Internet

Instagram announced today that the number of people who use Stories on a daily basis has grown significantly since the last time we checked in. Back in April, Instagram announced that Stories had hit 200 million users, but in the roughly two months since then, that number has grown by 50 million people. To celebrate a quarter of a billion users for Stories, Instagram is rolling out new features that allow you to preserve your Live broadcasts for a short time.

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In its quest to get as many Prime subscribers as possible, Amazon has been packing it with more and more services. This year alone we've seen the launches for services like Prime Reload, Prime Reading, and Anime Strike, but today Amazon is going either further by launching a Prime service that is arguably bigger than any of those. Its name is Prime Wardrobe and it promises to "bring the fitting room to you."

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For years, we've walked into retail stores only to pull out our phones and compare the prices we see to those online, generally using a website like Amazon to see if we're getting a good deal. Now that Amazon is beginning to expand into retail spaces of its own, it has to worry about those same pricing comparisons. In a fantastic bit of irony, Amazon could use a new patent to outright prevent people from comparing prices in its own stores.

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Twitter is getting a bit of a redesign across a number of different versions today. Though this redesign isn't anything drastic - you'll still know Twitter when see it, in other words - it does make quite a few quality of life improvements across the board. These new features and tweaks are coming to iOS, Android, TweetDeck, and Twitter Lite, though you may not see them right away.

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Computing devices are getting more powerful, more varied, and more ubiquitous, but the data storage in these devices hasn't changed that much. We are still beholden to the HDDs, SSDs, and eMMCs or UFS of yesteryears. In fact, the storage story has become even more complicated because each device has its own storage that you have to manage or keep in sync with other devices.

Enter cloud computing and cloud storage, with its promise of being able to access your data anytime, anywhere. Well, as long as you have an Internet connection, that is. It is an inescapable fact of modern day computing life and it pays to know the choices you have. Here are ten of the top cloud storage options this half of the year.

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Amazon has followed in the footsteps of certain other cloud storage services, dropping its unlimited storage option. The unlimited storage deal used to be available for the company's Amazon Drive cloud storage platform for $60, but now that $60 gets you a single terabyte of storage space. That's still a decent amount, but far less attractive for those in need of ample space. Unfortunately, an alternative isn't readily available.

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Facebook has announced better accessibility on its live streaming platform, adding closed captioning to Facebook Live. The move aims to make Facebook's video streaming option more inclusive for individuals who are deaf or otherwise have trouble hearing. The company says the new feature is 'a key part of building [a] global community,' though it will depend on publishers, too -- they have to take advantage of the feature for captioning to show up on their videos.

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Amazon Prime can be a handy service to have, especially if you're a cord cutter or you do a lot of shopping on Amazon. The issue with it is that at $99 per year or $10.99 per month, it can be a little on the expensive side for some folks. Today Amazon announced an initiative to help with just that, revealing that it will offer discounted Prime subscriptions to low-income customers in the US.

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Artificial intelligence trained with photos of real-life things eventually learn to generate simulations of things based on sketches, at least in the case of the pix2pix project. We've been keeping an eye on this project for a while, having previously noted its increasing abilities to generate buildings and even cats from crude sketches. Now the AI is back with some new training, and the resulting images are mostly terrifying.

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The US government has approved social media background checks applied to individuals applying for a visa, it has been announced. The controversial move will require visa applicants to provide a list of their social media handles from the past half-decade, as well as 'biographical information' from the past 15 years. The decision to approve this new vetting method was made by the Office of Management and Budget.

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If you've been using the internet for the last 15 years or so, you probably remember, or at least came into contact with, del.icio.us, the pioneer of social bookmarking websites. Founded in 2003, the site had a number of good years before it eventually changed hands more than a few times, and has been considered mostly a forgotten relic since then. But now the sun is setting for del.icio.us, as the service will be shuttered later this month following its sale to rival Pinboard.

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Coinbase, a Bitcoin exchange, is in talks for what could end up being the largest funding round ever for such a company, according to sources. The company is tipped in talks with possible investors for a funding round that may see Coinbase valued at more than one billion dollars, a new milestone for the cryptocurrency market if it proves true. What is spurring such massive figures? The similarly massive -- and growing -- demand for Bitcoin and other cryptocoins.

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