Talk about an offer that sounds too good to be true: Spotify is giving away a Google Home Mini to both new and current (!) subscribers to Spotify Premium and Spotify Premium Family. Ready for the catch? No catch. I took advantage of this offer when Spotify ran it last year, and when it was …

Fans of Food Network celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis and Ree Drummond can now take live cooking classes with the pros. The new Food Network Kitchen app, out Tuesday, wants to become your personal kitchen assistant.  Food Network Kitchen integrates with Amazon Alexa to act as a hands-free helper while you cook, said Tyler Whitworth, senior vice …

Figma, an online service that lets designers and design teams work together on projects such as mobile apps, is now letting people share their work publicly for others to scrutinize and modify. The idea behind the Figma Community site is to let people connect to and learn from one another while showing off their own work. Giving work away for …

Three senators have introduced draft laws that could require social media companies to ensure consumers have a way to move their personal data to other platforms when they want to, Axios reported earlier Tuesday. Things like friends lists and profile information should be exportable to other competing platforms. Republican Senator Josh Hawley and Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal …

Lyft has experienced a rough first few months on Wall Street. But the company’s co-founders still seem optimistic. Lyft CEO Logan Green said Tuesday that the company plans to reach profitability one year earlier than analysts had previously forecast. “We’ve never laid out our path for profitability and we know that’s a question on a lot of investors’ minds,” Green …

Islamic State militants have reportedly turned to TikTok, a social video app popular among teens, to post short propaganda videos. Some of the videos, now removed, showed corpses paraded through streets, Islamic State fighters with guns and women declaring they’re “jihadist and proud,” according to a report Monday from The Wall Street Journal. Some of the posts also reportedly used …

Why settle for connecting to just one cellular LTE network when you can connect to two? If you’ve got a Pixel 4 or Pixel 4XL from Google Fi, you’ll be able to do exactly that in the coming weeks.  Google Fi on Tuesday said customers will start seeing better coverage via its new dual connect technology. Google Fi uses local …

True story: I once left my S’well water bottle in a car overnight on a camping trip in the blazing hot middle of August. When I went to move the car the following afternoon there was still ice clinking in the bottle!  I don’t know what sort of black magic S’well uses to insulate its steel beverage bottles but I …

Update, Oct. 23: The Huawei Mate X has been released, but only in China so far. Original story follows. The loss of Google’s apps is proving to be a major problem for Huawei, an executive told the Financial Times over the weekend. The controversial Chinese company is operating under the weight of a US ban imposed by the Trump administration, …

Facebook unveiled on Tuesday a $1 billion pledge to help resolve California’s affordable housing crisis over the next decade, a commitment that comes as tech companies get blamed for contributing to the state’s rising rents. In a blog post, Facebook CFO David Wehner said the social media giant would partner with the state to provide more low- and mixed-income housing.  …

Keeping a current backup of your Android phone and all of the data it holds is an important task that’s part of owning a phone. Let’s be honest, phones break, get misplaced or — even worse — get stolen. And when that happens, the financial burden of replacing a phone is stressful enough; don’t add to the stress by not …

Apple boss Tim Cook highlighted his company’s efforts on climate change in a Monday night speech at the 30th anniversary celebration for Ceres, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable energy, in New York.  He reminded us that devices like the iPhone 11 are made up the “highest-quality 100% recycled aluminum alloy ever” and noted the efforts of Lisa Jackson, who led …

When GoPro announced its Hero 8 Black camera at the beginning of October, it also revealed a new dual-lens 360-degree camera. GoPro took everything it learned from users of its Fusion 360 camera and created the Max, which is essentially a smaller, lighter and all-around better version of a 360 camera. But it’s better if you don’t think of the Max as a …

Following in the philosophical footsteps of the Leica M10-D, Fujifilm’s taking the less-is-more approach for the next generation of its rangefinder-style mirrorless, the X-Pro3. It’s designed to be used with the LCD closed to minimize distractions, instead displaying a small status LCD with information like shutter speed, aperture and ISO on it. The camera also inherits the better sensor and …

Amazon top exec Jeff Wilke on Tuesday pushed back against news reports that uncovered counterfeit, illegitimate and unsafe products on its website. “You can find anecdotes to support whatever conclusion you want,” Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of worldwide consumer, said on stage at the Wall Street Journal’s annual Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, “but the vast majority of sales …