Instagram has tweaked a couple of its direct messaging features to make them a bit more flexible and interactive. You can now automatically capture and remix photos sent to you in replies back to friends, and allow photo and video replays to be replayed more than once. The remix feature lets you capture the original photo message and incorporate it into your reply, complete with the option… Read More
Wow, this is a bad one. On Macs running the latest version of High Sierra (10.13.1 (17B48)), it appears that anyone can log in just by putting “root” in the user name field in a certain place. This is a huge, huge problem. Apple will fix it probably within hours, but holy moly. Do not leave your Mac unattended until this is resolved. Read More
Not content to just revive The X-Files on television, Fox is also bringing the franchise to phones and tablets.
The new title from FoxNext Games and Creative Mobile Games is planned for release early next year, after the TV show returns for its eleventh (!) season. According to Variety, the story will take place in 2010 — long after the original series, but before the events of last… Read More
The Donald can’t seem to keep his hands off the phone while in the White House, but the same rules may not apply to his staff in the near future. The White House is mulling a personal cell phone ban for employees and possibly visitors, citing cybersecurity concerns. Read More
Roughly two years after emerging on the scene as a new Bay Area accelerator, NFX Guild, an outfit run by several seasoned founders, has raised $150 million for a full-fledged venture fund. It’s quite a ways from the $10 million that NFX used to get started, but as is often the case with these things, the firm’s ambitions have grown with time. Read More
InstaCarro, a Brazilian-based marketplace for buying and selling used cars, has raised a whopping $22 million in its first institutional round of venture financing. One of the largest early-stage investments for a Brazilian startup, the new financing will be used for product development and international expansion. Read More
Apparently, Google made good on its promise to fix its awful hamburger emoji, in the wake of an online debacle last month. In case you missed it, when a tweet about the problem with the emoji went viral – the cheese in Google’s burger emoji is under the bun! The horror! – Google CEO Sundar Pichai replied he would “drop everything” to address this issue. According… Read More
The last time U2 offered up an album exclusive, things didn’t go great. Apple reportedly paid $100 million for exclusive rights to Songs of Innocence, the Irish arena rock band’s first record in half a decade — and irritated countless iTunes users in the process by forcing it onto their iPhones and iPads. Probably no surprise, then, that the two seem to have parted ways.… Read More
Apple hasn’t shared any exact number, but Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang calculated that Apple may have sold as many as 6 million iPhone X units this weekend alone, StreetInsider reported. With such a big number, it’s hard to grasp Apple’s success with the iPhone X. Last quarter, Apple sold 39.3 million iPhones when you combine all iPhone models. In other words,… Read More
Amazon says it will allow Alexa skill developers to alert customers using notifications starting today, and soon, it will allow them to recognize users’ individual voices as part of their skill-building process. These changes, along with other developer enhancements, are being announced this morning at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, where the company delved into the… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division is launching a number of new programs for its partner ecosystem today. These include a new networking competency program for companies that focus on advanced networking features, as well as the new AWS Machine Learning Partner Solutions program that highlights partners that have demonstrated expertise in (can you guess it?) running machine… Read More
A UK parliamentary committee that’s investing fake news has been told by Facebook and Twitter they will provide information relating to Russian interference during the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum vote in the coming weeks. Read More
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer announced today it’s expanding to the U.S, with approval to operate in 41 states starting today. This includes regulatory approval in New York via the state’s Department of Financial Services’ “BitLicense”, which only five other cryptocurrency companies currently have. For comparison, Coinbase has approval to operate in… Read More
Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion-user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast,” a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More
Just a few weeks after the major launch of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft is already looking toward what’s next as the company tests features that could fundamentally shape how you use web browsers. Today, Microsoft announced a new feature tentatively called “Sets,” a fairly significant retooling of how web browsers and apps operate philosophically in Windows 10. Read More
Apple is expanding its social media outreach. The company has just launched a new YouTube channel to teach people how to use their Apple devices, like the iPhone and iPad, via video tutorials. The first set of videos focus on common and fairly simple tasks, like taking screenshots, adding attachments to email, deleting photos, changing the wallpaper and more. The videos are short, with most… Read More
Instacart has inked a deal with Albertsons to offer same-day delivery from the grocery store chain.
The deal will include 1,800 of Albertsons stores across the country by mid-2018, helping Instacart deliver on its promise to be available in 80 percent of markets across the U.S. by the end of 2018.
This isn’t Albertsons first foray into the tech space. Earlier this year, the company… Read More
A new partnership between autonomous driving startup Optimus Ride and release estate developer LStar Ventures will see self-driving vehicle access offered up to residents of a new urban development near Boston called Union Point, via a revenue generating last mile commuter and local destination autonomous travel service. The partnership will see the Union Point neighborhood, which occupies… Read More
While Photoshop users have gotten pretty damn good at masking humans and other subjects over the years, it still remains one of the most tedious tasks in the app. But the days of Magic Wand masking will soon be over.
Adobe today teased an upcoming feature that uses AI to identify and automatically mask subjects in the image. The feature is called Select Subject and it uses Adobe’s AI… Read More
On the heels of news that Amazon may have accounted for half of Black Friday online sales, the retailer today announced that the Black Friday holiday shopping weekend – which it defines as Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – was its best-ever, in terms of Amazon devices sold. The company historically doesn’t release hard numbers related to its device sales. Instead, it… Read More
