Tech News Today 1863

Swedish furniture giant Ikea just bought TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based on-demand company that finds you someone to help you do stuff, like for example, assemble your Ikea furniture. According to a press release, TaskRabbit will continue to work as an independent company. TaskRabbit operates in the US and in London, and has been around for nearly a decade. The biggest question I have about this sale is, why buy furniture that needs to be put together if you're going to pay for someone to put it together? Just buy furniture that's already put together.

YouTube is making some changes that affect creators on the Patreon crowd funding platform. Going forward, those creators are being asked to join YouTube’s Partners Program in an effort to battle abusive and inappropriate content on the video site. However, many of these creators aren’t very happy with the new request because YouTube’s policy states that creators can’t apply until they reach 10,000 public channel views which might not harm creators who already have a healthy following, but will make it hard for up and comers to gain traction by linking out externally to their own Patreon destinations.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pi says Apple should flip the switch on the iPhone's FM radio, especially if the company cares about people's safety in natural disasters. The Federal Communications Commission says the radios that are already present in iPhones could have helped millions of people access lifesaving radio information in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma. Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC all sell smartphones with unlocked radios, but critics of Apple's choice say they don't unlock theirs because they don't want people to have free access to the radio, so that we'll pay for services like Apple Music.

Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-today.

Thanks to CacheFly for the bandwidth for this show.