The always reliable Emojipedia (they have one job and they do it well (actually it’s a complex beat)) has posted the final list of emoji that will be included in the Unicode 10.0 release this June. There’s a bunch of great stuff in here if you like fantasy creatures and inclusion. But there are a couple clunkers, too. Let’s look at the best and worst of today’s emoji crop. Read More
A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Read More
The final chapter of Samsung’s lengthy Note 7 saga apparently has yet to be written. Following pressure from environmental groups that culminated with a on-site protester at the company’s Mobile World Congress press event, Samsung has confirmed its intentions to re-release the Note 7 back into the wild in refurbished form. Read More
Late last year the European Space Agency doubled down on its Mars mission, dedicating half a billion euros to the next phase of its Exomars 2020 program — and now we are seeing the benefits of that enormous investment: a pretty awesome new render of the rover they plan to deploy to the Martian surface. Read More
Good news for fans of GoDaddy’s Easter Egg-filled Super Bowl ad: The company has launched an entire campaign around the ad’s star, “The Internet.” Read More
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has a new company — Neuralink — focused on developing the capabilities of the brain through technological augmentation. It’s been known for some time that Musk was working on brain-computer interface tech as a means to help ensure humans can keep pace with the accelerating development of artificial intelligence. Read More
A reminder that I’ll be holding a micro-meetup at Boomtown on Broadway in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday, March 29th at 7pm. Companies will have 2 minutes to pitch in front of two local judges and then 2 minutes of questions. No slides, no props, no costumes (Ok, maybe costumes.) Boomtown is at 2060 Broadway B1 in the basement. To get there, park around Spruce and Broadway and it’s… Read More
Google, which has accused Symantec and its partners of misissuing tens of thousands of certificates for encrypted web connections, quietly announced Thursday that it’s downgrading the level and length of trust Chrome will place in certificates issued by Symantec. Encrypted web connections — HTTPS connections like those on banking sites, login pages or news sites like this one… Read More
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the company to own the future of virtual reality, and in the short term that means putting a lot of VR headsets on a lot of faces. To do so, the company is hiring Michael Hillman, a 15-year veteran of Apple, to lead the VR product roadmap for Oculus as head of VR hardware. Read More
Apple began offering a “free app of the week” back in 2012 as a means of highlighting some of the App Store’s best titles and encouraging users to start downloading. Google, belatedly, is following in Apple’s footsteps with its own newly launched “free app of the week” section on Google Play. However, we understand that Google has not yet committed to… Read More
Earlier this month, Sarah Silverman tweeted about a new website called Make Tweets Great Again that had sprung up to give money to the ACLU every time President Donald Trump dropped a tweet bomb from his personal account. The project is a prime example of a newfound “apptivism” from coders and developers across the Web. Read More
Faraday Future, the would-be Tesla rival facing well-documented challenges in terms of capitalization and efforts to bring its first production vehicle to market, has scrapped plans to construct an assembly facility and “experience center” (read: showroom) in Vallejo, California on Mare Island. Read More
Developers, let’s see if you’re in luck this year and get a ticket for Apple’s developer conference, WWDC 2017. While tickets cost $1,599, there are just too many people who want to go to the conference to accommodate them all. For the past few years, Apple has run a lottery to select ticket holders. The lottery is opening now for WWDC 2017. You have until March 31 at 10 AM… Read More
It’s patch day at Apple. The company just released four new versions of its four operating systems for all its devices — iOS 10.3, macOS 10.12.4, watchOS 3.2 and tvOS 10.2. Some of those updates are more important than others. Read More
We finally have a peek at the smartphone that Android co-founder Andy Rubin and his team have been building. Today, Rubin tweeted out a teaser photo of the yet-to-be-named device emerging from his stealth startup.
I'm really excited about how this is shaping up. Eager to get it in more people's hands… pic.twitter.com/LRzQCFSKTm
— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) March 27… Read More
The PlayStation 4 Pro just got an update that makes it an even better companion for a 4K TV set. An update to the native PlayStation Media Player app will enable 4K video playback, for files in mp4 format saved on either a USB drive or kept in a home server the PS4 Pro hardware con communicate with. Not that if you’ve got a drive attached to your PS4 Pro that’s formatted to act as… Read More
London-based ‘social impact’ accelerator, Bethnal Green Ventures, which backs pre-seed startups with ideas for using tech to tackle social and/or environmental problems, has taken £1.3 million in funding from three social tech and innovation funders: Big Society Capital, Nominet Trust and Nesta. Read More
Just when you thought it was safe to eat a salad researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have shown that a decellularized spinach leaf can be turned into a vascular network that could help doctors regrow organs. The project, featured in the journal Biomaterials, is about as proof-of-concept as you can get, but the primary value is proving that a previously existing vascular system can… Read More
Toyota and NTT, one of Japan’s largest carriers, are teaming up to work on connected vehicle technology, with an agreement to work together on research and development in this emerging area. The team-up makes a lot of sense, since both carriers and automakers are looking to maximize the amount of data they can get from their customers as vehicles become increasingly connected.
The… Read More
Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported Facebook was rolling out a new feature called “Town Hall,” which would allow the social network’s users to easily locate, follow and contact their local, state and federal government representatives. The company today confirmed the feature is available to all U.S. users on desktop and mobile, and will now include News Feed integration. Read More
