Halloween is just around the corner and if there was one horror-themed phenomenon this year, it was Netflix’s nostalgia-driven Stranger Things. Google has now teamed up with Netflix to bring a Stranger Things sticker pack to the latest version of its Allo messaging app. It’s also hosting a Stranger Things scavenger hunt in New York today (Oct. 28). The update isn’t just… Read More
Facebook is overhauling its in-app camera to embrace the next era of augmented reality visual communication pioneered by Snapchat. The new features include Snapchat-style animated selfie masks, overlaid graphics, and geofilters; Prisma-esque fine art-themed style transfer filters; and some innovative new “reactive” filters that respond to your body’s movements. What Facebook… Read More
More reasons to be miserable about the UK’s vote to leave the European Union: Apple has hiked the pound sterling price of Macs, old and new, by as much as 25 per cent to take account of currency fluctuations in the wake of the June referendum vote. Thanks #Brexit. Read More
Lazada, under Alibaba’s stewardship, is in advanced talks with Redmart, a Singapore-based grocery delivery service, to make a major investment or acquire the company outright, three sources with knowledge of the deal told TechCrunch. Once a deal is agreed, it could be completed as early as next week, one source said. Read More
Meal replacement powder maker Soylent has halted sales of its main product as part of an investigation into why some customers have been getting sick after eating its products. Read More
Florida-headquartered Magic Leap has set up a company in Helsinki to gain access to Finland’s vast, Nokia- and gaming-driven reservoir of VR and AR talent. In July, Magic Leap registered a company in Helsinki with CFO Scott Henry as the chairman of the board. The company did not return my request for a comment. The Finnish VR and AR companies I spoke with would not confirm or deny… Read More
Earlier this week, the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, a “hub for entrepreneurship” in the center of Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh campus, was officially launched in an event attended by upwards of 600 students, alums, and professors. They’ll have even more to celebrate when construction on the 300,000 square-foot business school where it’s being… Read More
Tesla posted an appetizer of sorts for its event tomorrow, via a blog post that details Powerpack 2, the second iteration of Tesla’s commercial and utility energy storage solution. The Powerpack 2 actually started shipping quietly in September, with a brand new energy module on board that’s capable of achieving twice the energy density or around 200 kWh of storage. Powerpack 2… Read More
In the second Apple event in the past two months, Tim Cook ceremoniously took the stage today at Apple HQ to keep us posted on what the company has been working on. The event opened with a moving message toward making Apple technology accessible to all without too much detail on how exactly that is going to happen. Followed by a not so humble-brag session about the positive reception of the… Read More
How do you get excited about a new snack food or laundry detergent when virtual reality, artificial intelligence and autonomous cars dominate the news? It’s easy: Because consumer goods impact every facet of our lives, from our personal health and comfort to how we socialize with each other and care for our environment. Read More
The Touch Bar is serious business. Apple’s interface guidelines warn against all kinds of fun things that developers probably started thinking about when the new MacBook Pros leaked earlier this week. No doubt some apps will find a way to be creative even under the stern eye of Apple’s party police, but it’s clearly discouraged. Read More
Logistics may be the name of the game when it comes to e-commerce, but the IPO market can still prove to be a fickle place for even the biggest players. Today, China’s ZTO Express, the company that provides shipping and delivery services to Alibaba among others, scored both a hit and a miss in its first day of trading as a public company. First, the company raised $1.4 billion in its… Read More
Every once in a while someone in Silicon Valley brings up the possibility of living forever, or at least a really long time, but first we’re going to need to figure out a way to enjoy all those extra years. Unity Biotechnology is a startup focusing on medicines to help us do that by slowing the effects of age-related diseases. And the company announced it has pulled in a whopping $116… Read More
Microsoft expects to close its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn by the end of this year — pending some final regulatory approvals — and so, in light of that, today LinkedIn posted a very basic earnings report for Q3. It’s also skipping the customary analyst call and is no longer providing financial guidance for the coming quarter. Still, the company reported growth in… Read More
Apple just introduced a shiny, super thin new MacBook Pro. But for what was birthed, a lot of widely-held standards had to die.
Today, Apple removed the MagSafe 2 charging port type, they stripped away the HDMI port, they ripped out the SD card slot, they shuttered the Thunderbolt 2 ports (which you probably used like three times) and they most notably killed the standard USB port. All… Read More
It’s a good day for consumers, and the advertisers are tearing out their hair: The FCC today voted to adopt new privacy rules that severely restrict what data ISPs can collect from you without your consent. The Association of National Advertisers called the rules “unprecedented, misguided and extremely harmful.” If that isn’t a strong endorsement, I don’t know… Read More
Alphabet’s strategy of trying to stuff the difference between declining mobile advertising value with additional clicks appears to still be paying off as the company once again showed Wall Street that it can make a ton of money and continue to grow. Alphabet (we’re just gonna call it what it is because we’re talking about the core business: Google) reported earnings of $9.06… Read More
Amazon disappointed investors when it posted third quarter earnings after the bell Thursday. With an adjusted earnings per share of 52 cents, this was well beneath the expected 78 cents. The stock quickly fell at least 6 percent in after-hours trading. Revenue of $32.7 billion was in line with what Wall Street was expecting. The miss came as a surprise because in recent years the company… Read More
Mozilla has been hard at work rolling out Electrolysis to bring the benefits of a multiprocess architecture to Firefox users for quite some time. Though Mozilla has put a large amount of its resources into the development of Electrolysis, the company has remained consistent about insisting there was more up its sleeve. Read More
That record scratch you just heard came from thousands of designers and R&D specialists who suddenly have to remake 3D models of laptops, phones and desktops. That sigh is coming from hundreds of programmers stepping up their new interfaces and that ripping noise is myriad press releases getting torn up and rewritten. After all, it’s almost CES time again and Apple and Microsoft… Read More
