Twitter Is Shutting Down Vine

Twitter
Jason Tate

Sara Perez, writing at TechCrunch, on Twitter shutting down Vine:

With Twitter’s future still in question following failed attempts at finding an acquirer and the recently announced layoffs of nine percent of its workforce, the company today announced it’s shutting down its standalone short-form video app, Vine. According a post, nothing is changing immediately — the website and apps will remain online for the time being, and users will be given a chance to download their Vine videos ahead of its official closure.

The founder of the company, on Twitter, had pretty good advice: “Don’t sell your company.” I hope BatDad Blake keeps posting videos somewhere — that was my favorite Vine account.

IBM Is Counting on Its Bet on Watson

The New York Times
Jason Tate

New York Times:

At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Watson was tested on 1,000 cancer diagnoses made by human experts. In 99 percent of them, Watson recommended the same treatment as the oncologists.

In 30 percent of the cases, Watson also found a treatment option the human doctors missed. Some treatments were based on research papers that the doctors had not read — more than 160,000 cancer research papers are published a year. Other treatment options might have surfaced in a new clinical trial the oncologists had not yet seen announced on the web.

I had a “holy shit” moment reading this.

AirPods Getting a Slight Delay

Jason Tate

It looks like Apple’s AirPods will be delayed a bit. Matthew Panzarino, at TechCrunch, reports:

“The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers,” an Apple spokesperson said to TechCrunch.

Apple did not say whether hardware or software updates are what is at the heart of the delay so I couldn’t conjecture which. My experiences with the AirPods have been very positive this far but the pre production units that were given out to press are not without their foibles and bugs. I have seen a variety of small software/hardware interaction issues that have caused some frustration — but have taken them in stride because they are not final products.

Apple will be making more announcements today at an event (rumors are new Macs), feel free to come join us in the Apple thread to talk about the new shit.