The Lighthouse IT Podcast - February 25th, 2022
This week, Matt & Griff discuss Peloton fights rust, Google & Chrome bring updates, MoviePass is back, Worldle not Wordle, Truth Social having a rough launch, Emoji URLs in Opera & more!
Listen here!
News
Inside "Project Tinman": Peloton's plan to conceal rust in its exercise bikes
- As Peloton's stock price began to tumble last autumn and just months after a costly recall of the connected fitness company's expensive treadmills, its executives were confronted with a new crisis.
- In September last year, staff at Peloton warehouses, which receive high-end bikes originally manufactured in Taiwan, noticed that paint was flaking off some of the exercise machines.
- The cause was a build-up of rust on "non-visible parts" of the bike — the inner frame of the seat and handlebars — and did not affect the product's integrity, Peloton recently told the Financial Times.
- Instead of returning the bikes to the manufacturer, executives hatched a plan, dubbed internally as "Project Tinman," to conceal the corrosion and sent the machines to customers who had paid between $1,495 and $2,495 to purchase them.
Google.com tests a busier homepage with a row of info cards
- Check out this totally wild Google homepage experiment spotted by 9to5Google: the search page suddenly has a row of cards at the bottom. If this design is widely adopted, it would easily be the biggest google.com design change ever.
- SEO opportunities?
Google Chrome's new Journeys feature helps you find that tab you just lost
- Google Chrome's latest feature, Journeys, is here to help lead you back from your web meanderings to where it all began.
- if they're collecting all our data, they might as well make it useful
- "When you type a related word into your search bar and click on 'Resume your research' or visit the Chrome History Journeys page, you see a list of relevant sites you visited and can quickly pick up where you left off, whether it was earlier today or weeks ago" - Google
Google is bringing Chrome OS to PCs and Macs
- Chrome OS Flex is the new version of Chrome OS, designed for businesses and schools, is designed to run on old PCs and Macs.
- This won't be the first time Chrome OS has shown up on devices it didn't ship with. Google recently bought Neverware, which previously sold an application called CloudReady that allowed users to convert old PCs into Chrome OS systems.
Try Worldle, the Wordle Spinoff Where You Guess the Country
- Worldle, moves the game from the realm of vocabulary to geography: It gives players a shaded outline of a country and six tries to correctly guess where the locale is.
- The more green squares you see the closer you are geographically to the right country.
MoviePass is officially coming back (unlimited movie tickets for a monthly fee)
- Two years after the wildly popular subscription service MoviePass crashed and burned, its co-founder Stacy Spikes is determined to bring it back. Spikes says MoviePass will return this summer.
- Under the new model, MoviePass will run on tradable credits that roll over month to month.
- Subscribers will also be able to use their credits to bring a friend
- MoviePass 2.0 will also work on a tiered system
Opera browser now allows emoji-only web addresses
- It will enable emoji-only based web addresses "to bring a new level of creativity to the internet." The integration is part of a partnership with Yat, a company that sells URLs with strings of emoji in them.
Fmr President Trump's new Twitter-like tool launched on App Store - "Truth Social"
- Demand has caused a waitlist and issues with signing up
- Trump funded the development following his banning from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Tinder Swindler Effect
- Simon Leviev
- Netflix documentary
- Opened lines of credit and loans in women's names that he met through dating apps - amount up to $10m.
- Now on Cameo and doing NFTs. #class