| Apple users in the U.K. are facing an app price hike, a video conferencing company joins the unicorn club and a new startup aims to make the doctor's office more like the Apple Store. You'll find all that and more in The Daily Crunch for January 17, 2017. Plus, some Apple rumors get confirmed. 1. Apple app prices are going up 25 percent in the U.K. Here's something else you can blame on Brexit: Apple is increasing the U.K. price of apps sold in its App Store to offset the falling value of the British pound relative to the U.S. dollar. That means an app that sells in the lowest price tier (so, $0.99 in the U.S.) will now be priced at £0.99, up from £0.79. The changes take effect in the next seven days. To be clear, other countries — specifically India, Romania and Russia — are seeing increased App Store prices too, due to changing tax rates and other factors. But this also follows an October price increase for Apple hardware sold in the U.K. 
2. Yep, Apple plans to do more with original video If you've been reading the rumors around Apple, you've probably heard that it's planning to challenge Netflix and other services with its own original video content. Now Jimmy Iovine, the head of Apple Music, essentially confirmed those reports while speaking at the Television Critics Association press tour, saying, "At Apple Music, what we're trying to create is an entire cultural, pop cultural experience, and that happens to include audio and video." 3. Facebook will open a Startup Garage in Paris Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was in Paris today to announce that the company as one of the launch partners at Station F, which is supposed to be the world's biggest startup campus. Starting in April, Facebook plans to have 80 desks on the campus, allowing it to work with 10 to 15 startups every six months. 4. Zoom joins the unicorn club Video conferencing service Zoom has raised a $100 million Series D. The round, which was funded entirely by Sequoia Capital, values the company at $1 billion. Zoom says it already works with 450,000 businesses, including 5,800 educational institutions. 5. AI expert Qi Lu joins Baidu Chinese search giant Baidu has moving into artificial intelligence over the past couple of years, and it took another step in that direction by hiring AI expert Qi Lu as group president and COO. Lu, who left Microsoft last year, has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, and there are more than 40 U.S. patents in his name. 6. Forward aims to be the Apple Store of doctor's offices We wrote last year that Adrian Aoun (who founded Wavii, a natural language processing startup acquired by Google) has attracted some big-name investors to his new health care company Forward. Now Forward is sharing more details about its plans to reinvent the doctor's office. Those plans are currently centered on a 3,500 square foot location in San Francisco, using the latest equipment, an onsite lab and proprietary AI. | 
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