The Pokémon Company, what is going on right now. How is it possible that one of the new pocketable monsters you created for Pokémon Sun/Moon is actually a pile of sand?? Look: What are you doing to me? Do you think this is okay? Here’s what the sand blob evolves into when hit with a water attack: THAT’S A DAMN SANDCASTLE, POKÉMON! Get it together. Meanwhile, there are other… Read More
The UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has supported the inclusion of bulk collection powers contained within the controversial Investigatory Powers bill. Read More
Apple keeps releasing new iOS 10 betas ahead of the final iOS 10 release in September. The company just issued the seventh beta for both developers and public beta testers — the public beta’s version number is one digit behind, so it’s public beta 6, but it’s the same version. Head over to the Settings app of your iPhone or iPad to update. There’s no sign of… Read More
Look out phone scammers. Alphabet, Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Samsung and Microsoft are coming for you. The big names are among 30 tech companies that have joined up to form the Robocall! Strike! Force! (our exclamation points).
Other notable names on the list include BlackBerry, LG, Qualcomm, Sirius XM, Verizon (the company than owns the company that owns this site), Nokia, T-Mobile and… Read More
What does the future of Cadillac look like? The Escala, the company’s new concept car, holds the answers. The Escala is on show publicly for the first time at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this weekend, and reveals a car that takes its name (Spanish for ‘scale’) to heart, as a larger sedan that previews the future lines of Cadillac’s body design, and the… Read More
Many of today’s fashion applications are targeted toward women, but a new app from Looklive wants to help men look great, too, without needing to be a fashion expert. Instead, the company – which is now also available as an iOS application – lets men shop the looks from their favorite celebrities and other style influencers. They can then buy exactly what those celebs… Read More
Soon cars, drones, phones, and almost anything with a battery are about to get a boost from a new MIT spin-out, SolidEnergy Systems. The company promises to double the battery life of basic lithium ion batteries and will also offer smaller batteries with the power of bigger cells. Why is this technology important? Because it is better than current battery tech and can maintain an energy… Read More
When it comes to open-source licenses, developers have their fair share of choices (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.), all of them with their own pros and cons. The same goes for commercial licenses. MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and his co-founder David Axmark, however, came up with a different model a few years ago: the Business Source License (BSL). This new license offers… Read More
It’s no secret, I love Markdown. But when it comes to collaborating with someone, Google Docs, Quip, Pages on iCloud.com and Word on Office.com are all rich-text editors. Meet Canvas, a real-time Markdown editor on the web and now on iOS. With this editor, I can see myself collaborating on stories with my coworkers and seamlessly put the result in our CMS. Read More
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is no stranger to the stage at Disrupt, but his job’s gotten a lot bigger in recent months with the acquisition of Yahoo. So Armstrong will be with us again at Disrupt SF. He’ll be joined by his boss Marni Walden, Verizon’s executive vice president and president of product innovation and new business. The two of them led Verizon’s effort to buy… Read More
The old-fashioned structure of traditional healthcare has led to poor quality, low availability and efficiency, especially in primary healthcare. The answer may be to sweep that away and build products directly for consumers, not the healthcare industry. That’s why so many startups are creating video-based healthcare startups to get around the industry. Read More
This week, Uber revealed imminent plans to get passengers into self-driving cars, Gawker died, Snapchat made a big acquisition and an early stage SF venture firm may be imploding. Get the Weekly Roundup in your inbox, if that’s your thing. Read More
Accelerators have been all the rage for the last 10 years in tech, but VC funds tend not to launch them in addition to their normal investment strategies. However, London-based Octopus Ventures is taking a different tack. Its new Octopus Labs will concentrate on FinTech startups specifically, with the move coming just as the U.K. government has been pressing the financial sector to provide… Read More
What did you do this summer? A few outdoor concerts, maybe some grilling. But did you complete a room-sized 40,000 transistor CPU made entirely by hand? Didn’t think so. James Newman wanted to create a CPU that students could use to learn about computing. He realized he needed to use transistors, but instead of embedding thousands of them into a chunk of silicon, he hand-wired… Read More
In-vehicle infotainment systems on newer cars increasingly offer access to your favorite media and navigation apps, thanks to systems like CarPlay and Android Auto, but older cars from even just a few years ago can still feel stuck in a connected tech first gear. Hudly, which debuted on Kickstarter today, wants to change that with an easy-to-install aftermarket heads-up display (HUD) add-on… Read More
Much has been written about Brazil during the Rio Olympics. But one facet of the country that’s relatively unknown to foreigners is how 9 percent of the population – or the roughly 17 million Brazilians between the ages of 15 through 19 – can get a decent, affordable college education. Read More
It’s finally here. After four years without a new album and a few weeks of cryptic teasing, Frank Ocean has finally released… well, something. In the same vein as Beyonce’s Lemonade, Ocean released a visual album called Endless exclusively on Apple Music. It’s about 45 minutes long, and is an interesting (and long-awaited) prequel to the Boys Don’t Cry album.… Read More
Okay, you’ve procrastinated long enough, startup fans. If you somehow haven’t yet gotten your tickets to the hottest startup show in the Bay Area, today is the day to do it. It’s the final day to get Disrupt SF 2016 tickets at our early-bird price point of $1,995 apiece, a full $1,000 cheaper than those same tickets will be tomorrow. Read More
India continues to be one of the rare growth markets in the global smartphone industry after lodging a 17 percent year-on-year increase in shipments in the second quarter of 2016, according to a new report from IDC. Read More
Dyson’s 360 Eye robot vacuum has been a long time coming to U.S. carpets. The squat little cylinder of a bot first broke cover in September 2014, with a splashy product announcement and a consumer launch in Japan in 2015. North American homes are only just getting their first taste of Dyson’s inaugural foray into robotics, however, and my own has been playing host to one for the… Read More
