It’s been a long time coming, but Fujifilm’s finally ready to offer up the sequel to its Instax Share Smartphone Printer SP-1. Two-and-a-half years after debuting the peripheral at CES, the company returns this week with the fittingly named Instax Share SP-2, which promises some key improvements over its warmly received predecessor. Read More
A former senior chief in the U.K.’s Met Police and now a Lib Dem peer in the House of Lords has warned about major risks to the privacy of web users’ personal data from a provision in the Investigatory Powers bill that would require ISPs to retain information on the websites and services accessed by their users for a full 12 months… Read More
On the heels of Amazon’s entry into the learning materials market, Google this morning also unveiled a series of product announcements aimed at expanding use of Google products and technologies in the classroom setting. At the ISTE conference today, the company introduced a number of new tools for educators, ranging from a research project that helps teaches kids to code called… Read More
Online clothes shopping can be a gamble – you never really know if items will fit until you try them on. Meanwhile, shopping at local retailers can be time-consuming. A startup called Boon + Gable aims to solve both those problems with a service that offers a personal stylist who comes to your home with a curated selection of clothes for you to try, then buy on the spot if you like them. Read More
Approximately 550 million people use Facebook Events each month, with 60 percent of connections to events happening serendipitously in the News Feed. But Facebook is giving hardcore extroverts seeking more parties a new Featured Events list full of hand-picked gatherings. Starting today, iOS users in 10 U.S. cities will see the option for Featured Events in a carousel atop their list of… Read More
Hi, I’m Lucia, and I’m the the newest TechCrunch summer writing intern.
I’m going to write from Chicago – please notice the standard Windy City hairstyle in the above pic – where I’m also a graduate student of Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Read More
It’s been over a year and a half since Microsoft first announced the open source .NET Core project, which aims to bring the core parts of Microsoft’s .NET framework (and its cousin, the web-focused ASP.NET Core) to Linux, OS X and other operating systems that the company didn’t previously support. As Microsoft announced today, .NET Core and ASP.NET Core have now hit 1.0.… Read More
Services like YouTube Gaming and Twitch are great for watching videos and live streams from your favorite gamers, but a new app called Leet, launching now, has a slightly different take. Instead of focusing on live-streamed gameplay and real-time chat, Leet lets gamers share short highlights from their favorite console or PC games to its online community and the social web. Others can then… Read More
Austin, U.S.-based AllClear ID, a provider of identity theft repair and credit monitoring services, has quietly acquired Norway’s Encap Security. The Oslo-based company offers device-based multi-factor authentication and e-signature solutions, predominantly to the financial services industry. Read More
A food delivery startup called Farm Hill is expanding its business from the suburbs of Silicon Valley to San Francisco this week, bucking the trend of so many “on-demand” businesses that focus on dense, urban markets first. Interestingly, Farm Hill benefitted from the demise of one of its city-focused peers in the industry, Spoonrocket. Farm Hill has taken over leases and… Read More
HP is working hard to make a strong Chromebook case for consumers looking for a secondary – or even tertiary – laptop, featuring some upgraded specs at rock bottom prices. Following on the heels of the Chromebook 13 announced back in April, the company’s just revealed the Chromebook 11 G5, a new Chrome OS notebook with some noteworthy features, including, most compelling, a… Read More
Google today announced Project Bloks, a new open hardware platform that allows developers, designers and educators to build physical programming experiences that can help kids (5+) learn to code. While Google worked together with design firm IDEO to build a reference kit, the idea here is to provide a platform that others can use to build their own devices. Google’s team provides the… Read More
The tech hype-cycle works something like this: Some driver triggers a flurry of investments in a particular “theme,” which in turn feeds news flow, panel discussions at conferences and a procession of expert “talking heads.” This febrile atmosphere all too often results in companies that are more noise than substance and an increasingly congested marketplace, which makes… Read More
If you’ve ever gnawed your way through a plastic bottle to get out the last delicious drops of soap you’ll be pleased to learn that researchers at The Ohio State University have created a type of plastic containing small structures that “cradle the droplets of soap aloft above tiny air pockets.” In other words, the soap never touches the bottle so it never sticks.… Read More
People seem to like editing photos through social media, which comes as no surprise with today’s announcement from Twitter: stickers. Made to be plastered over your new photos, Twitter is making sure that emojis, props, accessories, and anything else of the sort is available to add to that penchant of decorating images you post online.
Twitter’s new stickers are also connected… Read More
Two-time entrepreneur Jason Lemkin just closed a debut venture fund with $70 million called SaaStr Fund. It’s an impressive feat and the latest in a string of interesting opportunities that Lemkin has created for himself since selling his most recent company, EchoSign, to Adobe four years ago.
It started with blogging. Lemkin also began actively answering questions about SaaS… Read More
Bee Partners in San Francisco has raised a $30 million fund, its second, to lead investments in very early stage startups based in the U.S. Founded in 2009, the firm is best-known as the first investor in TubeMogul, now a publicly traded adtech company. Bee was also an early backer of the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, drone tech startup Skycatch, the second-hand fashion marketplace Tradesy… Read More
Back in March, we reported how Amazon was poised to up its stakes in the educational publishing market with the launch of a free platform called Inspire for teachers and others to post and share education resources online. Today, the company has confirmed it is doing just that. It has announced Amazon Inspire, an online education resources (OER) platform for teachers to source free… Read More
“We went through 45 mechanical iterations of Cozmo,” explains Boris Sofman. “This was a huge, hugely complex problem of mechanical engineering, industrial design and character design. The goal to make a character that had the size, shape and capabilities, form factor and practicality of a character that wanted to do all that we could do.”
The result is surprisingly small. Read More
