Reddit opens its Toronto office, PayPal announces a crypto checkout service, and the esteemed Louvre museum makes its entire collection available online.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, March 31 and I’m your host Baneet Braich.
It’s official. Reddit has set up shop in Toronto. The new headquarters boasts Canadian management, sales, community and engineering teams to help foster and grow its third-largest user base after the U.S. and U.K. According to the social media giant, Reddit’s Canadian user base is relatively young with 59 per cent aged between 18 – 34, and more than 40 per cent of users are women. At 31 minutes a day, Reddit users in Canada spend more time in-app than almost all other social media platforms.
PayPal is getting friendly with digital currency. The online payments firm says it will allow U.S. consumers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay millions of its online merchants globally. Customers who hold bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash and litecoin in PayPal digital wallets can soon convert their holdings into fiat currencies and make purchases. Ahead of the formal announcement, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters that this is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet. There will be no transaction fee to check out with crypto and only one type of coin can be used for each purchase. The service will be rolling in the next couple months.
The Louvre museum has made its entire collection available to view online. Nearly half a million items from its collection are online for the public to visit at no charge. This comes after pandemic-related shutdowns and a surge of visits to its main website. As part of its major online revamp the museum has also created an online database of 482,000 items. The focus is on website accessibility and immersing viewers online. It’s a step that has been in preparation for several years with the aim of serving the general public as well as researchers.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening!