investing.

Robson says that when it comes to angel investing, women and non-binary people have been left out. “I had a number of friends who had recently within the past couple of years become VP-level at different companies, and they had an interest in angel investing, and they had the means to at that point, but they didn’t have access,” she said.

That was in contrast to males in a similar position. “They found that a lot of their male counterparts who were also execs or male founders were getting pinged by their VC friends to join in on deals, and they weren’t getting the same treatment,” she said.

Robson says that she found this surprising at first because at her firm, they try to fill the cap table with a diverse set of angels. As she looked around, she found that wasn’t the case at all firms, but it wasn’t always because of a lack of desire to be more diverse. It was also a sourcing problem. They didn’t know where to look.

So if you had one group looking to invest, and another looking for diverse investors, it seemed that something could be done to bridge the gap. “I just found myself in a unique position having been in venture for almost six years and having a bunch of VC relationships because of that, and then also having access to awesome female [and non-binary] founders and operators that I could kind of bridge that gap in a pretty seamless way,” she said.

Her experience is not uncommon. Diana Murakhovskaya, general partner and co-founder at the Houston-based Artemis Fund, told TechCrunch recently that prior to launching the fund in 2019, she and her co-founders attended networking events in the Houston area and noticed a dearth of women. She started hosting dinners to find out why.

“I said, ‘Where are all the women?’ [ … ] And so we started doing these dinners to bring together women and asking them why they’re not investing, what they’re doing. And these were all corporate women [who had the money to invest].” Like Robson, Murakhovskaya found that these women had never been invited to invest, and they started a firm to change that.

Robson took a different approach. She has a day job, but she knew that she could make some introductions when it made sense. “So I’m the conduit between the two [groups]. I have this database with angel investors and other VC relationships and then also deal flow that I see that will come from other angel syndicate groups or deals that Cowboy can’t invest in because we’re conflicted out, and I try to connect those two,” she said.

Robson, on her own, created this database of people, many of whom she knew previously or learned about when she put out a call for female and non-binary angel investors on Twitter. “I chatted with them and got a sense of their background and what they were interested in, if they truly understood the risks and dynamics of angel investing, and added folks that way.”

She said going outside her network would also help create a more diverse database that went beyond people she had known personally. “I also knew that my network would be limited, and the whole point of this is increasing access, so I wanted to be a little bit more public about it so folks who wanted to be angels could see those messages on Twitter and then join in,” she said.

The database includes the names, check sizes they are willing to invest, sectors they want to invest in and previous investments (if any). She says that typical check sizes are between $15,000 and $50K, but she has seen checks as small as $5K or less as she attempts to get more people involved.

“In some cases recently there have been newer female [and] non-binary angel investors who have wanted to write checks that are $5K, some even below, and some founders and VCs have been open to those smaller check amounts because they want to add diversity to the cap table,” she said.

Lisa Wallace, who is co-founder at pay equity startup Assemble, says that she had been an angel for a couple of years when she responded to one of Robson’s tweets. She also found that when her company was raising a seed round, it was difficult to find a diverse group of angels for her cap table. She says that Robson’s network solves both problems.

“I think that there’s actually two parts of the problem. First of all, I’m a diverse angel, and I want to make sure that I [can access] dealflow, selfishly. But on the other side of it, it would have been really easy had Amanda had this when I was raising my round because I would have just pinged her,” Wallace said.

Stella Garber is another angel in Robson’s network who is former CMO at Trello, and started angel investing in 2016. She too came across one of Robson’s tweets and says that it’s always good to find other sources of possible deals as an angel investor.

“It’s really great to see all the different types of deals that come through that channel. There’s been a mix of all types of different industries, mostly early stage I would say. But obviously as an angel, you have to do your own due diligence, but it’s just nice to have that channel to get deals from,” Garber said.

While these two had experience in angel investing, not everyone does, so Robson has also been helping set up workshops to explain what’s involved to those who are expressing interest and want to learn the mechanics of this type of investing.

Robson admits that quite a bit overhead is required to run the network because she is the sole conduit. But she says that it’s the kind of job that is hard to outsource because she has the first-hand knowledge of both firms and angels that the role requires.

“I do want to get some help to grow it, but I also think that there are limits to how much I can outsource any parts of this because the access piece is super important. I’ve been doing this for four to five months and I’ve only sent 18 deals through, but all of those ended up getting a lot of interest from the group because they’re highly curated.”

