Leela Kids is a very straightforward app that nonetheless might prevent some parents from going insane. It curates podcasts by subject matter for age ranges from three to 15 years old and packages them in a kid-friendly interface. Leela Kids gives caretakers peace of mind that whatever their charges are listening to is age-appropriate and reasonably edifying. In fact, it recently hit the top… Read More
One thing can certainly be said for Amazon: the company moves fast. The retail giant’s $13.7 billion Whole Foods acquisition only officially went through today, and it’s already moved in to mark its territory. Amazon Echo displays have begun popping up in strategic locations in Whole Foods across the country, sporting tongue in cheek signs that market the ‘farm… Read More
DJI wants security researchers to turn their attention to its software and drones and will pay for discovered bugs or exploits. Called The DJI Threat Identification Reward Program, the program aims to create a formal line of communication between researchers and hackers to the drone maker. The company will pay between $100 and $30,000 for qualifying bugs, “depending on the potential… Read More
Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban has been advising chat app Dust for the past few years. And now, Radical App, the group that oversees Dust, is adding two more properties. The team will be releasing its Mercury Protocol blockchain messaging technology by the end of next month, and will be introducing Broadcast, a social media platform that targets online harassment. Read More
Skidos, an edtech startup based in Copenhagen after relocating its HQ from New Delhi, offers an SDK to help games developers turn casual games into “learning apps”. Read More
Facebook says it’s taking another step against Pages that share fabricated news stories. The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren’t supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked… Read More
In this episode, eBay’s VP of design, Dave Lippman, shares his experience designing at Apple and eBay, the differences in their approaches to data and intuition and how he’s learned to dance between the two. In design, there’s a tension between the aspects of creativity, craft and strategy. Lippman shares the importance of finding balance between all three and figuring out… Read More
Today at The Kafka Summit in San Francisco, LinkedIn announced a new load balancing tool called Cruise Control, which has been developed to help keep Kafka clusters up and running. The company developed Kafka, an open source message streaming tool to help make it easier to move massive amounts of data around a network from application to application. It has become so essential today that… Read More
It’s a constant refrain. Today’s email is a tragedy and a travesty. There’s no way to sort information in personally relevant ways, few tools that can organize the mass of messages rolling in through an increasingly ubiquitous scroll of information in a vertical list format. Erik Lukas, the founder of Jumpin Labs, has a different vision for what email should look like. Instead… Read More
When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination — and VMware made the whole shebang official today at VMworld when it announced that VMware Cloud was live… Read More
Hulu today announced a new agreement with The CW Network, a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros., which will allow Hulu to offer the network to subscribers of its newer Live TV service. The deal is notable because the addition means Hulu now has in place agreements with all five of the major U.S. broadcasters, having previously made deals with NBC, FOX, ABC, and CBS itself. Hulu… Read More
The Insta360 brand has quickly become known for consumer 360 photography products, and the new Insta360 One is its latest device designed for mobile immersive imaging. The new Insta360 One offers 4K video resolution, and 24 MP stills, as well as the ability to work in a completely standalone mode, remotely with your phone as a Bluetooth controller, and plugged in directly to your iPhone using… Read More
Athelas is launching a low-cost, blood diagnostics device today made for testing certain diseases like the flu, bacterial infections and cancer in the comfort of your home.
Tanay Tandon founded the startup in 2014 at the tender age of 17 to develop a smartphone device that could detect malaria through blood samples. That idea proved difficult but the idea of ease and mobility stuck with… Read More
But while some close competition like Jawbone have gone the way of the dodo, Fitbit is still kicking — and is indeed still synonymous with the wearable category for many consumers.The company has worked hard to diversify its product offerings and has begun to make a more aggressive push into the healthcare market. But for the past several months, one way forward has loomed larger than… Read More
The Ionic is a bit of a Hail Mary pass. The smartwatch represents years of R&D and millions of dollars in acquisitions converging into one product. It’s one the company’s CEO has been talking up months before its official unveiling, pointing to it as a sign that Fitbit has fight left in it, even as the wearable industry continues to contract around it. Read More
Somewhere along the lines, while it was hard at work on the Ionic, it occurred to Fitbit that it really ought to make a pair of Bluetooth headphones, too. After all, ditching the smartphone during a workout is one of the smartwatch’s selling points, thanks to mobile payment and offline caching for music services like Pandora, so wireless earbuds are a bit of a no-brainer. Read More
About ten months ago, Microsoft promised the VR industry a shot in the arm and an update to PC-tethered systems by way of their “mixed reality” platform and OEM partner-crafted headsets which would boast inside-out tracking, lower system spec requirements, 1440p per eye displays and a much lower price point, with headsets starting at just $299. Many of the headsets will be… Read More
The Ionic needs to be a big product for Fitbit. Sure, the company’s CEO assured me that it’s not make or break, but after years of research and development and tens of millions in acquisitions, Fitbit needs a hit. The company’s hedging its bets a bit by bringing on third party launch partners like Starbucks and Pandora for its new app store, and is teaming up one key company… Read More
It looks like Sonos is nearing the release of a speaker that has a built-in voice control assistant. According to an FCC filing found by Dave Zatz, the company is seeking to get approval from the U.S. Government to sell a speaker that sports “integrated voice control functionality with far field microphones” and “multiple voice platforms.” It’s impossible to say… Read More
VMware, the company that gave rise to the virtual machine concept in the enterprise data center, announced a series of products and services today at VMworld in Las Vegas that show a company clearly shifting to managing hybrid environments. The hybrid strategy really began to gain momentum last year when the company forged agreements with the top public cloud vendors including Microsoft,… Read More
