Apple Teaming With Postmates to Get You iStuff Faster – Tech Roundup

Apple fans in the Big Apple will be happy to hear the same-day delivery option that it rolled out in San Francisco in May has arrived in New York.
By Mathew Schwartz ,

Apple (AAPL) - Get Report fans in the Big Apple will be happy to hear the same-day delivery option the tech giant rolled out in San Francisco earlier this year has arrived in New York City. The expansion of the service, which is offered through courier operator Postmates, was reported first on the MacRumors blog, which notes that while its available in most of Manhattan, it's not yet ubiquitous.

Human couriers: Still easier to deploy than Amazon (AMZN) - Get Report drones. Score one for Apple, whose shares closed down a fraction at $113.69. 

Car-service ride-sharing app Uber may have grown in popularity so rapidly it's becoming a verb, but don't count out its smaller rival, Lyft, just yet. According to Reuters, Lyft President John Zimmer says the three-year-old company is on target to hit $1 billion in gross annual revenue over the next 12 months. That's an impressive acceleration: In 2014, the number was $130 million, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

Of course, Uber remains the lead car in the race: Its 2015 revenue is expected to be $2 billion. But we bet it's not laughing at those little mustaches now. 

The question of how small and portable you can make a fully powered computer has gotten a new answer: a 2.6-ounce HDMI stick.

Alphabet's (GOOGL) - Get ReportGoogle and Asus on Tuesday released the Chromebit, an $85 device about the same size as the popular Chromecast stick, which turns any screen into a honest-to-goodness computer. You'll want to add a mouse and a keyboard, too; wireless is likely your best bet, but they somehow managed to fit a USB port into the device if you'd rather go corded.

The positives and the negatives about the device are the same points, in some ways: For example, the device (naturally) runs Google's Chrome OS. How you view that likely depends on how attached you are to Windows or OSX. Also, a quick search online shows several options for buying complete Chromebooks for just $65 more, making the value questionable.

Not surprisingly, the various reviewers who got an advance look at the Chromebit point out it's not the fastest or most powerful Chrome experience you'll find.

But as a seriously portable way to turn the giant flat-screen in your living room (or anyone's living room) into a real computer, the Chromebit is a new level of teeny, tiny awesome. 

Twitter (TWTR) - Get Report may have lost some enthusiasm for ex-CEO Dick Costolo, but Costolo is still pretty enthusiastic about the prospects for the company now that co-founder Jack Dorsey is on the job.

"Jack is the guy," he said in an interview on CNBC's "Fast Money Halftime Report." "He is inspirational, the team loves working for him. He is a great editor of the product."

More to the point, he said, he sees Twitter poised to make some hefty profits: "It's got this enormous reach, billions and billions of users ... it's got three of the top 100 apps in the App Store," he noted. "It's a resilient platform. I'm confident the team will capture the value."

Twitter shares closed down nearly 1% Tuesday to $25.07. 

Alphabet (which we all still think of as Google) never found the level of success it wanted with its Google+ social media platform. Today, after taking a few months to figure out what parts of it people did like, it announced on the official Google blog that it was making some broad changes.

In the post, it wrote: "There were two features they kept coming back to: Communities, which now average 1.2 million new joins per day, and Collections, which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster."

Henceforth, those two aspects of the simpler, redesigned platform will be much more prominent.

Will the changes work to lure people away from Facebook? (Or get more of them to use both?) No way to know. But remember: We once thought MySpace was unbeatable in the social media realm. In time, anything could happen. Alphabet shares closed down slightly at $745.98.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.

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