She says the ultimate purpose is to build this network of successful angels. “I want to have these rockstar angels who’ve gotten access to amazing deals and have amazing track records. And so that’s really the ultimate goal. And it’s more about that and in making these angels successful than me leading this group.”

via Tingle Tech

There's a nameless kind of capitalism in our culture, and it's been creeping up on us for years. The executives and engineering whiz-kids at the top of Amazon, Apple, Google, SpaceX, Tesla, and Virgin Galactic are its exemplars. Its brand is extraterrestrial (it cares about getting at least some of us off-planet), existential (it seems to care about saving this one), extravagant (so many tax-free billions of dollars sloshing around!), extreme in its goals (in the best Silicon Valley tradition), with an "X" factor of inspiration from science fiction.

So says Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor you may know from her New Yorker articles or her seminal book on Wonder Woman, among many others. Lepore deserves credit for identifying this kind of capitalism, for sharing her disquiet about it, and for setting out to name and dissect it in a new podcast. With all those "ex" words to describe it, and the sci-fi connection, the entity has one obvious label: X capitalism.

Instead, Lepore dubs it "Muskism" — and it's this focus on one man, Elon Musk, instead of a systemic issue, that causes problems with the podcast. Despite being beautifully sound-edited, and co-produced by the BBC, Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket barely has time over the course of five half-hour episodes to deal with the wider issue of what capitalism itself is morphing into in the 21st century. And so a promising look at an important invisible phenomenon disappears down a rabbit hole of half-formed arguments — one familiar to anyone who has read Musk's Twitter mentions.

To be fair, Musk has certainly done his damnedest to make himself the face of X capitalism. As Lepore notes, listen to his early interviews and you can hear the shy nerd with outsize ambitions who was not yet the P.T. Barnum-style showman. Then Musk discovered a talent for keeping Tesla afloat at a crucial moment (the 2008-2009 financial crisis) by juicing preorders for a vehicle (the Model S) that hadn't even arrived at its final design yet.

The Iron Man comparisons followed, though let's be honest here — the only way in which Musk actually looks or acts like comic-book Tony Stark, or Robert Downey Jr., is that he sometimes wears a leather jacket. But Musk didn't exactly disavow the connection, appearing as himself in Iron Man 2. He discovered that outlandish if vague plans for Mars colonies boosted interest in SpaceX. Fast forward to 2021, when Musk boosts his profile by stirring up controversy in every contemporary debate, from cryptocurrency to COVID restrictions. No publicity was bad publicity, as it turned out.

Musk sets up his online personality as bait, and Lepore, like a lot of critics, falls for the allure of paying it negative attention. Nobody would be more pleased than Musk to give his name to an entire form of capitalism, no matter what critique was attached to the naming. Don't be surprised to see him or his millions of stans use a #Muskism hashtag — turning the label into a positive for their guy in the same way the Reagan administration gleefully took to calling its Strategic Defense Initiative "Star Wars" (originally an insult leveled by Sen. Edward Kennedy).

Personally, like Lepore's, my opinion of Musk has been on a downward trajectory for years. From cautious admiration while attending the Model S launch in 2012, it plummeted to head-shaking disgust at his lowest point yet, the "pedo guy" tweets of 2018. (His latest sexist tweet debacle, which literally happened as I wrote this, shows he hasn't yet learned his lesson.)

The well-sourced history of Tesla earlier this year confirmed my growing sense that Musk is out of his depth, a control freak careening from crisis to crisis, coasting on pure luck and the kind of connections that come with being a Silicon Valley billionaire. That plus my love of science fiction should have put me squarely in the target audience for The Evening Rocket.

In fact, the podcast left me more sympathetic towards Musk when I finished it, which is quite an impressive feat. The scapegoating is strong with this one.

Legitimate reasons to criticize Musk are right there for the taking. Instead, Lepore strains herself drawing a connection between South African apartheid (which, as she admits, Musk did not support or experience much, having left South Africa as soon as he could, age 18) and space exploration.

