Despite a weak second quarter and a lot of eyes on the end of the year, Salesforce is already starting to look pretty good again to Wall Street. The company beat analyst expectations today in its third-quarter earnings report across the board. Salesforce reported earnings of 24 cents per share on revenue of $2.14 billion. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 21 cents per share on revenue… Read More
Tesla and SolarCity leapt an important hurdle Thursday: getting shareholder sign off for the proposed acquisition of the latter by the former. Respective shareholder votes at both companies signaled a green light for Tesla’s plan to take over the solar energy technology provider, which Elon Musk first proposed in June. Even minus Musk and “other affiliated shareholders,”… Read More
President Obama awarded the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to a batch of 21 deserving recipients, among them computing pioneers Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton. Read More
President Barack Obama spoke in Berlin Thursday during a visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and during his remarks he addressed concerns about fake news circulating via social platforms like Facebook. On the subject of fake news, Obama noted that the ease with which we can make false information seem like genuine facts on platforms including “a Facebook page” means… Read More
VR has quite a bit to offer creative types in terms of building worlds and images that would be impossible otherwise. Oculus Story Studio is looking to redefine the concept of a digital art with their latest effort, Quill. Oculus announced today that it will be releasing the application for free on December 6 in time for the launch of the Touch motion controllers. The input devices, which… Read More
Alexa’s on a quite a roll of late. Amazon’s AI assistant is adding new skills all the time, and this week the company’s adding one of its highest profile partners. On November 19, Alexa will get the Send Message skill, allowing AT&T subscribers to text one of ten predetermined contacts using their voice. The skill works pretty much as you’d expect. Ask Alexa to text… Read More
Farming is, by far, the most mature industry mankind has created. Dating back to the dawn of civilization, farming has been refined, adjusted and adapted — but never perfected. We, as a society, always worry over the future of farming. Today, we even apply terms usually reserved for the tech sector — digital, IoT, AI and so on. So why are we worrying? Read More
Airbnb is looking to move beyond the simple experience of booking a place to stay — moving part of the responsibility of figuring out what to do in those places to Airbnb and its hosts instead. That’s the goal of the company’s new ‘experiences’ feature in the Airbnb app. In addition to booking places to stay, hosts and locals can offer different tours, events… Read More
For someone who is blind or partially sighted, everyday tasks can be a pain — choosing the right can from the pantry, for instance, or picking up the right book from the table. A smartphone could help them with this kind of problem, of course, if it knew how to identify objects and describe them to the user — and that’s precisely what a 12th-grade student from Toronto has made… Read More
If you share the same Apple ID with your family, you may have noticed that the call history gets synced between those devices. The Intercept and Forbes found out that Apple stores this log on its servers for up to four months and law enforcement could take advantage of it. Apple wants you to be able to browse your missed calls on multiple devices. That’s why the company is using iCloud… Read More
Renew.com has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Venrock, Expa and others to launch a platform aiming to give the baby boomer generation adequate information on their benefits after retirement.
American companies started to shift away from pensions and healthcare benefits packages for retirees in the mid-1980s, leaving the last bit of the boomers without the same compensations their… Read More
Bone conduction has been around in some form or another for some time now, but the technology still hasn’t managed to crack the mainstream. New York-based hardware startup AfterShokz may have come the closest with its line of crowdfunded Trekz wireless headphones.
The Bluetooth sport bands offered up good design and patented bone conduction technology that manages to vibrate their… Read More
Apple may not have yet launched its own TV streaming service, but there’s now another way to watch live television on Apple’s set-top box: Sony’s PlayStation Vue’s Apple TV application has arrived. The service, which is available on Apple TV 4th-generation devices, offers all of Vue’s standard features, including its cloud DVR and support for simultaneous… Read More
In a month of unexpected outcomes, we have also seen some tech partnership announcements, ones we thought we might never see. In fact, just this week we witnessed Microsoft joining the Linux foundation and Google joining Microsoft’s .NET foundation. You cannot minimize just how at odds these announcements are with what has been the reality of the tech industry over the last 20 years.… Read More
Y Combinator has developed a reputation under its president, Sam Altman, for iterating — a lot. The accelerator program’s newest twist? Temporary or “visiting partners” who will be asked to become highly involved with a particular “batch” or YC class based on their particular expertise. The partners will be a bit like YC’s “part-time… Read More
Though not quite as destructive as MegaBots, or as humbling as Boston Dynamics, Reach Robotics’ MekaMon might just be the most fun and accessible robot on the market. Leveraging augmented reality, anyone interested in a good time can whip out their smartphone to battle their bots in the physical and virtual worlds at the same time. Quite a bit of technology goes into the four-legged… Read More
Lyft has released extended comments regarding the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s guidelines on autonomous driving, released earlier this year. Lyft’s formal comments address a number of areas where it thinks the NHTSA policy is spot-on, including vehicle interiors designed to maximize passenger safety, but also outline some parts where they feel the… Read More
While most people might know Niantic for building the hype-monster that is Pokémon GO, GO wasn’t the company’s first big release. That title goes to Ingress, an equally (if not more) location-centric game. Just days after Ingress’ fourth birthday, Niantic is shaking things up with the introduction of a feature they’ve been working on for months: the ability for players… Read More
Sam Ramji, the founding CEO of the open source platform as a service Cloud Foundry foundation, is joining Google in a yet-to-be-disclosed executive role. Abby Kearns, the current VP of Industry at the Cloud Foundry Foundation and an industry veteran, will take over as Executive Director while Chip Childers will become the organization’s CTO. Ramji is leaving Cloud Foundry at a time… Read More
The makers of Firefox are today introducing a new mobile web browser for iOS users that puts private browsing at the forefront of the user experience. Called Firefox Focus, the mobile browser by default blocks ad trackers, and erases your browsing history, including your passwords and cookies. The end result is a simplified browser that may load web pages more quickly, the company claims,… Read More
