Apple Maps will Soon Show Everyone All COVID-19 Testing Locations

Apple will soon be showing all users where their closest COVID-19 Test location is in Apple Maps. There will be a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.

Apple has launched a portal for hospitals, healthcare providers and businesses to register as a COVID-19 testing location. Apple will review the application and when approved, the location will start appearing on Apple Maps.

The testing locations will appear with a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.

Will Airbnb IPO on a Public Stock Market Any Time Soon?

Short Answer: NO – I doubt it.

Airbnb was in a good position to IPO at the end of last year, but seemed to push it back. Since then the follow has happened:

  • Coronavirus has all but stopped their business.
  • Combination of debt & equity from Silver Lake, Sixth Street Partners
  • Previously raised $4.6 billion
  • Financial Times reported new $25b valuation last week

Airbnb won’t be seeing the public markets any time soon as they really need to focus when the Coronavirus lockdowns start to exit and the world opens up for business again.

If Google owns Waze, and Waze is even better than Google Maps, then why doesn’t Google combine them?

Google Maps has long been my favourite maps platform. However, Waze is widely used by my friends. Google owns both Maps and Waze, but why don’t they combined the two platforms?

Simple – There are two distinct use cases.

Use Case One: Help me Find a Destination

Use Case Two: Help me in my regular commute

Google has made a very good decision on keeping them separate. It’s seems to be the right decision.

Is There an IMDB for the Music Industry?

There is an IMDB for the music industry that is currently in development – Tunedex.

Tunedex seems to offer the world’s largest open music database, which shows the discographies of every musician on the planet.

Tunedex has a lot of opportunities so it will be very interesting to see where it heads in the future.

Why Did Microsoft Buy Wunderlist and Then Kill The Product?

Microsoft buying Wunderlist seemed to fit nicely with the business productivity suite that Microsoft has developed over many year.

The Wunderlist acquisition was only $150 million and it sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.1% of Microsoft’s market capitalisation.

Wunderlist fits in nicely with Outlook and running tasks from within email – plus it can go nicely with Office 365 inside a suite of much larger products – it also might have been to hire the amazing talent at Wunderlist.

Quibi Launches Today! Quibi Will Flop for Sure!

Quibi launches today.

Price point: $4.99

Reason: Immersive video content on a mobile device.

Funding: Quibi has raised over $1.8 billion in funding to date.

I think it’s very easy to see that Quibi is being made by a bunch of executives who aren’t or connected to their target audience. Quibi is built for a younger generation who don’t really want to consumer full length films on their mobile devices only. The younger generation are all about short form content and getting information as fast as possible (eg. TikTok).

p.s. their target audience also don’t have enough money for yet another subscription service at $4.99 per month.

Conclusion: Quibi will be a flop!

Im expecting that we are all sitting here in 12 months saying that they just haven’t been able to get the subscriber numbers that they wanted or needed to hit with $1.8 billion in funding.

Twitch Sees Big Viewership Growth But Needs to Expand Beyond Games to Generate $1 billion in Ad Revenue

Twitch has seen a huge wave of growth in its viewership in most part due to coronavirus. Twitch wants to generate $1 billion in ad revenue and commerce this year, according to The Information. The company reportedly delivered about $300 million in ad revenue in 2019.

The only way Twitch are going to achieve this is by expanding beyond just hardcore gamers. Brands will want to see diversity of content – Games, Music, Chat, Entertainment and more.

Twitch seems to be the first part of Amazon’s grand plan for gaming. Amazon will soon launch its very first game from its recently established gaming studio.

Quibi Launching Tomorrow (Monday 6th April 2020) – Good Timing or Bad Time due to Coronavirus COVID-19?

  • Quibi launch date is Monday 6th April
  • Not supposed to compete with Netflix or Disney Plus
  • Aimed at on the go video streaming (YouTube competitor really)
  • How will it do while launching during Coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic?

Quibi and timing… good or bad??

