That was effectively the only conversation missing from Facebook’s F8 conference — an event that even made time for a progress update on a moonshot project that might one day allow us to hear through our skin. Perhaps that’s the luxury of a company whose advertising revenue is up 57 percent year-over-year. But don’t misconstrue unseen for unimportant. Behind… Read More
I’ve been thinking a lot about retail these days and I’ve been connecting the dots between the seeming death of retailers like Ralph Lauren and the book industry. In short, we are feeling the seismic echoes of the 2008 crash right now on Main Street and things are both ugly and pretty at the same time. The book industry, like the music industry, nearly imploded when the world… Read More
Alphabet’s (Google’s) life sciences division Verily has launched its public pitch for a massive, multi-year health study it’s leading, along with Duke University School of Medicine, Stanford Medicine and Google proper. Read More
Earlier this week, Forbes published its annual Midas List, which showcases who the outlet believes to be the top investors in the world. Stuart Peterson of Artis Ventures was on the list — very far down, behind the many VCs whose names are instantly recognizable to founders, like Chris Sacca and Peter Fenton and Mary Meeker. The way Peterson tells it, that’s the way he likes it. Read More
Xiaomi unveiled its newest flagship smartphone — the Mi 6 — today at an event in Beijing, having skipped Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s largest annual event where it announced the Mi5 last year.
There’s plenty at stake with this new device, given that Xiaomi suffered a sales slump last year with CEO Lei Jun admitting that the company has entered a… Read More
Ada, a London and Berlin-based health tech startup, sees its official U.K. push today, and in doing so joins a number of other European startups attempting to market something akin to an AI-powered ‘doctor’. Read More
If you haven’t heard of Chewy, you aren’t alone. But PetSmart, the retail giant with more than 1,500 stores across the U.S., has clearly been tracking the low-flying, five-year-old pet supplies company. According to Recode, it just agreed to purchase its young rival for a stunning $3.35 billion, just slightly more than Walmart paid for Jet.com last year. This editor only… Read More
Baidu is opening its self-driving vehicle platform in a bid to help drive the development of autonomous cars. The Chinese internet giant today announced its Apollo project that will see its platform, including vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, opened to help others in the industry, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.… Read More
80% of Instagram’s users 600 million users are outside the US, so it needed a way to provide a better experience for users with limited network connectivity or no data plan.
Today at F8, Instagram announced it’s built support for using most of its features without Internet access. Much of this functionality is now available on Android, which is the preferred device type in the… Read More
An augmented reality developer platform, group chat bots, and a virtual reality version of Facebook itself were just a few of the launches at the social network’s big F8 conference today. Here’s a breakdown of each major announcement and why they’re important to you and Facebook. Read More
Today Facebook open sourced Caffe2. The deep learning framework follows in the steps of the original Caffe, a project started at the University of California, Berkeley. Caffe2 offers developers greater flexibility for building high-performance products that deploy efficiently. Read More
Today’s Stories Facebook launches augmented reality Camera Effects developer platform Facebook launches beta of Spaces, its goofy and fun social VR platform Snapchat introduces World Lenses – live filters for just about anything Steve Ballmer’s new project sheds light on U.S. Government spending Pandora Premium opens to all, invites no longer needed Credits Written… Read More
Oracle just announced that it has acquired ad measurement company Moat. Founded in 2010, Moat helps advertisers and publishers measure whether people see and interact with online ads. The need to create what CEO Jonah Goodhart has called “the currency for digital advertising” seems increasingly important given advertiser concerns around viewability, fraud and trust, and Moat has… Read More
Have you always wanted to check out that StarCraft game you’d heard so much about, but somehow managed to go nearly 20 years without buying a copy? Good news! Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Read More
You can’t be hanging around in the world of crowdfunding for as long as Kickstarter without spotting a few trends here and there. Taking a leaf out of Y Combinator’s Request for Startups, the crowdfunding site is highlighting what it thinks are opportunities in the coming year. It sends a signal to potential campaigns, hinting what Kickstarter will throw its not inconsiderable… Read More
Virtual reality really isn’t good enough yet to justify going broke for. Though VR headset prices are steadily coming down, the fact is it’s still not all that accessible for even the most gadget-obsessed consumers to get started on high-quality VR. Today, HTC, which makes the popular Vive headset, announced a few deals that will help new customers spread out the cost of the… Read More
Electric production vehicles may be relatively rare, but electric concepts abound, and most of them are targeting 2020 for a rough production date, as is the Volkswagen I.D. CROZZ, an all-electric design whose name I hope dies in a horrible fire between now and whenever (if ever) it does end up hitting the street. Read More
Well, it was fun while it lasted. The NES Classic Edition (it went by several names, but you know what I mean) was the must-have item of the holidays and pretty much ever since, owing to short supply of the compact retro gaming console. And Nintendo just confirmed that it was indeed ending production of the device in Europe, the last region they were still officially available. Read More
At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced that it is open-sourcing Litho, a declarative framework for building efficient user interfaces on Android. Litho is the same framework Facebook uses internally to build its own Android app, which is currently being used by more than a billion people every month. Read More
Facebook today announced the launch of React VR, a new JavaScript framework that lets developers build virtual reality experiences with the help of JavaScript. React VR takes its cues from Facebook’s existing React framework; just like with React for standard web apps, VR developers can now use the same declarative model to write apps for their 360-degree experiences. Read More
