YouTube is showing off a brand new file format for creators who want to check out VR but are intimidated by taking the full plunge with all the crazy hardware and production issues. It’s called VR180, and it’s half of a spherical video. It’s a simple evolution, but it makes some notable compromises that give traditional and VR viewers some new gains. Read More
After three days of connectivity issues that prevented some Skype users from being able to log in, make calls or send and receive messages, the company says it has now fully resolved the problem. What it isn’t saying — at least not yet — is what exactly happened. Read More
African startups can now score capital commitments real time―so long as they convince a venture capitalist to give it to them in front of a live audience. That’s the format for Face The Gorillas, a Rwandan IT pitch series that runs several times a year on local TV, YouTube, and at select events. The competition was originally conceived in 2013 by Yariv Cohen and wife Angela… Read More
ABBYY has been being doing optical character recognition software since forever, but it’s now brought its software to mobile. If you want to capture text and make it actionable (click on links or ping out to map directions) this is an extremely useful app. Its new ABBYYs TextGrabber 6.0 for iOS has just gone live on the Apple App store and it has real-time recognition capabilities and… Read More
Tesla might be a music service operator soon, in addition to a maker of electric cars and solar energy products. That’s according to a new report from Recode, which says that Tesla has been talking to music labels to make this happen.
The planned offering could start with a free, Pandora-like streaming radio option, which theoretically would be tied to Tesla vehicle ownership, one imagines. Read More
Facebook’s Oculus is returning to San Jose on October 11-12 this year to share some news about the future of VR at the company’s Oculus Connect 4 developers conference. Facebook has slowly been bringing the Oculus name and leadership under its own core brand. With the amount of VR news popping up at F8, some wondered whether Oculus Connect’s days were numbered. Apparently not. Read More
Blockchain (the company) just raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Lakestar. Blockchain has been working on the most popular bitcoin wallet in the world. You can open a wallet on the company’s website or through its mobile apps. GV, Nokota Management, Digital Currency Group and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mosaic Venture Partners, Prudence Holdings,… Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt has always been a fruitful meeting ground for founders and investors, and every year TechCrunch makes it easier for the right folks to connect. A year ago we launched our CrunchMatch program and this year it helped facilitate 450 curated meetings in May at Disrupt NY. And then there’s ‘featured pavilions’ in Startup Alley, where selected startups in the… Read More
Researchers at the University of Calgary have released the latest version of their “Wearable Microsystem for Minimally Invasive, Pseudo-Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring,” a watch-like wearable that “bites” you every few hours to draw blood and test your glucose levels. The system uses a shape memory alloy actuator which contracts when heated and then snaps back into… Read More
There’s a petition circulating among Uber employees asking the board of directors to let Travis Kalanick return to the company, Recode reports. The email going around talks about how Kalanick is “critical” to the company’s future success. It ultimately asks employees to show their support for Kalanick and push for him to get reinstated in an operational role. Read More
Iliad’s cloud hosting division Scaleway has been betting on ARM chipsets for years because they believe the future of hosting is going to be based on ARM’s processor architecture. The company just launched more powerful ARMv8 options and added more cores to its cheapest options. Read More
More women are having kids in their 30s than in their 20s. However, those closer to 40 than 30 face higher risks than their younger counterparts. Add to that 1 in every 8 couples in the U.S. have some type of fertility issue. More couples are looking at IVF and other fertility treatments. But those treatments can be costly. A new Bay Area startup, Future Family, hopes to change that. Read More
Most job interviews for developers are somewhat predictable in that they will likely involve some kind of coding — generally on a whiteboard. That’s not really how developers normally work. Because they are so different from most developers’ real-world experience, even the best coders need to practice for these “exams.” CodeFights wants to help developers practice… Read More
Facebook sees Groups as the core of its push to “build community,” as Mark Zuckerberg detailed in his 6,000-word humanitarian manifesto. So today at its Communities Summit in Chicago, where it assembled 300 admins of top Groups, Facebook is making good on Zuckerberg’s promise to give admins more tools to manage their flocks. Read More
Distracted driving has become a national safety crisis because of the rise of smartphones. With the release of iOS 11’s latest beta on Wednesday, testers can now get their hands on one of the new mobile operating system’s most important — if not most glamorous — new features: a long-needed “Do Not Disturb While Driving” mode. Read More
DeepMind Health, the division of the Google-owned AI company that’s applying machine learning to medical data in the hopes of profiting from diagnostic gain, has inked another services agreement with the U.K.’s National Health Service — expanding the deployment of its alerts, messaging and task management app, Streams. Read More
Sneaker resale marketplace GOAT has been on a bit of a tear since I covered them nearly two years ago. The streamlined app and the incredibly buzzy sneakerhead market have combined for some pretty impressive growth and stickyness. Now GOAT’s Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano have recruited former Twitter COO Adam Bain, who was a natural fit because he was a user before they ever met. Read More
“Making the world more open and connected” had one fundamental flaw: it didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection. Technically, it could encompass digital voyeurism via the News Feed, trading in-person friendship for online acquaintanceship or the filter bubbles and echospheres that have further polarized the United States. Read More
Today in odd apps I present Smell PGH, an app that lets you report weird smells in Pittsburgh. Why would you do this, you ask? Well hold on. “If you smell something bad in the air, chances are that air isn’t good to breathe,” said Beatrice Dias, project director for the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab. “Smell PGH provides a way for citizens to… Read More
Netflix is bringing back Wet Hot American Summer with the sequel mini-series Ten Years Later, all episodes of which are streaming on August 4. We knew this follow-up to the prequel series and original movie was coming, we just didn’t know exactly when. Luckily, it’s coming in time for there to actually still be some summer to burn. The series looks like it’ll feature all the… Read More
