Facebook wants you to talk about sports, GarageBand will make you a rich and famous DJ, General
Motors doubles down on the car sharing economy, and more...
It's Thursday January 21st and this is Crunch Report.
Uber has pretty much nailed the car service industry, but has been experimenting with
other avenues like food delivery... now, it's launching a standalone app for UberEATS, the
company’s prepared food delivery service, in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, New York,
Austin, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Houston, Seattle and Dallas. UberEATS will come to
both iOS and Android by the end of March, and the company says it'll work to expand
its delivery hours in those cities as well. Clearly the Toronto test was working - that's
where Uber's been testing this for just over a month. Until now, UberEATS has been a feature
within Uber’s regular app, and meals are only available during lunchtime. But pretty
soon customers in the 10 cities I mentioned will be able to order food from Uber’s partner
restaurants for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
Facebook's getting into the sports game with a new destination called ‘Facebook Sports
Stadium... that includes play-by-play coverage of various games of sportsball, comments from
your Facebook friends, analysts and experts, various stats and info. Which is really smart
because everyone's on Facebook anyway, the social network has 1.5 billion monthly users..why
not let them argue about football instead of doing it somewhere else? Sports Stadium
is also Facebook’s way of getting around the regular timeline not being exactly real-time,
since sports conversation depend so much on live viewing. The feature is initially live
in the U.S., covering football, and only on the iOS app to start. But, the social network
says it “will support other sports around the world like basketball, soccer, and more
soon” and expand the feature to other platforms “in the coming weeks.”
General Motors just launched a new program called Maven, which is designed to further
the company’s foray into car-sharing services and made up of a 40-person team from the car
technology industry, plus Google, Zipcar and Sidecar to develop even more sharing services.
This follows news from a couple of days ago that GM was acquiring select assets and employees
from Sidebar - an Uber competitor. Maven will include a several things- a car-sharing trial
in Ann Arbor, Mich.; a service for neighborhood fleets of cars in New York that's now expanding
to Chicago; a peer-to-peer service in Germany where people share their cars; and a GM campus
program in the U.S., Europe and China to test more new ideas. In Ann Arbor, GM will use
connected car systems so that you can save things like music preferences in various vehicles
that you're sharing, with support for GM’s own OnStar navigation, calling and security
service, Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto and more. Essentially, GM knows people are moving
away from sole car ownership and is not only doing its best to change with the times, but
stay ahead.
Apple's music app GarageBand just got a big update on iOS called Audio Units, with more
emphasis on making electronic tracks. GarageBand has historically been geared more toward more
instrument focused music. A new feature called Live Loops is a grid-based interface that
lets you highlight different cells to create all kinds of samples, and the ability to make
some pretty good sounding stuff! There are some fun bells and whistles too, like a button
that lets you control the FX by physically moving your device.. anything from your iPhone
to an iPad Pro as long as it's running iOS 9. The GarageBand update is available now
in the app store, and is free.
Appropriately since we're coming to you from Switzerland, Google just launched some cool
new Street View imagery of the Mont Blanc! Which is on the other side of the Alps, but
still. Very cool! Google partnered with a number of photographers, skiers, mountaineers,
climbers and runners to build a bunch of 360-degree imagery, including what the Mont Blanc looks
like from the perspective of an ice climber, for example, and get an up close view of the
Mer de Glace glacier, which Google helpfully points out is melting because temperatures
are rising, adding “This Street View imagery serves as a digital record of Mont Blanc as
it appears today, so future outdoor enthusiasts and scientists can look back at this time
capsule to see how the mountain has changed."
That’s the report for today. I’m Sarah Lane.
Crunch Report airs every weekday at 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific, on Techcrunch.com. You can also
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