She admits that Tesla has done some good in the world — but only in brief end-of-episode praise for its flawless execution on the world's largest battery in Australia. (Lepore does have a point here: Tesla got more good done when it was being less than flashy, literally working on a public utility project.) She criticizes Tesla for accepting Bitcoin, given how bad Bitcoin mining is for the environment, then criticizes Musk for reversing course. He is literally damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

The biggest sin for sci-fi fans is that this most literary of critics seems to be confused about her source material. Several times, Lepore expresses doubt that Musk really loves Douglas Adams' delightful Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, given that the story contains spoofs of capitalism such as the wealthy planet-building planet of Magrathea. This is fair enough. But Hitchhiker's contains a whole lot more she doesn't mention, including a loving portrait of the showboating galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox — a Musk prototype if ever there was one.

Hitchhiker's, first launched as a radio show in 1978, was also a product of its time, featuring a preponderance of men and just one main female character. Yet it somehow escapes the criticism that Lepore levels at other male heavy classic sci-fi such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation, published 30 years earlier. Musk's love of Foundation (it was etched on a disk in the dashboard of the Roadster launched into space) is taken as a sign that he wants to start space colonies run by elite white men.

Which may come as a surprise to fans of the Apple TV+ series Foundation. That show uses a diverse cast and the same basic story to reveal what Asimov was really writing about: a small, wily, pro-science counterculture outlasting the bellicose threats of a creaking old Empire focused on superstition and the short term. (Not for nothing did I name it among the most anti-Trump books I'd ever read.)

Taken as read in all this is the notion that space exploration is inherently bad; that anyone aiming to go out there must necessarily be ignoring the big problems down here. Infuriatingly for NASA lovers on the left, Lepore identifies space as a Republican issue. Here, more than anywhere else, she has an unfortunate failure of imagination; here she could have challenged her assumptions. Two things can be true at the same time: Blue Origin and SpaceX are worth celebrating, and their owners should pay more taxes.

Yes, Mars is a dead-end for settlement, but how about the surprisingly more realistic prospect of cloud cities on Venus? A space elevator would make orbit accessible to everyone, not just the superrich, while removing the need for destructive rocket fuel. The promise of putting businesses in space, as asteroid-mining proponents will tell you, is that it can remove the most damaging elements of industry from the surface of the Earth. Cryptocurrency doesn't have to be mined; with the right incentives, as sci-fi luminary Kim Stanley Robinson notes, crypto tech could save the planet.

The X capitalism phenomenon is as complicated as the 21st century itself; that's why we've barely begun to identify and name it. Many of its environmental commitments are legit, such as Apple data centers run on entirely renewable energy. X capitalism resists simplistic labels such as good or bad. It deserves an in-depth examination, not a poorly-constructed argument that serves only to feed the ego of one man and fire up his legions of followers. If you come for the self-appointed king of X capitalism, to paraphrase The Wire, you'd best not miss.

via Tingle Tech

The internet's favorite season is upon us. It's that time of year when Meg Ryan, patron saint of turtlenecks, sprinkles pumpkin spice all over the Western Hemisphere and it officially becomes fall.

The fall season brings blessings as abundant as a good harvest: sweaters, darkness, Fat Bears, the list goes on. But most important of all, fall is a time for hot, nourishing, comfort-in-a-bowl. Also known as: soup.

People really like soup. In fact, the hashtag #soupseason has almost 36 million views on TikTok. And what's not to like? It's easy to make, endlessly versatile, and soothing to mind, body, and soul. Truly, there is nothing more therapeutic than a simmering pot of soup on the stove. Except maybe actual therapy.

SEE ALSO: Which Instant Pot should you buy? Here's a breakdown.

You might take soup-making pretty seriously. You judge foods by their potential as a soup ingredient, you save the parmesan cheese rinds, you've picked the meat off of many a rotisserie chicken carcass.

Or maybe you're new to soup and want to see what the deal is with this hot, savory liquid that people keep raving about. No matter what, these gadgets have been carefully selected to take your soup game to the next level. This #soupseason, you're going all the way.

Immersion blender

Like Thor's hammer or Wonder Woman's lasso of truth, the immersion blender is the quintessential tool for any "souperhero." These handheld blenders can turn almost anything into a silky smooth puree. And the best part is that it all happens directly in the pot. Butternut squash? Split pea? Potato leek? You name it, this baby blends it.

Instant Pot

The magic of a good soup comes from everything cooking together so that every spoonful is infused with complex flavor. If you're making soup on a stove, this process takes a while. But with the Instant Pot, you can achieve the simmering-for-hours flavor in a fraction of the time. Throw in your soup contents, adjust the settings, and let the Instant Pot do its thing.