How to Fix Your Permalinks in Google Cloud WordPress Deployment via SSH Due to Internal Server Error

Whenever I create a new WordPress blog on Google Cloud and then try to edit the permalinks it gives an INTERNAL SERVER ERROR.

This happens in every Google Cloud deployment of WordPress.

The reason is because you need to Enable mod-rewrite in Apache because the .htaccess files need to do what it needs to do. Here is now to fix it.

Step 1) Make sure you have enabled mod_rewrite in apache. This can be done by going through Compute Engine>VM Instances > identify the correct instance and to the far right on the line will be SSH. Click it and it will take you securely inside a command line interface. Run this command: 

$: a2enmod rewrite

Enable Apache AllowOverride

2) Check your virtualhost configuration in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and make sure that it is configured with AllowOverride All instead of the default AllowOverride None for your web root directory. This tells apache it is ok for settings in .htaccess files to override settings. Use this command to modify the file.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Once you're in there, find the right spot and change it.

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride ALL <----(edit from none)
        Require all granted
</Directory>

After you’ve made that change, make sure to restart the server:

sudo service apache2 restart

Now, your .htaccessshould work. You can also make this change inside a virtual host, which would normally be preferable, but that depends on the way Apache is set up.

Confluence – Is It Really Worth $10 per user per month to Create an Internal Wiki on Their Platform?

For the past month or so I have been thinking a lot about internal communications at our company and trying to work out how we can create a central source of truth and information for all the products we create. This lead me to Confluence.

Confluence is a tool that allows anyone to create a wiki (that actually looks good) in a matter of minutes.

Confluence looked like a great solution and I even had a play around with the product as its free to signup and use for 10 people. However, I was simply shocked at the price of such a tool. I understand internal communication is very important, but should it really be valued at $10 per user per month?

I know Confluence hosts the platform and there are a lot of great features, but $10 per user per month just seems a little bit over the top for a tool that I could create using WordPress in a matter of hours (which will have a hosting cost, but at a fraction of the cost).

Why are so many technology companies especially paying for such a service? Is it because of the ease of use? Is it because of the templates?

You can’t even brand Confluence effectively for your company on the $10 per user per month.

Jeff Housenbold Interview – How Softbank Vision Fund Deploys $100 billion

I have been watching This Week in Startups – with Jason Calacanis – pretty much since the beginning. The video series / podcast provides a great insight in to some of the leading minds in the technology world.

Jeff Housenbold (Softbank Vision Fund) recently sat down with Jason to talk about the Softbank Vision Fund and some of its portfolio companies.

The comments about Growth vs Profit were very interesting and provided great insight.

iPhone 3G only $99, it’s Possible

Some hot news for those of us that have with held buying an iPhone (all 2 of you). Word on the street is that Apple has had an excellent 4th Quarter, and with sales of iPhones surpassing previous estimations, there is some wiggle room when it comes to price.

The iPhone which currently resides in an exclusive contract with AT&T, sells for $199 with contract. Millions and millions of people jumped on board with the first iPhone came out, and the second generation was just as popular. With over 15 million iPhone sold worldwide, it has dominated the mobile market. Outstanding sales have given Apple a cushion in case the current economic downtown starts to effect sales, they can afford to drop the price of the iPhone to $99.

What would a $99 iPhone do to the market? For starters, with such a low barrier to entry, the iPhone will clearly bleed further into the consumer market, even those on the fence would be tempted to purchase, and the market dominance would only leave true niche mobile companies like Blackberry able to withstand the onslaught.

Conjecture? Possibly, but only time will tell. Get those Christmas wish lists ready and stay tuned for more info!

EmbedIt WordPress Plugin Review

I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want.  Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website.  Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.

After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag.  This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin.  According to their site, EmbedIt is a,

simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.

  • embed Youtube videos into wordpress
  • embed ustream into wordpress
  • embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
  • embed whatever html code into wordpress
  • embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article

The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme.  EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.

My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on.  I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it.  I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.