Dieter Bohn Earth Day goes online

Happy Earth Day everybody. Barbara Krasnoff has put together a list for how to celebrate online. If you can safely go outside somewhere today, I also highly recommend that. In fact, I’ll be doing that myself after a couple of weeks of burning the candle at both ends, so there may not be a newsletter tomorrow.

On to the links, stay safe out there.

- Dieter

Streaming & services

┏ Sonos launches its own streaming radio service. I have to say did not expect this move from Sonos at all. The company has been adamant for years that it is able to convince so many services to work on its speakers because it is neutral — Sonos won’t cut deals with one company at the expense of another.

The radio service seems fine — honestly anything that interpose itself between me and TuneIn and iHeartRadio is good in my book. Both of those apps feel like upsell minefields to me. Sonos’ own station might be neat, I’ll probably check it out.

Oh hell, I’ll just tell you that if you haven’t asked your smart speaker to stream 89.3 The Current out of Minnesota, give it a shot.

┏ Spotify launches curated podcast playlists in a bid to make the platform a podcast tastemaker. Ashley Carman details the new plan. I will tell you that I trust Sonos to be a neutral arbiter of content way, way, way more than I trust Spotify. We live in a golden age of audio streaming right now, without the exclusives and holdouts of years past in music. But it’s here for podcasts and that trend is only growing. I don’t like it! And Spotify’s actions here and elsewhere make me worry that trend is only going to accelerate.

┏ HBO Max will launch on May 27th. Julia Alexander looks ahead:

HBO Max is one of the last major entrants in the streaming wars this year, following Quibi and NBCUniversal’s Peacock. It’s also one of the most expensive streaming services on the market, coming in at $14.99 a month. That’s the same price as what customers pay for the network via their cable packages as well as the price of HBO’s current standalone streaming app, HBO Now.

┏ Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions now available, most new features coming later.

Two of the biggest additions to Microsoft 365, a Microsoft Family Safety app and Microsoft Teams for consumers, aren’t actually available with the launch of the subscriptions today. Many of the Office-related improvements are live, though. The PowerPoint Presenter Coach feature, which helps people practice a slidedeck and avoid stuttering and swearing, is available as part of the subscriptions.

┏ Epic gives in to Google and releases Fortnite on the Play Store. They are very pissed about it. It seems as though Google’s constant warning about non-Play Store apps became too onerous. It shouldn’t be this way, especially on Android.

┏ Marco Polo has been around for years, but it’s blowing up amid the pandemic. Ashley Carman details the app’s current rise. Honestly I love my family dearly but sometimes I have the mute the group chat. This seems like a nice alternative, one that would encourage more video and photo sharing, too. Hi mom!

Marco Polo is a messaging app that works a bit like Snapchat. Users can send video and text messages to others that they can watch on their own time, rather than committing to a video call or posting content publicly to stories. It’s designed to be family-friendly, insomuch as people can send each other video messages that they open whenever they want, without dominating anyone’s schedule. The team expects parents, grandparents, siblings, and close friends to use the app to keep up with each other’s lives.

More from The Verge

┏ VanMoof S3 e-bike review: better than the best. Thomas Ricker’s review has me completely smitten with the idea of this bike. It’s not a good fit for me since I can’t commute by bike (or won’t be able to once the shelter-in-place rules are relaxes).

Every e-bike should have VanMoof’s Turbo Boost feature. The button, accessible from the right grip, is now even more powerful and torquey, giving a near-instantaneous boost without feeling jerky. Push it when you want to make a fast start, climb a hill, or overtake someone quickly. It’s not a throttle, but who cares?

┏ Vanlife hits a standstill during the pandemic. Great story by Jake Kastrenakes.

The pandemic has amplified those inconveniences for vanlifers and taken some of them off the road, but many say the situation could be worse. They still have food, shelter, and a place to stay, even if they’re not moving around as much as they’re used to. “Showers. At least for me, that’s been the big thing, like they’re nonexistent in my life right now,” says Lindsey Graham who lives in a van with her husband Danny to make it easier to move around to his travel nurse assignments. They’re currently near Los Angeles. “You can’t find it. We use Planet Fitness [for showers], but that’s closed.”

┏ First at-home COVID-19 testing kit authorized by the FDA. It’s going to healthcare workers first, as it absolutely should. Nicole Wetsman details this very good news:

Self-administered nose swabs are just as accurate as those more invasive swabbing methods, according to an analysis done by UnitedHealth Group and the Gates Foundation. The FDA started allowing those types of swabs at the end of March, although the agency said they still had to be done under the supervision of a clinician.

┏ How to use your Nvidia graphics card to improve the quality of your calls. What a clever idea!

┏ Nintendo Switch sales in March more than doubled from last year, reports NPD. Doubling your console sales year-over-year this late in the console’s lifecycle is straight up bonkers.