Mashable Tech – Spoken Edition

Jeanna Barrett had spent the last 20 months in Seattle helping grow a location-based mobile app. In April 2011, Groupon acquired the startup, and it declined to keep her on staff. "I called my parents after I found out I didn’t have a job at Groupon and said, 'I'm moving to San Francisco.' I just knew I wanted to make it work," Barrett said. Barrett is one of thousands of hungry tech workers that move to San Francisco each year.

Bitcoin.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A popular app is splitting one of its fastest growing features into its own app. Facebook made this exact type of decision when it broke out direct messaging into the Messenger app two years ago. This time, Instagram is doing the same for users in select countries with a new app called Direct. Instagram is testing a standalone messaging app in Chile, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Uruguay based on its direct messaging feature, according to The Verge.

Snap may have had a rough year, but you wouldn't know it from the App Store charts. Apple just revealed the most popular apps of 2017 and Snap nabbed the top two spots on the list, beating out Facebook, Google, and Netflix. While Snapchat was the most downloaded app of 2016, it slipped to the number two position this year, with Snap-owned Bitmoji taking top honors. That shouldn't be much of a surprise to those who have been paying attention.

Bitcoin is on the rise again. On Wednesday, the price of one bitcoin broke through $12,000, a first for the cryptocurrency. At time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $12,740, according to CoinMarketCap. UPDATE: Dec. 6, 2017, 1:53 p.m. CET Less than 12 hours after it first passed the price of $12,000, Bitcoin is now trading at over $13,000. Bitcoin's market cap broke $200 billion for the first time as well, and is currently at $213 billion.

It's straight out of a nightmare. You're staying in an Airbnb with your partner on a romantic getaway, and discover as you're packing up to leave that a hidden camera placed in the bedroom captured your every move. What to do? Well, immediately call the police. However, by that point, you've already become the victim of a privacy-invading creep.

Star Wars and OnePlus fans are in for a real treat. While the default colorway for the OnePlus 5T, one of the year's most-talked about Android phones, is Midnight Black, the company's preparing a new Star Wars Limited Edition version just in time for the premiere of The Last Jedi. Launching on Dec. 14 (that's a day before the U.S. release of The Last Jedi), the special edition trades the black aluminum backside for Stormtrooper white, black button accents, and a blood red alert slider button.

Soon, we’ll all get to spend 192 minutes watching battle scenes a galaxy far, far away. But for most of us, that ultra-long Star Wars: The Last Jedi run time still won’t satisfy our need for all things Star Wars. So, bring on the gifts. A Star Wars-themed Christmas, Chanukah or Kwanza present is as close as most of us will get to Luke, Rey, BB-8 and Kylo and Finn. What follows is a list of our favorite gadgets and tech gear in the Star Wars universe.

Hey, remember on Amazon Prime day when everyone flipped over Instant Pots (because they're freaking amazing)? Well, the eight quart and the six quart pots are on super sale today — start planning your recipes now. The Instant Pot Duo is a number one best selling multi-cooker, and with seven kitchen functions in one, that's no surprise.

Breaking into a locked iPhone X shouldn't ever be described as simple, but according to a group of security researchers, that's exactly where we find ourselves. The same Vietnamese team that managed to trick Face ID with an elaborately constructed mask now says it has found a way to create a replicated face capable of unlocking Apple's latest and greatest biometric using a series of surreptitiously snagged photographs.