Showtime will now allow subscribers to download its programming for offline viewing on mobile devices – following similar moves by Netflix and Amazon. The network says its entire library will be supported, including the full seasons of its top shows like Homeland, Billions, Ray Donovan, Shameless, The Affair, Weeds, Dexter and others. The new feature will be supported both on its… Read More
Today Facebook begins fighting misinformation with news literacy education, in addition to product features. This week, users in 14 countries, including the U.S., will see an alert above the News Feed several times over the next few days that links them to Facebook’s Help Center where they can read “Tips to Spot False News.” Read More
You may not be aware, but Uber offers an open source version of the data visualization framework it uses internally, called deck.gl. The tool was made available to anyone via open source license last November, and now it’s getting some key updates that should help make it more useful to external teams and individuals looking for interesting ways to take their data and turn it into… Read More
Twitter historically has had a rocky relationship with its developer community. It once encouraged third-party apps, then later restricting them; hosting developer conferences, then killing them; debuting a suite of developer tools, then selling them; and despite issuing a mea culpa, the company failed to regain the trust of many. Read More
A little over a year ago, Stripe introduced its Atlas program as a way to help international entrepreneurs get incorporated and set up with everything they’d need to do business in the U.S. Now the payments startup is opening up the program as a way to facilitate company creation for founders that are already here. Read More
It was hard to know what to make of Clips at launch. Sure, Apple launches its own standalone apps from time to time, but it’s never offered up anything quite like this. For Apple, Clips is another play at mobile video editing — a dead simple solution for those who don’t have the time, skill set or desire to fiddle with Final Cut or even iMovie. Read More
Instagram is killing it. The photo-sharing behemoth has topped 600 million users, with the most recent 100 million joining in the last year. Plus, the company now has more than 1 million active advertisers, building on Facebook’s already-dominant advertising business. But there is also a question of whether Instagram can continue iterating in a unique way? Or if it even needs to?… Read More
Volkswagen is doubling down on China and AI in one fell swoop after the automaker announced a $180 million investment in Chinese startup Mobvoi to bring smart technology into its cars. Unlike a regular capital raise, VW’s money is going into a joint-venture that will “develop and apply AI technologies to automotive industry” rather than Mobvoi itself, the companies said in… Read More
Ford is going to be focusing on electrification across its lineup in China, with plans to electrify most of its vehicle offerings in the country by 2025, Reuters reports. The long-term plan will begin with the launch of a plug-in hybrid electric sedan called the Mondeo Energi with local partner Changanin China in 2018, and then a fully electric SUV sometime within the next five years,… Read More
Nvidia updates its top-of-the-line Titan graphics card yearly, so it’s only natural the Titan Xp got announced Thursday. The Titan Xp’s new specs include 12GB of GDDR5X memory running at 11.4 Gbps (!), an army of 3,840 CUDA cores running at 1.6GHz and 12 TFLOPs (that’s twelve trillion floating-point operations per second) of brute processing power. A GPU like this will be… Read More
The Drone Racing League just unveiled the drone that its pilots will use for the second season, which will again be airing on ESPN starting on June 20th. The drone, called the Racer3, has a top speed of 85 MPH, and can go from 0-80 MPH in under one second. They also have 210 LED lights for pilot identification and visibility to the audience. The Racer3 will also have a hard shell to protect… Read More
Trov, the provider of on-demand insurance for individual items, has raised $45 million for its global expansion efforts. The company is one of a growing number of tech-enabled startups that are looking to change the insurance business and carve out a piece of that multi-trillion-dollar industry. At Danville, Calif.-based Trov, that means providing insurance policies for individual items on… Read More
Microsoft couldn’t wait until E3 in June to unveil the Scorpio, so the company shared some details with Digital Foundry and we now know all of Project Scorpio’s tech specs. As expected, it’s going to be by far the most powerful gaming console out there.
The console GPU will be able to process six trillion floating point operations per second, or six teraflops for short. Read More
Self-driving trucks are attracting a lot of investment and attention, what with Otto’s drama and platooning tech developed by key players like Peloton, but Swedish transport startup Einride has a different vision of how freight will move around roads in the future. The company revealed its ‘T-Pod’ design Thursday, an electric vehicle with self-driving capabilities that… Read More
Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, had originally been aiming for late 2017 as the target gate to begin sending human crew up to space aboard its rockets, with the aim of beginning commercial tourist rocket rides in 2018. The 2018 target remains in place for initial commercial service, but Blue Origin is now looking more likely to start test flights in… Read More
A startup called Flow wants to make it easier for companies to sell their products in different geographies. To extend its platform to even more e-commerce sellers, the company has raised some funding from Forerunner Ventures and Fung Capital. Read More
The EU-US Privacy Shield appears to be weathering the storm of a Trump presidency — for now. But it could take just a single stroke of Trump’s pen to bring the entire arrangement toppling down. Read More
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos uses his considerable stake in the ecommerce company to fund his other company, private launch provider Blue Origin, Reuters reports. Bezos told attendees at the 33rd Space Symposium that he sells around $1 billion worth of Amazon stock every year to help fund Blue Origin, which is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the $73.54 billion value of his total holdings… Read More
The entrepreneurs in the TechStars NYC program are going to spend today meeting with investors, reporters and other folks from the tech industry — but luckily, I had a chance to do rapid-fire interviews with most of them on Tuesday. Though Techstars may be increasingly known for the industry-focused startup accelerators it creates with companies like Comcast and Target, it still runs… Read More
Hyperloop One is in Washington on Wednesday, presenting to policy makers and others in the nation’s capital details regarding its progress, and revealing 11 teams from the U.S. presenting proposed routes across 35 cities. The 11 U.S. teams will join the group of 24 other proposals from around the world, competing to become one of 12 total finalists, of which Hyperloop One will… Read More
