Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website.

In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to customary closing conditions.

“We believe RepairPal will accelerate our broader services efforts by expanding our offerings in the multi-billion dollar U.S. auto services advertising vertical,” Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

While it might not seem like an obvious marriage, RepairPal fits into Yelp’s ambition to become a major home services funnel.

In recent years, Yelp has added functionality beyond restaurant and business search tools, like an AI-powered feature that suggests plumbers, repairmen, and other home service providers to users potentially in need of them. Yelp has also introduced programs like Yelp Guaranteed, which offers up to $2,500 of coverage for qualifying projects in case of problems.

Yelp makes money through fees it receives from service providers for certain leads — and through ads. In the company’s most recent fiscal quarter (Q3 2024), advertising revenue from services businesses increased 11% year-over-year to a record $228 million, with revenue growth of around 15% in the home services category alone.

In its shareholder letter, Yelp says that RepairPal generated approximately $30 million in revenue and was roughly break-even on cash and net income. 

“We believe there are clear synergies between Yelp and RepairPal,” the letter reads. “RepairPal brings deep knowledge of auto repairs and pricing, which we can leverage to improve our offerings for auto services businesses. They also maintain a robust partner network, including CarMax, USAA, and Endurance Vehicle Services. Meanwhile, Yelp has a large consumer audience and expertise in areas like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and AI, which we believe will provide value to RepairPal going forward.”

The acquisition is a nice exit for San Francisco-based RepairPal, which managed to raise $21.3 million in funding from Cars.com, Tugboat Ventures, and others in the 17 years since the company’s founding. In its press release, Yelp didn’t say whether founders Aaron Tavistock, David Esser, and David Sturtz will be joining Yelp corporate.

A Yelp spokesperson later confirmed to TechCrunch that all RepairPal employees, including the leadership (but not the founders, who no longer head the company), will be joining Yelp.

Google Photos is making it easier to follow activity in your shared albums with a new “Updates” section. In the new section, you’ll be able to see notifications like updates to a shared album and updates to a conversation within Google Photos, according to a support post from Google.

The Updates section can be found by tapping a bell icon that replaces the Sharing button (the one that looks like two people). Updates are shown chronologically, and you’ll be able to look at activity from “today, yesterday, this week, this month, last month, and beyond,” the Google Photos team says the post. “We want to streamline how you can view recent activity with an interface that makes albums, groups, and conversations more accessible.”

Google notes that if you want to access shared albums, you can do so from the newly-launched Collections section.

The new Updates page is rolling out now on the Android and iOS Google Photos apps. I personally don’t have it, but one of my colleagues does; if it’s not available to you, the Photos team says to check back “over the coming weeks.”

• Edge-lit LEDs appear to develop visible problems very early
• Problems are particularly obvious with larger-sized displays
• Shop around for discounts on better-quality panels

Late last year, we published a warning for Black Friday TV buyers: avoid big TVs with cheap edge-lit panels. The main reason was the visual quality, as edge-lit panels aren’t great for big sizes. But a new report suggests another reason you should steer clear. Big edge-lit panels appear to fail more quickly than other types of TV displays.

That’s according to Rtings’ ongoing TV longevity tests, as reported by FlatpanelsHD.com. The tests feature 100 different TVs from multiple brands and with multiple technologies – edge-LED, direct LED, full array local dimming, and OLED – and the results for edge-LED aren’t great.

What’s the problem with edge-lit panels?

Mixtures of oil and water can be efficiently separated by pumping them into thin channels between semipermeable membranes, paving the way to cheaper and cleaner ways to deal with industrial waste. Experimental prototypes managed to recover both oil and water with a purity greater than 99.9 per cent.

Various methods already exist to split such mixtures into component parts, including spinning them in a centrifuge, mechanically skimming oil from the surface and splitting them with chemicals, electrical charges or semipermeable membranes, which allow some substances through, but not others. Membranes are the simplest method, but are currently imperfect, leaving behind a stubborn mix of oily water or watery oil.

Now, Hao-Cheng Yang at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues have developed a more efficient method that uses two membranes – one hydrophobic layer that allows oil to pass, and one hydrophilic layer that allows water to pass – in order to cleanly separate both.

Yang says the idea has been tried before with less-than-impressive results. This is because as oil or water is removed from the mixture, the concentration of the components changes, making the membranes less efficient.