Hot/cold blender

Another way to make soup quickly is with a blender that blends and heats at the same time. Throw in a bunch of ingredients, and a few minutes later you have fresh, hot soup. For a long time, Vitamix had the market cornered... for about the same price as a round trip flight to Europe. But nowadays several brands make less expensive blenders that have this function.

Hot Pot

The exact origin is uncertain, but archeologists in China discovered ancient hot pot vessels that date back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD). Thankfully, technology has advanced since then and there are many on the market that you just plug in. Jae Thomas, shopping reporter at Mashable loves her hot pot because, she said, "it gives meals a cozy, communal feel."

Automatic stirrer

Initially this one felt a little too gimmicky to include, but the reviews have us...intrigued. "[I]t's basically a vibrator with feet," wrote one reviewer who goes by Allison. "The kitchen is so much more fun when you're not stuck stirring." Anyway, somehow, the little motor at the top rotates the feet, and it really does stir your soup.

Kale and herb razor

Maybe you're using fresh herbs like rosemary, thyme, or parsley to add vibrant flavor. Or maybe you've realized that kale is best consumed in a soup with sausage and white beans. Either way, this handy little gadget will save you the tedious job of picking the leaves off the stems.

'Nessie' ladle

You could use a regular ladle, or you could use one that looks like the mythical creature believed to inhabit a body of water in the Scottish Highlands; the one who has spawned intrigue, delight, and conspiracy theories for hundreds of years. The choice is yours.

Fat separator

Not to sound like a snob or anything, but using homemade stock really is better. Making stock with bones releases nutrients and flavor, but also fat. And nobody wants that. You could skim the fat off the top of the stock as you're cooking it, or you could pour it into a fat separator which does the job for you. The fat rises to the top, and you pour the stock out from the bottom. Genius!

Souper cubes

So you've made stock that the Barefoot Contessa would be proud of. Now you need to store it for all of your future soup endeavors. According to the product website, these silicone trays hold two cups, are dishwasher/oven safe and protect your precious stock from weird freezer smells. Plus, they're a good alternative to single-use plastics.

Hydroflask food jar

If you want to take your soup on-the-go and be an influencer at the same time, look no further. Hydroflask's trendy status aside, reviewers love it for its wide-mouth design and ability to keep soup (or any food) warm for hours. It's also leak-proof, dishwasher-friendly, and comes in fun colors.

Explore related content:

• Food processors will change the way you cook (and these 7 are the best)

• A cast iron skillet is the one pan that belongs in every kitchen — here's why

• Don't host your next tea party without one of these electric kettles

via Tingle Tech

Despite nearly dying off a decade ago, instant photo printing has come roaring back.


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These titles emphasize technique and skill—and they're a strong foundation for the serious home chef's library.


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Want to resurrect that paragraph from a few drafts ago, or dredge up the doc you accidentally deleted? Here are your options.


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A new model of learning centers on blasts of neural activity that act as teaching signals—approximating an algorithm called backpropagation.


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If you follow Mashable Shopping's coverage, you know that we live to bring you the best product recommendations we can find based on countless hours of online research. But what about the stuff that we buy for ourselves? The stuff that made it into our shopping carts? Well, we're here to tell you about those things, and we'll be back every month to do so again.

Here's what the staff bought in October 2021.

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The perfect fall sweatshirt

"I'm a hard-core Swiftie, so it's no surprise I'm counting down the days until Red (Taylor's Version) drops. Naturally, I already pre-ordered the album on vinyl, and this time around, I knew I also was going to need some clothing merch for all my Sad Girl Fall™ needs. A cozy sweatshirt complete with the gorgeous new and improved album artwork looks like it'll do nicely for singing in the car and getting lost upstate." —Erin Strecker, Entertainment Editor

An IG-famous facial cleanser

"I’ve been on the hunt for a new facial cleanser for a while now. My last one did the job fine, but left my skin a bit tight. I’ve always loved the Glossier Milky Jelly Cleanser precisely because it did the opposite, but I went with a different influencer-friendly option this time: the Cocokind Oil to Milk Cleanser. I’ve seen Instagram ads for months, with the cleanser oozing out of the tube in a hypnotic spiral, and couldn’t resist it anymore. It is truly oil-to-milk as is the name: The texture out of the tube is jelly-like, but when wet it dissolves into a milk-like consistency right away. While the smell isn’t my favorite (though not horrible either), I love how it feels on my skin — and it leaves my face supple, just like I wanted." —Anna Iovine, Culture Reporter

