New app from Devin Davies, developer of the ADA-winning Crouton:

Cassette is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you enjoy your home videos like the good old days. With a retro interface Cassette auto plays through videos from your devices’ Photo Library. Mirror your device to a nearby Apple TV for a true kick back experience.

The VHS retro pastiche is fun, but don’t get the wrong impression from it. Cassette is not an app that makes your modern videos look like they were shot on an old camcorder. (Rarevision VHS is a fun app for that, if that’s what you’re looking for.)

Cassette’s tape-playing pastiche is more about putting you in the right mindset. Instead of watching one video from your Photos library, or two or three, it mimics popping in a tape labelled, say, “2014” and sitting back and watching an entire hour of videos from a decade ago. It just launched today but I’ve been using the beta via TestFlight for a few weeks, and you really have to try it to see how effective it is. Davies made a nice video teaser to pitch the app. It’s good, you should watch it.

The way I’d pitch it is that Cassette is to the videos in your Photos library what the Kodak Carousel was to your 35mm film slides back in the 1960s. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, reporting for the AP back on January 26, six days into Trump 2.0:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on Jan. 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.

They should have added a similar provision to their Chrome offer sheet today. Give 25% to the US Treasury and another 25% to Trump’s future presidential “library”.

Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a paywall-puncturing gift link; also on News+):

Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance.

Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full. Estimates of Chrome’s enterprise value vary widely but recent ones have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion.

Perplexity apparently also told the Journal that the story was theirs exclusively, despite the fact that they also revealed the stunt offer to Bloomberg as well. Prefixing a headline with “Exclusive:” is irresistible catnip to business/investor-oriented publications. The Journal, at least, had the good sense to raise a skeptical eyebrow at the premise in its headline (“Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome”¹). Bloomberg, not so much (“AI Startup Perplexity Makes $34.5 Billion Bid for Google’s Chrome Browser”).

The whole premise is ludicrous. Start with the fact that Perplexity is only valued at $18 billion. Add to that the fact that Perplexity is almost certainly overvalued at that price. I don’t know anyone who uses Perplexity, and Perplexity doesn’t develop or run their own LLMs.

But all of this stuff about Google possibly being forced (as a remedy in the US v. Google antitrust case they lost) to sell Chrome doesn’t consider that Chrome, on its own, divested from Google and thus disconnected from Chrome users’ Google accounts, is likely worth little to nothing. I wrote about this at length back in April. Chrome is tremendously valuable to Google. It has very little value on its own. Chrome generates no revenue on its own — it simply serves as an outlet for Google to show its own lucrative search ads without paying traffic acquisition fees to a browser owned by someone else (like, say, Apple or Mozilla or Samsung). Chromium is open source. Microsoft Edge is forked from it. Brave is forked from it. Opera (remember them?) forked from it over a decade ago. Perplexity (or any actually credible would-be buyer of Chrome) could just start their own fork.

There are two things Chrome has that other Chromium browsers don’t: billions of users, and integration with Google account services. Chrome has those billions of users because of the Google account integration. Severed from Google, Chrome users would lose those essential features — possibly including Google Search — and they’d likely begin switching away in droves.

I wrote just last week that Perplexity looks like a scam. Someone is spreading rumors that Apple is sniffing around at buying them, despite the fact that the two companies are an absurdly bad cultural match. I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate. Desperate moves to seek an edge in product, and desperate moves to seek publicity that Perplexity’s product can’t garner on its meager merits.

Jay Peters: Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only […]

Thomas Dohmke (tweet): From building mobile developer tools, to running the acquisition of GitHub alongside Nat Friedman, to becoming GitHub’s CEO and guiding us into the age of Copilot and AI, it has been the ride of a lifetime. Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided […]