Twitter is expanding its live sports plans, with weekly, live streamed games from Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. The live streams will be available for free to out-of-market viewers, whether they’re logged into Twitter or not. Twitter is also announcing a new nightly sports highlights show called The Rally, produced by mobile video company 120 Sports. (The Rally… Read More
Seeing 3D movies in theaters isn’t my preferred choice for a bunch of reasons, but the glasses definitely rank among its most annoying features. The cheap plastic things always have to ride atop my existing, actual vision glasses, for one, and they also always seem to be scratched or otherwise marked up. Which is why news that MIT has developed a glasses-less 3D display tech suitable for… Read More
One asset that Verizon will be getting as part of its $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s core assets, which it did not specifically mention in its big announcement today, is Yahoo’s (in)famous brand — main name, purple color and exclamation mark all included. This, in turn, means that when the deal is completed (expected Q1 2017) the remaining Yahoo will rename itself… Read More
Pokemon players will eventually be able to fill out their collections via trades, which is very good news for people eyeing region-specific Pokemon like Australia’s Kangaskhan from the other side of the world. Niantic CEO John Hanke revealed at a San Diego Comic Con panel that Niantic is indeed working on adding trading (and new training features) to their game, as well as… Read More
Crowd-funding is almost an old-fashioned concept in the tech world these days, but it’s still having a relatively new and significant impact in the world of politics. A brand new initiative is now taking the UK by storm and plans to use tech to shake up the UK’s political system in the wake of the chaos of the Brexit vote. Kicked-off by former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown,… Read More
Today Verizon confirmed that it plans to acquire Yahoo’s core assets — search, advertising and content, along with Yahoo’s Sunnyvale real estate — for $4.83 billion in cash. That business will in turn be combined with AOL, which Verizon acquired last year for $4.4 billion. Today, Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, said that it’s all about scale for his company… Read More
After a months-long bidding process and many layoffs, Yahoo has finally found a buyer. Verizon (which owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch) is officially acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion, which includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities. Read More
More consolidation in the so-called big data space. Publicly-listed U.S. big data company Teradata has acquired London-based Big Data Partnership, a startup that provides big data solutions and training to help companies become more savvy in the use of, well, big data. You may have noticed a recurring theme here. Read More
The race to create a new, 21st Century form of bank continues. In Europe, Holvi (coming out of Finland) was desktop-first and hasn’t come to the UK. It also hasn’t been focussed on being a hub for third party services, so therefore behaving more like a platform. In the US there is Seed.co (a YCombinator startup) but they haven’t launched internationally yet. So with the… Read More
Gridstore, a company that focuses on building software and data center appliances for Windows Hyper V-based clouds, today announced that it has acquired DCHQ, a service that helps enterprises move their applications to any cloud or container infrastructure (with a specific focus on Java-based applications). With this acquisition, Gridstore is changing its name to HyperGrid and the old… Read More
For better or worse, preaching the gospel of your candidate no longer requires leaving the couch. As anyone who’s cracked open a social media account over the past year can corroborate, the platforms are lousy with campaign slogans, incriminating links and, um, spirited discussions. In the lead up to next week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Hillary… Read More
While many designers and engineers find success with 3D-printing parts in plastic for prototyping and low-volume production, producing parts out of metal using similar technology has recently led to the creation of some of the most exciting 3D-printed parts in memory. Read More
In the ever accelerating social media feedback loops of the modern Internet age, ‘don’t feed the trolls’ is a phrase that appears to have fallen out of fashion, favor and collective memory. Read More
In a massive shake up just ahead of Monday’s convention in Philadelphia, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced today that she will be stepping down from her role as the head of the Democratic National Committee after the end of the event. The move comes as calls for her to resign have increased in the wake of a massive release of DNC staff member emails by Wikileaks.… Read More
Robin Smith is the co-founder CEO of ORIG3N, a regenerative medical company that has crowdsourced blood samples to create the world’s biggest and most diverse bio-repository. According to Smith, regenerative medicine is the next big thing in medical science — so disruptive, in fact, that he says it’s akin to the Internet in 1993. No wonder, then, that ORIG3N has already… Read More
Democratic governments are slow-moving creatures — as they should be. Social stability generally requires that change be evolutionary, not revolutionary, lest the changes imposed set off turmoil that could cause much more harm than the hoped-for good. While that principle works fine for most aspects of society, it’s woefully inadequate when it comes to implementing technology for… Read More
According to reports that are starting to trickle in, Yahoo’s board has accepted the terms of the Verizon offer we reported last week. The core assets of the company that started life in Jerry Yang and David Filo’s 1994 Stanford dorm room as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and at one point was one of the highest valued properties on… Read More
Computers are complicated, and one thing drivers don’t need in cars is complication. The safe operation of big, heavy, motor-powered vehicles that can travel as high speed relies heavily on an attentive driver paying attention to the control systems they use to make the car go, as well as to the world around them. Computers, whatever other advantages they have, require attention and… Read More
