Snapchat has quietly acquired an Israeli startup

Instagram, be aware.

Snapchat sewed up its first acquisition in Israel this week, according to the outlet Calcalist News. It acquired four-year-old Cimagine, whose augmented realty lets consumers instantly visualize products they want to buy in their intended location, paying what Calcalist says was between $30 million and $40 million.

• Date: January 2017
• News
• Category: Tech

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After having its infrastructure shuttered, CyanogenMod will live on as Lineage

Lineage issues.

The days leading up to the holiday have been a real roller coaster ride for Cyanogen fans. Yesterday, Cyanogen Inc. unceremoniously pulled the plug on its support for CyanogenOS in a short post declaring that “all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued” by the year’s end.

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LG’s MacBook Pro-focused 5K display goes on sale

Get on with the sale.

It won’t arrive until well after the holiday, sure, but that fancy 27-inch display LG created for the new MacBook Pros is now officially available on Apple’s site. The new monitor, which was launched alongside a 4K model back in October during the MacBook Touch Bar event, marked a new approach for Apple, which has customarily created its own hardware for such occasions.

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Google hits the reset button

Kudos, google.

For eight years, Google always held its biggest event of the year, its I/O developer conference, in San Francisco. This year, however, it moved it out (and outdoors) to an amphitheater in Mountain View, right next to its campus. Looking back, that move now feels symbolic. In many ways, 2016 was a year of change for Google: It was the first full year after the surprise Google/Alphabet reorg and the year that saw Google get serious about its own hardware, the cloud and the enterprise. The feature lets users select a color that appears behind their text status in place of the normally-white background. Several of the color options offer an Instagram logo-style color gradient, which make them more stylish and modern than boring flat colors.

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Facebook encourages text statuses with new colored backgrounds

Socially.

Facebook’s core attraction isn’t news articles you could find anywhere, it’s intimate posts from your real friends. That explains why Facebook is trying to make highly personal text statuses as eye-catching as photos with the new test of a colored background option.

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Whatever happened to 3D printing?

Going 3D all the way.

When I visited the Brooklyn 3D printer factory in 2013, workers in an assembly line were busy putting together Solidoodle printers. An army of assembled printers whirred as they lay down layers of melted plastic to make parts for the next set of machines. At the time, the promise of desktop manufacturing had just entered the general public’s consciousness. The media reported breathlessly on the potential of local manufacturing and bio-printing. Governments raised fears about undetectable 3D-printed guns. Early adopters wondered whether they, too, needed a 3D printer or CNC machine in their homes. Cervantes was hopeful. Solidoodle was months away from shipping its next-generation printer. Today, Solidoodle is dead. The company ran out of funding in late 2015 after attempting to move operations to China, which led to a drop in product quality, unexpected shipping problems and a loss in confidence among customers. Cervantes announced its closure in March.

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