WordPress is embracing WebVR as it begins to roll out support for 360-degree videos and photos to its network of sites. In a blog post, the company says its aim is “to make publishing VR content as simple as publishing text or photos to the web.” Currently, the 360-photo feature has been made available to all blog account types while the 360-video uploader is still in beta and… Read More
If there’s one thing I consistently love and can be trusted to both enjoy free or even pay money for, it’s fireplace videos. Sometimes called yule log videos, too, these are those things you see on Netflix, in the Apple TV App Store and on YouTube that just show a fireplace for a long period of time, often looping a clip and sometimes including music or sound effects.… Read More
BlackBerry announced the major global partner in its shift toward a solely software and service company today, and no surprise, it’s TCL. The Chinese hardware maker behind the Alcatel brand has already done a lot of heavy lifting for BlackBerry, as the designer and manufacturer behind the DTEK50 and DTEK60 handsets. Those phones were, in essence, rebadged versions of OEMed devices, with… Read More
What do you buy for someone who has everything? Either a pink fairy armadillo or an Arduino MKRZero. I’d recommend going with the Arduino. The MKRZero is basically a really, really small microcomputer with a number of outputs and headers as well as a battery management system and USB control. It’s great for learning or building 32-bit applications and it’s small enough to… Read More
A new Skype application dubbed “Skype Mingo” has been spotted in the wild, offering Android users the ability to use Skype as the native calling app and contacts manager for their smartphone, while still being able to take advantage of Skype features like chat, file and photo sharing, video calls, and its new bots. The app, still in alpha testing according to Google Play, was… Read More
Social media sites such as Twitter face being regulated in the UK under anti-porn proposals, as part of the government’s Digital Economy bill proposal. Read More
Comcast isn’t a name that gets tossed around much when people talk about connected home automation plays from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google, but all the while the cable giant has been looking toward the space as the next step in its ever-growing offering of home service bundles. It’s a very different play than any of the aforementioned tech giants, of course. For… Read More
PlayStation has a new Bluetooth wireless headset, an over-ear pair of headphones that’s launching January 12 for $159.99. The new cans are called the Platinum Wireless Headset, presumably to indicate how much more premium they are than what came before, which was only Gold. What more does Platinum do for you, the gamer? Well it offers virtual 7.1 surround sound, but that was also a… Read More
After years of speculation, it appears that Twitter did actually develop a messaging app of its own. But, two caveats, it was intended for emerging markets and it was killed off before ever being released to the masses. Read More
What’s better than a few geofilters? A billion algorithmically generated filters. That’s Facebook Messenger’s strategy to steal the visual communication crown from Snapchat, thanks to its new camera feature that rolls out today. Well, actually, “a billion” is selling it short. Read More
It might seem a little weird to think about seeing ads on, say, your smart refrigerator — but according to a new study, Americans are actually pretty open to the idea of advertising on “Internet of Things” devices. The study was released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (a trade group for online publishers and advertisers) and conducted by MARU/VCR&C, which says… Read More
The Flo app — the period calculator for women that tracks and predicts menstrual cycles, ovulation, and fertile days — has raised $1 million in seed round funding led by Flint Capital along with the Haxus Venture Fund co-founded by Yuri Gurski (who invested in MSQRD that was sold to Facebook in 2016). The Flo app is developed by OWHealth, a US-based startup. Like MSQRD, Flo was… Read More
Should you be interested in the lifecycle of the bee or the magic of clip art and equations then ExplainEverything would like a world. This Wroclaw, Poland-based company offers a sort of iPad-powered whiteboard that lets you collaboratively display drawings and text, equations, and even stamp out fun (and educational) clip art presentations. The company recently raised $3.7 million from Credo,… Read More
Airfare prediction app Hopper has grown from 1 million downloads to over 10 million in the course of a year – a trajectory that’s allowed it to pull in $82 million CAD (~$61.2 million US) in additional funding to continue to grow its business. The Series C round was led by North American pension fund manager, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and includes participation… Read More
You can’t swing a bag of cats these days without hitting a company that’s working on AI. The latest, HyperScience, is today coming out of stealth for the first time. Based in New York city, HyperScience is bringing relatively general-purpose AI to market to solve the problem of data processing for its clients. Sometimes, problems aren’t actually too complex to solve, but… Read More
Carmakers are building alternative models to vehicle ownership like it’s going out of style (it probably is). Two of those side bets on collaborative transportation might be coming together, according to a new report that says Daimler and BMW are considering merging their car-sharing services Car2Go and DriveNow. The combo is designed as a way to better compete with rivals from outside… Read More
While GumGum is best-known as an in-image advertising company, CEO Ophir Tanz told me, “Advertising, in my mind, was just one aspect of what we did.” In other words, he sees plenty of other applications for GumGum’s computer vision technology, which is why the company released a social media product earlier this year, and why it’s now launching GumGum Sports. The aim… Read More
Simple Habit, the Netflix for meditation and mindfulness, is today launching publicly out of Y Combinator. The company has been around since June of this year, and has since launched an Android app and a web app. Simple Habit focuses on making mindfulness as accessible as possible so that it will eventually turn into a habit. The company does this by acquiring experts in the field of… Read More
It was only announced in September, but for Nintendo fans, it amounts to years of waiting, as Nintendo dragged its heels and refused to give in to the seeming inevitability of Mario’s smartphone debut. The intent behind the gaming giant’s steadfast insistence was understandable, if, perhaps, ill advised. Nintendo is both hyper-protective of its intellectual property and accustom… Read More
Some changes are underway at WeTransfer, the European startup that competes against the likes of Dropbox and Box by providing a cloud-based platform to share and swap files with others. The company has announced that effective January, its co-founder Bas Beerens is stepping down as CEO, with a new CEO, Gordon Willoughby, coming in. Beerens will move to a role as executive chairman from… Read More
