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.  …