A toothbrush upgrade

"I've had a Quip electric toothbrush for a couple of years now, but I recently bought the smart motor to upgrade my brush. It uses Bluetooth to pair with an app on my phone where I can see stats on how I brush and keep track of my brushing streak. The app shows data like how long I brush, how long I spend brushing my top teeth vs. my bottom teeth, strokes per minute, and the intensity of the brush. After the first couple of uses, I learned I wasn't giving my top teeth enough love, and I've since corrected it." —Miller Kern, Assistant Reviews Editor 

Some winter Crocs

"I became a Crocs person during the early days of the pandemic, and now I own three pairs. I wear my classic clogs around the house pretty much 24/7, so I decided to get some winter Crocs for the colder months. I opted for the lavender pair of the lined clogs, which are basically like slippers. I also got a little rollerblade Jibbitz charm to put in my Croc holes. Crocs, please sponsor me." —Miller Kern, Assistant Reviews Editor

The trendiest hiking boots

"It seems like every cool outdoorsy person I know has a pair of Blundstone boots, and after years of feeling left out, I finally bought myself a pair. I got the rustic brown color (obviously) so now I can pair them with my Patagonia fleece to signal that I am absolutely down for camping or hiking at any time." —Jae Thomas, Shopping Reporter

Some extremely cute dryer balls

"After ditching dryer sheets, I bought these precious dryer balls to further green-ify my laundry process. (Not-great chemicals apparently seep off of dryer sheets and are single-use, of course.) I’ve definitely noticed that the movement of the dryer balls keeps me from having to turn the dryer on a million times to dry towels, and clothes still feel fluffy (they just don’t smell like Bounce). I chose sloths, but penguins, sheep, and more little creatures are available from Free the Ocean." —Leah Stodart, Shopping Reporter

Some shampoo for a bathtime-hating pup

"My dog is very well-behaved, but when it comes to bathtime, she becomes a bit difficult. She's afraid of water, and I personally hate having to make her uncomfortable just to get her clean. I saw this dry shampoo in a TikTok and thought it might be the perfect thing for my dog, seeing as you don't need to get them wet to use it. She seems to love it, and now she can smell great without having to get soaked." —Dylan Haas, Shopping Reporter

Some really nice gym headphones

"I go to the gym almost every day, but I've neglected to get myself a good pair of headphones to accompany me during my workouts. (Pro tip: AirPods and sweat do not work well together.) Though they're pricey, I've always wanted a pair of Powerbeats Pro for their overall quality and secure ear hooks. I spotted them on sale, and decided that it was now or never. Honestly, they're one of the best things I've picked up all year." —Dylan Haas, Shopping Reporter

A new gaming headset

"The plug of my cheapo Turtle Beach Recon 70 decided to randomly break into three pieces (???) so I upgraded to the well-reviewed SteelSeries Arctis 3 when it went on sale at Best Buy. I actually bought the slightly fancier Arctis 5 first, but then had to return it because the only one left at my local store was missing the Xbox adapter. There really doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between them (aside from the 5’s RGB lighting), so no complaints." —Haley Henschel, Freelance Deals Writer

A sunscreen with a little something extra

I'm a sucker for cute packaging, but I'm definitely not a sucker for making impulse purchases, so I don't know why seeing a few TikToks of this Tower28 foundation compelled me to open my Sephora app at 10:46 p.m. on a Wednesday. I don't even usually wear foundation. With that said, this product gives that perfect just-there glow, feels super lightweight, and doesn't break me out, so I'm glad I gave in to the algorithm." —Bethany Allard, Shopping Reporter

The new MacBook Pro

"I bought a 14-inch MacBook Pro. I've been waiting for this laptop for six years; I got my last personal MacBook in 2015, and since then have been decrying Apple's lousy keyboards, lousy port selections, and general lousy design choices through a long, dark night of the laptops. Deliverance is at hand! The new MacBook Pro is everything I've been waiting for, and even the base model is probably more power than I need. Hopefully this will last at least another five years." —Sascha Segan, Lead Mobile Analyst for PCMag

via Tingle Tech

African e-commerce fulfilment startups backed by Y Combinator seem to be piquing investors’ interest this year for their niche e-commerce play.

