Three months after acquiring iconic audio tech company THX, Razer is making another move to expand its business beyond hardware and software for the gaming community. The company has acquired Nextbit, the startup behind the Robin smartphone, founded by Android veterans who had set out with high hopes (and some decent funding) to rethink how to build a mobile phone that leaned on cloud… Read More
Reactions to President Trump’s executive order placing a three-month ban on entry to the U.S. from seven majority Muslim countries have been rippling out across the Atlantic over the past 48 hours — with figures from the U.K. tech industry adding their voices to a general chorus of dismay. Read More
In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration established the very cool-sounding “Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles,” which does exactly what it says. It requires that 100 percent of all EVs and hybrids make some noise at low speeds by 2019. If a vehicle can move forward or in reverse without engaging an internal combustion engine, it needs… Read More
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has come out strongly against the executive order issued by Donald Trump regarding immigration and blocking certain refugees from entering the U.S. Amazon had previously expressed support for employees affected by the order in an email from HR VP Beth Galetti, but the new message from Bezos expresses opposition to the executive order in general, and also details steps… Read More
Rashaun Williams, a former fund manager at QueensBridge Venture Partners, the venture capital firm made famous by the hip-hop legend Nas, has joined boutique merchant bank Manhattan Venture Partners to leverage his proximity to star power for a new secondary investment fund. Read More
Good enough and convenient. That’s proved a winning strategy for Instagram’s clone, according to a dozen analytics providers, social media celebrities, and talent managers who told TechCrunch they’ve seen a decline in Snapchat Stories usage since Instagram Stories launched on August 2nd. Read More
A wearable wireless hydration sensor from North Carolina State University will be able to tell how thirsty you are via a chest patch or wrist-worn device. The device is designed to tell you when you might be facing heat stress due to dehydration. “It’s difficult to measure a person’s hydration quantitatively, which is relevant for everyone from military personnel to athletes… Read More
MXNet, Amazon Web Services’ preferred deep learning framework, was accepted to the Apache Incubator today. Admission to the incubator is the first step necessary for the open-source initiative to officially become part of the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation supports the efforts of thousands of developers maintaining open-source projects around the world.… Read More
The sky above the port may be the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, but in most hacker dens it’s usually all psychedelics and healthy snacks. And what better way to partake in your favorite psychoactive substances than with a true cyberpunk’s vape? The DaVinci IQ is a black slab designed to heat herbs to temperatures between 230 and 430 degrees Fahrenheit. A grid of… Read More
Machine learning is not new. We have witnessed it since the 1990s, when Amazon introduced a new “recommended for you” section for its users to display more personalized results. When we search for something on Google, machine learning is behind those search results. The “Friends” recommendations or the suggested pages on Facebook or a product recommendation depend on… Read More
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced Monday that he’s filing suit in federal court against Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and select senior Trump administration officials, seeking a declaration that key portions of Trump’s Executive Order on immigration be declared unconstitutional. Alongside the lawsuit, Washington-based tech companies Amazon and… Read More
Google is making a number of ad partner announcements around its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format today. The idea behind AMP is to speed up the mobile web experience for users and it’s no secret that ads play a major role in making regular mobile (and desktop) pages load slowly. With AMP ads, Google and its partners aim to make ads load fast again. The new partners Google is… Read More
Apple will report its holiday quarter earnings tomorrow. Once again, all eyes will be on the iPhone. The device now represents the vast majority of the company’s revenue. So anything that can affect iPhone sales is a big deal. And if you’ve been paying attention to Apple’s past earnings, you know that Apple has had a complicated year. In short, revenue has been down for… Read More
Leslie Miley, the former engineering manager at Twitter and now-former director of engineering at Slack, has just announced his latest move. Miley left Slack at the beginning of this year and is now working with Venture for America for the next 12 months to launch a new program called Executive in Residence in San Francisco, he told me via email.
“Silicon Valley is the center for… Read More
Today at an event in San Francisco in which it announced updates to its Paper app and its Smart Sync feature, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston talked up the company’s revenue growth and self-serve business model. Houston claimed that Dropbox was on pace for a $1 billion revenue run rate and that the company was free-cash flow positive, which could bolster the company’s plans for a… Read More
Sure, building a startup is hard, but building a real community for a virtual industry may be the toughest challenge in tech. Upload was founded in the aftermath of Facebook’s Oculus VR acquisition as a meetup for VR founders and fanboys/fangirls to chat about their hopes for the space and their plans to make them happen. In the past couple years, Upload has managed to vastly… Read More
Dropbox said today that it is rolling out Paper — its note-taking app that it’s emphasizing is a tool that’s built for managing workflow as well — globally.
In addition to the regular launch of Paper, the company said that users will also be able to automatically generate presentations and run them through Paper in their browsers. Radhakrishnan said that users were… Read More
Ride hailing app Lyft can now poll your calendar for suggested destinations right within the app itself, thanks to a new integration option being rolled out starting today. And coming soon, it’s going to let you specify your own shortcut destination options, in addition to “Home” and “Work,” letting you easily enter frequently visited spots so you don’t have… Read More
Dropbox today released Smart Sync, its tool that allows users to access files stored online in Dropbox accounts automatically on a desktop without having the file stored locally. Previously dubbed Dropbox Infinite, Smart Sync gives businesses a way to share and access files without needing to have massive ones stored on their desktop. The idea is that businesses regularly deal with piles… Read More
Getting locked out of your account sucks. Almost everyone has experienced the frustration of forgetting a password, losing the phone on which they receive two-factor authentication codes, or jumbling the answer to a security question. But as exasperating as it is to lose access to your account, none of the widely-available measures for account recovery are very secure. Major breaches like… Read More
