Android Pay launched in Canada on Wednesday, with support for a number of major banks at launch, and additional banks to be added soon. The Android Pay debut in Canada was teased at Google’s I/O developer conference keynote earlier this month, and reported as imminent last week by MobileSyrup. The launch today includes support for Visa and MasterCard credit, as well as Interac debit… Read More
Nickelodeon’s Noggin is today taking a step to differentiate Noggin from being just another “Netflix for kids” type of subscription video service. Alongside its existing lineup of TV shows and sing-alongs, Nick is introducing a series of what it calls “play along” videos. These new videos, which are also curriculum-based, are designed to be interactive in… Read More
Google today said that its machine learning models can now detect spam and phishing messages with 99.9 percent accuracy. While this still means that one out of a thousand messages gets through, the company argues that this is a pretty good number. Read More
Sling TV, the Dish-owned streaming service for cord cutters, wouldn’t win any awards for its app’s design, which at best is merely functional and at worst, downright confusing. The company, however, has been trying to improve the experience over the years to make its features easier to access and today, it’s continuing those efforts with a somewhat interesting choice:… Read More
If you’re about to replace your roof, Tesla has you covered, but roofs have a long life span, and besides, not all of us have the luxury/misery of having a roof to replace in the first place. Most of us have walls with glass in them, however, and that’s the window of opportunity SolarGaps is reaching for, with a Kickstarter campaign for its solar panel window blinds. Read More
This is the best way to get up to speed on everything going on in tech. Kleiner Perkins venture partner Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is essentially the state of the union for the technology industry. The widely anticipated slide deck compiles the most informative research on what’s getting funded, how Internet adoption is progressing, which interfaces are resonating,… Read More
Google is updating its Compute Engine cloud computing service today with a number of new features that are especially interesting to users who need high-performance processors and/or access to a lot of memory. Read More
Pokémon GO-maker Niantic says it has driven 500 million visitors to sponsored locations like McDonald’s Japan where gamers can score a special virtual good. But it never said how much those sponsors paid per visitor delivered by the game. Read More
Microsoft today announced the launch of Draft, a new open-source tool that helps developers streamline the processes of developing container-based applications that are meant to run on Kubernetes clusters. Read More
CoreOS is hosting its user conference in San Francisco today. Unsurprisingly, the company had a few announcements to make at the event. Most of these centered around its Tectonic platform for managing Kubernetes-based container infrastructures. For the most part, these updates are pretty straightforward. Tectonic now uses the latest version of Kubernetes, for example (1.6.4), which the… Read More
You probably still get plenty of snail mail at your home — wedding invitations, bills, ads for new credit cards. But despite all the efforts to kill that snail mail and get it sent directly to an inbox, there really doesn’t yet seem to be a replacement to that experience of getting home and stepping over those letters from businesses. That’s a business Lob wants to lock up. Read More
Oculus is still trying to show people what virtual reality is like when they aren’t the ones wearing the headsets. In March, the company introduced Facebook live-streaming to the platform, and today, the company is making it even easier for you to locally share your experiences inside the Gear VR with those around you thanks to added support for Google Chromecast. To get to streaming,… Read More
Concord wants to be your all-in-one solution for everything related to contracts. The startup just raised a $3.7 million Series A round from Alven Capital, with existing investors Streamlined Ventures, Bruno Deschamps and Thibault Poutrel also participating. Many departments rely on contracts to work with clients, suppliers, legal partners and more. But it’s still a tedious process as… Read More
Surprisingly, Amazon Alexa doesn’t have a good way to search for Alexa skills by voice. You can’t say that you want to play word games, need a skill to check airport security wait times, or feel like meditating. Alexa doesn’t know what to tell you. Amazon released its own “Skill Finder” skill last year, but it’s a bare-bones experience that can only read off… Read More
Searching for art and artists on Google has just been improved. Today, Google announced it’s integrating the work done by the Google Arts & Culture team into its Google search results and Maps, allowing web users to better experience the art they seek. This includes, in some cases, being able to view high-resolution imagery of the artwork in question, see it hanging on the wall in… Read More
Robot arms have come a long way since the 1960’s when George C. Devol and Joseph Engelberger created the earliest industrial models. Those had two-finger grippers that, in retrospect, look fit to pluck a rubber ducky out of a bin in a carnival game, but nothing too sophisticated. By now, robots in factories and warehouses can adjust their grip like human hands, or use suction and… Read More
Nuvyyo, the makers of the Tablo DVR for cord cutters who want to record free, over-the-air TV programming from their digital antennas, is today launching their next-generation device, the Tablo DUAL. As you might guess by the name, the new DVR supports two tuners, so you can record from two TV channels at the same time. The new hardware is also housed in a 20 percent smaller form factor than… Read More
Yogome, a Mexican edtech startup that makes kids games for the iPad, has raised $6.6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Spanish VC Seaya Ventures, with participation from Variv Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. The company had previously raised $3.2 million in seed funding and is also backed by 500 Startups. Read More
Move over duckface. Shove off rainbow spew. There’s a new selfie game in town and it wants to turn your 2D visage into uncannily accurate 3D — then splice that axiomatic piece of you into animated cartoon suits that rock out, strut their disco stuff, skateboard, look coy, relaxed or laugh manically. Read More
