Apple is asking its employees how they feel about smart glasses as the tech giant considers entering the fledgling market, according to the latest report from the prominent Apple tipster Mark Gurman.

Citing people with knowledge of the matter, Gurman said on Monday that Apple has started gathering feedback from employees in focus groups organized by the company’s Product Systems Quality team, which is part of Apple’s hardware engineering division.

In a leaked email to select employees based at the company’s headquarters in California, the team wrote: “Testing and developing products that all can come to love is very important to what we do at Apple. This is why we are looking for participants to join us in an upcoming user study with current market smart glasses.”

Gurman said it’s not unusual for Apple to use internal focus groups when considering whether to enter a new market, as it can gain valuable feedback while keeping its plans secret, though as in this case, there’s always a chance that such activities may leak.

This is just the latest in a string of reports suggesting that Apple is moving closer toward the idea of building a pair of smart glasses designed to take on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which have a built-in camera for taking photos and videos, and also let wearers make calls, listen to audio content, and ask an AI assistant questions. A recent update added the ability to send voice messages, and have the device read out incoming ones. At a special event in September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that his team is developing a pair of smart specs with immersive augmented-reality capabilities for future release.

Considering how Apple is struggling to make a success of its larger and clunkier — and pricey at $3,499 — Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, the company is sure to exercise a great deal of caution when moving ahead with any plan for smart glasses, especially as the market for the device continues to be pretty niche.

And as Gurman said in his report, if the feedback from employees is positive enough to prompt Apple to pursue the project, its smart glasses are still likely to be “years away” from launch.

A new update has rolled out for the Pixel Screenshots app. The latest update essentially makes “All screenshots” redundant, tweaks carousels, and adds new shortcuts.

Google updates Pixel Screenshots app after the October Feature Drop

Last month, Google rolled out the October Feature Drop for Pixel smartphones. With the update, Google essentially unleashed its Gemini Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) within the Pixel Screenshots app. Devices from the Pixel 6, going all the way up to the latest Pixel 9 Pro, will be eligible for the October Feature Drop.

Pixel device users eligible for the update will be able to use the power of Gen AI with the app to look for content. Specifically, Google announced how users could append “in Screenshots” to any command to “help you find something you saved in Pixel Screenshots, from wherever you are on your phone.” Gemini would essentially scrub through the images and look for context and content users asked.

The Pixel Screenshots app is now getting another update. It is currently available on the Play Store. Pixel Screenshots v0.24.373.08 brings with it several UI tweaks and improvements.

Google dumps “All screenshots”, and improves the ability to quickly glance at images

The Pixel Screenshots app’s homepage has two carousels for Reminders and Collections. These segments then have a grid for all the captured screenshots. Previously, users had the ability to get a full-screen “All screenshots” view.

The latest update for the Pixel Screenshots app reportedly removes the dedicated All Screenshots page. Instead, Google has placed the grid density options directly on the main screen.

Moving forward, users have the option to switch between four or three squares. Additionally, there are two rectangular previews, which offer an easily glanceable look. Needless to say, this eliminates the step of tapping on the “All screenshots” view and then adjusting grid density.

Google also replaced the “Select screenshots” option in the Collections view with an FAB (Floating Action Button). The “Edit title” and “Delete” options are now in the overflow menu.

The update also introduces app shortcuts that let users quickly “Take a photo” and “Add an image” right from your home screen. Users need not even head over to the FAB for these actions.

Google has also truncated long transcriptions/descriptions. This means the “Add a note” field or “Add to collection” options are easily available without having to scroll to the end of the text.

Portable Bluetooth speakers are always a good option to pick up for a special someone (or yourself) when early Black Friday tech deals start to pop up. One model worth paying attention in the sales is the JBL Clip 5, which has dropped to an all-time-low price of $50. That’s 30 bucks off the regular price.

We often recommend JBL products in our buying guides, such as our ones on the best portable Bluetooth speakers and best travel gifts. They’re by and large durable devices that deliver ample volume for the beach or a cookout, for instance (but maybe don’t use it on public transit if you don’t want to risk the ire of your fellow passengers).

JBL

The JBL Clip 5 has dropped to an all-time-low price of $50. The small, portable clip-on Bluetooth speaker should come in handy for your next cookout or beach trip.

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$50 at Amazon

As the name suggests, the JBL Clip 5 has a built-in carabiner, making it a cinch to attach to a backpack or belt loop, to name a couple of options. JBL said it redesigned the carabiner this time around to make the opening wider. As such, it’ll be easier to attach the speaker to a wider range of things.

Although the speaker measures just 1.75 inches, it’s said to deliver solid audio with punchy bass and a maximum output of seven watts. The JBL Clip 5 should be durable as well, since it has a IP67 waterproof and dustproof rating.

It’s claimed that the speaker will run for up to 12 hours on a single charge but there’s a Playtime Boost option that adds up to three extra hours of listening time. In addition, you can pair two Clip 5s for stereo audio or connect the speaker to other Auracast-enabled models from JBL to boost the sound.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

We’ve known it for some time, but now it’s certain: the generative AI race is as much a contest for developers as it is for end-users.

