Rumor is that Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform will soon launch its own Kubernetes-based container management service. Those rumors are getting a bit more concrete because AWS today joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of the Kubernetes project, as a top-level Platinum member. Read More
Curbside, a startup powering same-day shopping experiences for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, including CVS, is today announcing a new partnership with Yelp that will allow consumers to shop in Yelp’s app, then pick up their items locally. Read More
Snapchat’s powerful but hidden Story Search feature is finally making itself useful by giving us a behind-the-scenes glimpse inside Apple Park, Apple’s new spaceship-like campus that will open soon.
Typing “Apple Park” into Snapchat’s search bar will show you the Apple Park Story, which is a collection of videos taken on the property. The full Apple Park story… Read More
Netflix is going to be home to the first television show created by the Coen Brothers, the directing duo that’s behind The Big Lebowski, Fargo, True Grit and many more films. The show is called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and is described as a “Western anthology” that will follow six different stories about America’s Wild West. Read More
Even the best shows take time to hit their stride. Who had high hopes after watching the first episode of The Office, a virtual shot for shot remake of its UK counterpart, defanged for American audiences? It seems unfair to judge Carpool Karaoke from a single episode, but there isn’t a whole hell of a lot present to give the viewer hope that the series might someday become more than the… Read More
Last week, Apple accidentally released an early build of the HomePod firmware. Guilherme Rambo has been digging around a library file to spot strings and references that hint at future products and features. In particular, he just noticed that the next iPhone will be able to detect when you’re looking at the screen so that it can silence your notifications. I looked around the… Read More
Meet Teleport: An app that’s using a trained neural network to power a selfie-editing feature that lets you change the color of your hair at the touch of a button. Read More
Intel is moving quickly to ramp its autonomous driving technology efforts now that it has closed its acquisition of Mobileye, the Israeli self-driving sensor and computing company. The plan is to build a fleet of over 100 test vehicles with SAE Level 4 capabilities (fully self-driving) with the first of those hitting roads later this year.
The test fleet is designed to show off Intel and… Read More
“Cloaking” sounds sci-fi, but it’s actually a trick used today by spammers to show content moderators or search engine spiders an innocent-looking version of their site while real visitors just see ads and scams. Read More
Jinn, the U.K.-based same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app that operates quite similarly to Postmates in the U.S., has gone through a turbulent time of late. This saw the company withdraw from all markets outside of London last month, as part of several rounds of mass-layoffs. Operations in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds in the U.K., and Madrid and… Read More
Smartphone company Essential, which is founded by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, has finally made official a $300 million funding round first reported in June. The funding round comes from investors including Tencent, as well as Amazon’s Alexa Fund, among others. Essential also revealed new information about its retail launch, including retail partners Amazon and Best Buy who will be… Read More
If you’re wondering why Marvel movies and Star Wars weren’t mentioned as being among the titles included in Disney’s upcoming streaming service, announced yesterday, that’s because they might be getting their own branded services instead. According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the company is still considering how it wants to bring Marvel and LucasFilm titles to consumers. Read More
PullRequest is a startup with a twist on the on-demand economy. It wants to be your company code checker. It takes care of finding code review experts, who can check for bugs, security issues, coding standards and performance problems. “We offer code review as a service. As developers push code, we have on-demand experts that review it [before it gets published]. This allows them to… Read More
Los Angeles-based Pistol Lake has developed what it thinks could be the next thing in men’s activewear — a line of shirts and other products made with new fabric that could be worn at the gym or out and about. To fund the next evolution of its product expansion, the company has raised $600,000 in new funding. Read More
Given the fact that the Echo Dot runs $50 a piece or three for $130, I suspect price isn’t a major factor hampering Alexa adoption. But leave it to the folks at Anker to undercut the price of Amazon’s cheapest Echo by offering up a $35 smart speaker with Alexa built-in. Essentially, it’s an off-brand Dot with all of your standard Echo/Alexa functionality. The Genie is… Read More
According to new research just published by the data science team at Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, Donald Trump’s efforts to push an America-first philosophy is having a measurable impact on how comfortable tech companies feel in seeking out foreign-born workers. Read More
Red Hat issued its quarterly update to the OpenShift platform today, adding among other things, a Service Catalog that enables IT or third-party vendors to create connections to internal or external services. OpenShift is RedHat’s Platform as a Service, based on Kubernetes, the open source container management platform, which was originally developed by Google. It also supports Docker,… Read More
Every time we do a gift guide here, one editor suggests the same thing: external battery packs. Every time, like clockwork. And it’s true, everyone in your life probably needs one. We all wander through our days tempting fate by porting around gadgets with sub-par battery life. The other big upside of gifting a power bank: they’re generally pretty inexpensive. Though that… Read More
There are a number of ways to find out more about your fertility these days — including from several at-home fertility test startups that have started to pop up in the last few years. Modern Fertility hopes to soon operate in much the same way, but with a more affordable option for testing 10 key hormones affecting women’s fertility. Read More
Here Be Dragons, an immersive production studio focused on virtual reality content, has closed a $10 million Series A round led by Discovery Communications with participation also coming from David Droga and David Jones. The raise sets the virtual reality studio’s valuation at $55 million pre-money. Read More