Summer batch graduate ShipBlu is the latest on that list and confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $2.4 million in seed funding.

The company, founded by Ali Nasser, Ahmed ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny in 2020, operates a delivery and fulfilment model. It delivers packages of all kinds for merchants and retailers — ranging from mom and pop stores and social media to fashion retailers who make thousands of shipments and international brands — to customers in Egypt.

On the fulfilment side, ShipBlu stores merchants’ products in warehouses it leases. Then it connects with merchants’ online stores and monitors orders via a dashboard, so when they come in, ShipBlu picks and packs the orders from the warehouse and sends them to the customers.

ShipBlu charges its customers per package, depending on two standard sizes, destination and shipping speed.

While these three factors are common in e-commerce and fulfilment, CEO Nasser said shipping speed is not prioritized the same way as the other two in Egypt.

According to him, ShipBlu is one of the few e-commerce fulfilment companies that offers that service to customers in the country.

“We let the merchant decide: Do they need to get that product to their customer overnight, and therefore, pay or charge the customer for overnight fees?” Nasser said to TechCrunch in an interview.

“Or are they willing to for a more budget-friendly option and would like to ship that package in three to five days? We offer that option to merchants, who in turn can decide to offer that to customers. So it could be the customer’s choice or the merchants’ choice.”

ShipBlu only fully launched this August. Per its YC profile, ShipBlu signed on more than 40 merchants during its first month. And since then, the company has managed to double its clientele while tripling revenues in the same period, said Nasser without stating hard numbers.

Within the next couple of months, Nasser says he wants ShipBlu’s network and infrastructure to reach 99% of Egypt’s population.

“Whether you’re living in a small village or a large town or a large city, we want to be able to get to you and have the infrastructure in place to get to your delivery to you,” the CEO remarked.

The idea behind such a daring move — which appears to be a bit of a stretch considering the timeline — comes from the founders’ ambition to change an industry that has lagged behind other regions in the wider GCC, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in terms of e-commerce penetration.

Over 100 million people live in the North African country compared to Saudi Arabia’s 30 million+ people, yet the e-commerce market in Egypt is a third of Saudi Arabia’s.

A significant reason this gap has always existed is that the infrastructure needed to facilitate the process of e-commerce in Egypt is abysmal. It runs deep even on an elementary level where zip codes are barely accurate or non-existent, presenting many challenges to last mile or delivery providers.

The zip codes were one of the issues Nasser observed from Egypt’s fragmented e-commerce and fulfilment market during his return from the US to the country months before the pandemic broke out.

As online payments boomed globally and in Egypt and upon finding out via research that the market size for last-mile delivery in MENA stands at over $3.1 billion annually, Nasser and his co-founders ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny got together to start ShipBlu.

“It was that period that it hit us and we realized how much more can be done for delivery services in the standard of service and the features that are available today. Compared to Europe and the US and other parts of the world, there was just so much more that we could bring to the market.”

But Egypt is an entirely different market compared to these developed regions. For instance, 40% of deliveries fail in the country, while the global benchmark for the latter is about 8%. The high rate of delivery failure makes the operating costs for over 150 providers in Egypt generally high. ShipBlu, differentiating itself from the market, says it has developed AI and ML algorithms to “reduce costs, meet delivery constraints, and refine its operating assumptions.”

The CEO says ShipBlu’s end goal is to make customers choose a three-hour delivery window for their packages and know what date to expect them, which contrasts how most traditional e-commerce fulfilment companies function.

“Roughly 56% of the time when someone in Egypt places an order online, they don’t even have a delivery date. After you place your order and you get an email confirmation, it’s complete silence until, on a random day, you’re going to get a call from the agent who’s on your on their way to you asking if you are available to pick up the package. We’re changing that,” he said.

ShipBlu has competition with the likes of Flextock and Bosta in Egypt. And following the completion of its seed round, the company now has a mutual investor with Flextock in Flexport, the billion-dollar freight and logistics company YC backed in 2014. The unicorn also invested in Nigerian e-commerce fulfilment startup Sendbox this year.

Nama Ventures led ShipBlu’s seed round with participation from 1984 Ventures; Orange Ventures, the venture capital arm of Orange Telecom; Starling Ventures and other VC funds and angel investors. The company says the investment will help grow its service offering and coverage across Egypt.

via Tingle Tech