Case-in-point: today, Elon Musk’s xAI, the spinoff startup of the social network X that uses its data to train new large language models (LLMs) such as the Grok family, today announced its application programming interface (API) is now open to the public and with it comes $25 free per month in API credits through the end of the year.

Given it’s already November, that’s just 2 months worth of free credits, or $50 total.

Musk previously announced the xAI API was open in beta three weeks ago to the date, but apparently uptake was not enough for his liking, hence the added incentive of free dev credits.

Is $25 per month with 2 months remaining really that much of a carrot?

It doesn’t sound like much coming from the world’s wealthiest man and multi-billionaire, and it’s not really on a per user basis nor in aggregate, but it may be enough to entice some developers to at least check out xAI’s tools and platform for building apps atop of the Grok models.

Specifically, xAI’s API is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $15 per million output, compared to $2.50/$10 for OpenAI’s GPT-4o model and at $3/$15 for Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. Ultimately, that means xAI’s $25 credit won’t get the developer very far — only about two million tokens in and one million out per month. For reference, a million tokens is equivalent to 7-8 novels worth of words.

The context limit, or how many tokens can be inputted or outputted in one interaction through the API, is around 128,000, similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and below Anthropic’s 200,000 token window, and well below Google Gemini 1.5 Flash’s 1-million context window length.

Also, from my brief test of the xAPI, I was only able to access grok-beta and text only, no image generation capabilities such as those found on Grok 2 (powered by Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 model).

New Grok models coming soon

According to xAI’s blog post, this is actually “a preview of a new Grok model that is currently in the final stages of development,” and a new Grok “vision model will be available next week.”

In addition, xAI notes that the grok-beta supports “function calling,” or the ability for the LLM to take commands from a user and access functions of other connected apps and services, even executing them on the user’s behalf (if the connected app allows such access).

Compatible with the competition

Furthermore, the xAI account on the social network X posted that the xAI API is “compatible with OpenAI & Anthropic SDKs,” or the software development kits of different web tools used by developers of those platforms, meaning it should be relatively easy to switch out those models for grok-beta or others on the xAI platform.

Musk’s xAI recently switched on its “Colossus” supercluster of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, which is being used to train its new models — the largest or one of the largest in the world — so apparently that facility is already hard at work.

What do you think? Is it enough to get the developers out in the VentureBeat audience to try building atop xAI? Let me know: carl.franzen@venturebeat.com.

The end of zero-interest rates has driven companies to look for savings wherever they can, but one area continues to be a major budget drain. Observability — collecting and understanding data and systems — typically remains an organization’s second-highest cloud expenditure, right after cloud provisioning itself. People have even gone so far as to talk of an observability cost crisis, underscored by anecdotes like Coinbase spending $65 million on its Datadog bill. 

And why is observability so pricey and important? Complex cloud architectures and microservices are here to stay, and with security issues and service outages all too common, ops teams need observability data to keep systems running.

Now a startup called Dash0 is launching to address the cost issue — if not by being cheaper, then by at least making buying and paying for their services easier.

Dash0 — pronounced “Dash-zero” — is a Datadog competitor whose pitch doesn’t revolve around drastically lowering observability costs. Founder Mirko Novakovic (left in the picture above) still expects companies to spend 10% to 20% of cloud costs on this budget item. But he and his team want to improve transparency, both in terms of pricing and of observability itself.

Dash0 says it can do this by way of how it’s built, by fully leveraging the open source observability framework OpenTelemetry (aka OTel), Novakovic told TechCrunch, which includes a feature called Semantic conventions that allows someone, “at any given time, [to] see exactly which service or which developer or which application creates how much cost on the observability side,” he said.

There are other companies, such as Signoz, that describe themselves as OTel-native, but Dash0’s positioning has resonated with investors. It raised a $9.5 million seed funding round led by Accel, with participation from Dig Ventures, the investment firm of MulesSoft founder Ross Mason.

Novakovic’s track record may have also helped. His previous company, Instana, also backed by Accel, was acquired by IBM at the end of 2020 for $500 million, a price that has never been publicly disclosed before now. Several other Instana alums are also now part of the Dash0 team.

If Dash0 is built on OTel, it’s also trying to improve it. The framework has actually been around since 2019, but “it is not that easy to use at the moment,” Novakovic said. “Vendors have to do a lot of work in making sure that it gets at least as easy as installing a Datadog agent. That’s where we are still lagging behind the proprietary folks.”

As a company, Dash0 hopes to unlock OTel’s benefits — vendor-agnostic standardized data — but with an intuitive UI, dashboards, and integrations with Slack, email and other tools. Its initial target customers are companies that have between 50 and 5,000 employees.

The company is now launching publicly, but it won’t heavily invest in sales and marketing until it is sure it has hit product-market fit. In the meantime, Novakovic said, its resources will go toward growing the tech and product side of its team, which now consists of 21 people, of whom 19 are engineers, all working remotely. 

Its next 10 hires will include a developer relations specialist who will also contribute to driving the adoption of OpenTelemetry as a solid alternative to proprietary options. On that front, the company intends to work with other OTel-related startups while making sure that “missing parts” like dashboards and query languages fall into place with projects like Perses and PromQL. “That’s a community effort together with the customers,” Novakovic said.