Technology

FlixBus, the low-cost bus service out of Europe, is doubling down on its U.S. launch. The parent company, FlixMobility, started cheap bus routes between Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson just two months ago.

Now itadding another 16 connections throughout central and northern California. as well as Nevada and Arizona. The new connections, which begin Thursday, include California cities such asBakersfield, Commerce, Fremont, Fresno, Gilroy, Kettleman City, Millbrae, Oakland, Richmond, Sacramento, Salinas, San Francisco, San JoseandUniversal City. Tempe, Ariz. and Reno, Nev. have also been added. Several of these routes, including from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Bakersfield to Fresno and Oakland to Burbank are $9.99.

FlixBus might be competing with traditional bus company Greyhound with fares between U.S. cities as low as $4.99. But it has a different business model that is more comparable to ride-hailing company Uber. FlixBus, which now operates in 28 countries, manages the ticketing, customer service, network planning, marketing and sale of its product. The driving is left to local partners, which get to keep a percentage of the ticket receipts.

These local bus partners manage the daily operations of the brightly painted FlixBuses. The company says itadding 26 more buses to its fleet to accommodate the expansion.New bus partners include Alvand Transportation, Amador Stage Lines, Classic Charter, LD Tours, Transportation Charter Services and Tourcoach.

FlixBus vehicles have other touches beyond its brightly painted facades aimed at attracting customers. The buses offer free Wi-Fi and onboard entertainment, and customers can use an app to book their tickets and track their bus.

Customers can also choose tooffset their carbon emissions with &CO2 Neutral& tickets. An additional 1 to 3 percent of the original price of these CO2 Neutral tickets are donated to a certified Global Climate Protection Project as well as the National Forest Foundation.

&We chose California as our new home because, more than anywhere else in the US, people no longer want the hassle of driving,& Pierre Gourdain, the managing director of FlixBus USA, said in a statement, who added the company has become southern Californiahometown carrier in a matter of weeks.

The company, which is backed by private equity investors such as Silver Lake Partners and General Atlantic, launched as FlixBus in 2013 following the deregulation of the German bus market. It has since evolved beyond the name change to FlixMobility. Today, the company operates the FlixBus and FlixTrain brands and as a pilot project forall-electric buses in Germany and France.

In a blog post today, Instagram announced a new feature: a green status dot that indicates when a user is active on the app. If you&re cruising around Instagram, you can expect to see a green dot next to the profile pics of friends who also are Instagramming right then and there.

The dot will show up in the direct messaging part of the app but also on your friendlist when you go to share a post with someone. Instagram clarifies that &You will only see status for friends who follow you or people who you have talked to in Direct,& so itmeant to get you talking more to the people you&re already talking to.You can disable the status info in the &Activity Status& bit of the appSettings menu, where itset to &on& by default.

Prior to the advent of the green dot, Instagram already displayed how long ago someone was active by including information like &Active 23m ago& or &Active Now& in grey text next to their account info where your direct messages live. For those of us who prefer a calm, less real-time experience, the fact that features like these come on by default is a bummer.

Given the grey activity status text, the status dot may not seem like that much of a change. Still, itone opt-out design choice closer to making Instagram a compulsive real-time social media nightmare like Facebook or Facebook Messenger. The quiet, incremental rollout of features like the grey status text is often so subtle that users don&t notice it — as a daily Instagram user, I barely did.

Making major shifts very gradually is the same game Facebook always plays with its products, layering slight design changes that alter user behavior until one day you wake up and aren&t using the same app you used to love, but somehow you can&t seem to stop using it. Instagram is working on a feature for in-app time management, but stuff like this negates Facebookbroader supposed efforts to make our relationship with its attention-hungry platforms less of a compulsive tic.

Itnot like users will be relieved that they can now see who is &online& in the app. The last time Instagram users passionately requested a feature it was to demand a return to the chronological feed, and we all know how that went.Over the years, Instagram users have mostly begged that the appparent company not mess it up, and yet here we are. The Facebookification of Instagram marches on.

Ita shame to see that happening with Instagram, which used to feel like one of the only peaceful places online, a serene space where you weren&t thrown into fits of real-time FOMO because usually your friends were #latergramming static images from good times previously had, not broadcasting the fun stuff you&re missing out on right now. Ithard to see how features like this square with Facebookostensible mission to move away from its relentless pursuit of engagement in favor of deepening the quality of user experiences with a mantra of &time well spent.& As users start to resent the steep attentional toll that makes Facebook &free,& ita shame to see Instagram follow Facebook down the same dark path.

Microsoft is capping off a rather impressive year without any major missteps in its final report for its performance in its 2018 fiscal year, posting a quarter that seems to have been largely non-offensive to Wall Street.

In the past year, Microsoftstock has gone up more than 40 percent. In the past two years, itnearly doubled. All of this came after something around a decade of that price not really doing anything as Microsoft initially missed major trends like the shift to mobile and the cloud. But since then, new CEO Satya Nadella has turned that around and increased the companyfocused on both, and Azure is now one of the companybiggest highlights. Microsoft is now an $800 billion company, which, while still considerably behind Apple, Amazon and Google, is a considerable high considering the past decade.

In addition, Microsoft passed $100 billion in revenue for a fiscal year. So, as you might expect, the stock didn&t really do anything, given that nothing seemed to be too wrong with what was going on. For a company thatat around $800 billion, that itnot doing anything bad at this point is likely a good thing. That Microsoft is even in the discussion of being one of the companies chasing a $1 trillion market cap is likely something we wouldn&t have been talking about just three or four years ago.

The company said it generated $30.1 billion in revenue, up 17 percent year-over-year, and adjusted earnings of $1.13 per share. Analysts were looking for earnings of $1.08 per share on revenue of$29.23 billion.

So, under Nadella, this is more or less a tale of two Microsofts — one squarely pointed at a future of productivity software with an affinity toward cloud and mobile tools (though Windows is obviously still a part of this), and one that was centered around the home PC. Here are a couple of highlights from the report:

• LinkedIn:Microsoft said revenue for LinkedIn increased37 percent, with LinkedInsessions growth of 41 percent. Microsoftprofessional network was also listed in a bucket of other segments that it attributed to increased operating expenditures, which also includedcloud engineering, and commercial sales capacity. It was also bucketed into a 12 percent increase in research and development with cloud engineering, as well as a bump in sales and marketing expenses. This all seems pretty normal for a network Microsoft hopes to continue to grow.
• Azure: Microsoftcloud platform continued to drive its server products and cloud services revenue, which increased 26 percent. The company said Azurerevenue was up 89 percent &due to growth from consumed and SaaS revenue.& Once again, Microsoft didn&t break out specifics on its Azure products, though it seems pretty clear that this is one of their primary growth drivers.
• Office 365:Office 365 saw commercial revenue growth of 38 percent, and consumer subscribers increased to 31.4 million. Alongside LinkedIn, Microsoft seems to be assembling a substantial number of subscription SaaS products that offset a shift in its model away from personal computing and into a more cloud-oriented company.
• GitHub: Nada here in the report. Microsoft earlier this year said it acquired it for a very large sum of money(in stock), but it isn&t talking about it. But bucket it alongside Office 365 and LinkedIn as part of that increasingly large stable of productivity tools for businesses, as GitHub is one of the most widely adopted developer tools available.