QR codes are dead, an internet marketing strategist wrote in AdAge in 2013. The murderer: "easier-to-use apps." And yet, four years later, that isn't the case. Apps have become even more prevalent and perhaps easier-to-use, but Facebook and Snapchat, two of these most-frequently-used apps, are pushing a present and future of QR codes. Spotify introduced its own codes last week. It's difficult to determine how QR codes became "cool" again.

It's no longer just about the black car. Uber has been working on a truck division called Uber Freight — no, not Uber flight, that'll come a bit later. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick showed off a new photo of one of the trucks on Sunday while he was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Uber has an office and first launched its self-driving cars on the road in that city. Details are sparse. According to Kalanick's tweet, it's all "great stuff." But this isn't the first time we've seen an Uber-powered truck.

Hey, did you hear? Smartphones are dead. That's according to Microsoft's Alan Kipman, better known as the inventor of the company's HoloLens augmented reality headset. "The phone is already dead," Kipman told Bloomberg. "People just haven’t realized." If the phone is dead, then, what will replace it? Kipman believes a device capable of "mixed reality" could be its replacement.

Remember the good old days when updating your Snapchat Story was all you had to do to let people know what was happening in your life? You know what? BARELY, tbh. Snapchat Stories were a blast, but it wasn’t long beforethe battle of the social media platforms intensified and things got ugly. Instagram copied Snapchat, Facebook copied Instagram copying Snapchat, and as a result we’re left with utter chaos in the form of THREE Stories to worry about managing.

Microsoft's newly announced Surface Laptop might be the MacBook Air/Pro killer you've been waiting for. The Surface Laptop, the company's first proper laptop running Windows 10 S, is "the most soulful expression of a Windows device" said Terry Myerson, Microsoft's executive vice president of the Windows and Devices group, at the company's education-focused event on Tuesday. Starting at $999 and launching on June 15, the Surface Laptop is the synthesis of the Surface Pro and Surface Book.

YouTube.com's finally getting a new look. A year after it was discovered YouTube was testing a new flatter, more minimalist website design, the company's now starting to roll out a public version as an opt-in setting. Anyone can try the new look out, but if you don't like it you can easily opt-out and revert back to the old design. The website redesign is based off of Material Design, the UI and design language Google created to give Android a modern look and feel.

Those ugly white borders on Snapchat Stories may soon be a thing of the past. A recent update made a small but significant change to how photos uploaded to Stories from Snapchat's Memories will appear: they'll no longer have that hideous white border. A quick refresher: Snapchat has allowed users to share saved snaps and photos from their Camera Roll to their Story since it first introduced Memories in 2015.

Yik Yak has been on its last legs for a while, and now the end is officially here. The anonymous, location-based messaging app that rose to popularity in 2014 will "begin winding down" over the next week, Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wrote in a blog post Friday. Square —yup, the Jack Dorsey-led payments company — acquired some of the Yik Yak engineering team for $1 million. Unsurprisingly, Square didn't want the app.

What do you get when you put an almost 4-foot high backpack on someone that's barely 5-foot-2? So it wasn't the most graceful when I tried on Google's Street View Trekker, one of several pieces of equipment the company uses to capture its Street View imagery. The 3-foot-9-inch high (1.2m) Trekker consists of 15 cameras in a ball-like shape, mounted on a pole, powered by a computer backpack. The set up is fully waterproof and battery-powered up to 8 hours.

There are no second chances in life, but there may be in email. While this is of little consolation to those wishing they could hit "undo" on semi-recent national events, Gmail's Undo Send feature gives us all the break we so desperately need. Are you using it? You really should be. Email, after all, is deceptively hard.