To overcome this, the team pumped the mixture into a thin channel between the two layers. In this confined space, droplets of oil are more likely to collide and accumulate, which means they can then be removed more efficiently by the hydrophobic membrane. This, in turn, increases the ratio of water in the mixture, creating a beneficial feedback loop that ensures both clean oil and water are removed continually.

“When we put the membranes [close] together, they will affect each other, making the process continue,” says Yang. “There’s a feedback between the two processes.”

In tests, the researchers found that total oil recovery increases from just 5 per cent to 97 per cent and water recovery increases from 19 per cent to 75 per cent as the channel width is narrowed from 125 millimetres to 4 millimetres. The purity of the recovered oil and water is more than 99.9 per cent, with only small amounts of waste left, says Yang.

The team is in talks with industry and Yang believes that the process is so simple that it could easily be scaled up to suitable levels within a few years.

Monitor deals are rarely this inexpensive: Walmart just knocked $50 off the Onn. 24-inch FHD Gaming Monitor. Usually priced at $149, it’s down to $99, which is a steal of a deal for a gaming monitor with some great specs. If that instantly sounds appealing to you, keep reading while we take you through what the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor has to offer for the price. The deal is proving popular already, so don’t count on it sticking around for much longer.

Why you should buy the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor

While you might not think of Onn. as making some of the best monitors, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor. It’s a 24-inch 1080p/full HD monitor with an impressive refresh rate of 165Hz. That means even if you’re playing action-packed games that are moving quickly, you won’t have to worry so much about motion blur as your monitor will be able to keep up with it.

Alongside that, the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor uses adaptive sync technology so it works well with your graphics card. There’s a 1ms response time so input lag won’t be a negative factor here. It also has low blue light adjustments, and you can change the height, pivot, swivel it, and tilt the monitor through the adjustable stand. One of the best gaming monitors? Maybe in this price range, given how affordable the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor is.

On the back, the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor has two HDMI ports and a DisplayPort, so you can easily hook up your PC or your console to it. Eight different gaming modes also add to the potential of the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor — tweak things just how you like them. It all comes together to make the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor surprisingly feature packed for the price.

Usually $149, the Onn. 24-inch FHD gaming monitor is down to the bargain price of $99 right now at Walmart. This is a fantastic price for a gaming monitor that has all the key tech specs you need. Check it out now by tapping the button below before the deal ends very soon.

Sony made some honest to god advancements to the game controller when it released the PlayStation DualSense alongside the PS5, and now it’s apparently looking to add some more innovation with the inclusion of a rewind feature.

The company has patented a new type of controller that comes with a rewind button. This would allow users to rewind gameplay with “user-triggered bookmarks.” The patent was discovered on Patentscope by Tech4Gamers (via TechRadarGaming). It appears to have been published as of October 31, 2024. The patent was applied for back in April of 2023. That might suggest that Sony is already working on this type of controller. Since the patent was applied for more than a year ago.

That does not, however, mean that Sony actually plans to release it. Sony could also just be securing the patent in case it ever wants to start developing a controller with such a feature.

Sony controller with a rewind feature would allow you to rewind gameplay

You can technically rewind a game now, although it depends on the game and it doesn’t really work like this feature that the patent is describing. However, any number of games will allow you to reset at a checkpoint after death. So in a sense, this would be a more advanced version of that perhaps.

The difference may lie in the ability to immediately hit the rewind button and go back to a very specific point of the player’s choosing. According to the patent, when the rewind button is pressed, it captures a series of frames and places them in sequential order. From there, users can pick out a frame and re-enter live gameplay from that point.

“The user is able to enter the rewind mode from the live gameplay using one or more controller inputs to view recent gameplay (e.g. rewinding, fast-forwarding, playing, etc.), and returning to live gameplay afterward,” the patent says.

The button could also allow for fast-forwarding

In addition to the rewind feature, the new button would also allow players to fast-forward. This could potentially let players skip past a particularly difficult portion or area of the game. It’s also noted that the button would be in the same location as the current share button on the DualSense. So it seems this would take the place of the share button. However, the rewind button would incorporate the share button features, so nothing would presumably be lost here.

The patent also describes additional features like a Highlight Reel mode. It’s unclear if this controller will ever make it into consumer’s hands. But, if it did it would be a nifty feature that could enhance gameplay on PlayStation consoles even further.