Welcome to the Tech Mem Right Home for Tuesday, January 16th, 2024 I'm Brian McCullough

today.

The app that was supposed to be Tik-Tokoc but for news is shutting down.

Apple tops global smartphone sales for the first time ever.

Microsoft debuts co-pilot pro, how the Apple Vision Pro demos are actually going to work,

and about that weekend streaming NFL game.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

In a move that's surprised just about everybody, algorithmic news sharing app

artifact is shutting down after concluding that quote the market opportunity

isn't big enough to warrant continued investment in the product,

quoting Tech Crunch.

The team had rapidly iterated on its product from a smart news like news reading app to a curation and news discovery

platform where individual users could become creators of a sort, finding interesting gems

from around the web that others could like and comment on.

It also employed several AI tools

to summarize news, rewrite click bait headlines, and surface the best content.

However, the slative changes had perhaps diluted the original value of the product

which was a simple news app that could take on the

likes of built-in offerings on users phones like Apple News. The end result was

something more akin to a Twitter replacement but that's a market with numerous

competitors including in fact Meta's Instagram which has launched a Twitter slash

X rival called Threads in the blog post penned by Instagram and artifact co-founder Kevin

...