You can’t alter copyright materials, then stream those altered copies via the web to paying customers, while still claiming you’re within your legal rights. At least that’s what VidAngel has just been told. Warner Bros., Disney and Fox have won a preliminary injunction against VidAngel, a Utah-based company offering a family-friendly streaming service that filters out… Read More
Say you’re just a small town girl living in a lonely world and you took the midnight train going anywhere. How would you reconnect to your Raspberry Pi while on the road? You would go into a smoky room, fire up your laptop, and try Dataplicity. Dataplicity is essentially a a VPN for your RaspPi. It not only lets you connect to your Pi remotely but you can also “wormhole” a… Read More
A few months ago I decided I wanted to start an email newsletter where I’d share links to everything I’ve written each week, reports from events I’d attended or had spoken at, and other commentary and thoughts. However, when I researched the current state of email newsletter tools I found that most were expensive, heavily focussed on marketing, or just feature-poor. Instead,… Read More
Just last week, HMD was priming the press for the return of Nokia branded handsets, slated to arrive at some point in the first half of next year. The young Finnish company, founded by a number of Nokia expats, seasoned the pre-announcement announcement with all sorts of superlatives, with the CEO tossing out words like “brilliant,” “passionate,”… Read More
Next Dynamics couldn’t find a print head to their liking, so they went ahead and built A new one, a fairly bold move in an industry where even some of the biggest names outsource that technology to companies like Xerox and Ricoh.
The result is lower costs (print heads comprise a disproportionate amount of a printer’s final price) and far more versatile machine. According to the… Read More
Snapchat has added some new features, including Groups, a new group chat that lets up to 16 friends share conversation and media. Group chats self-delete after 24 hours by default, and Snaps sent within a group can be opened only once, and replayed only once, by each member of the group, just like a regular Snap. The new Group feature also includes an easy way to pop out to individual chat… Read More
Apple knew it was going to taking something big to help cushion the blow of its decision to drop the headphone jack from the new iPhone. For the company, the answer arrived in the form of Airpods, wireless Bluetooth versions of its EarPods built around the new W1 chip. At the time, the headphones were slated to arrive the following month, but, well, the company clearly still had a lot of… Read More
Improbable, the London startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that has been developing a platform for third parties to build virtual and simulated worlds, is today launching the alpha of its first product, SpatialOS. And with it, Improbable is also announcing a strategic partnership with Google, the first part of which will see Google providing its Google Cloud Platform as the backend… Read More
If you’re a sports fan you probably remember attending a game where you spent a fortune on tickets – and it was totally worth it. Your team won in overtime, there was a half-court buzzer beater, etc. The kind of games that memories are made of. But you also probably remember the opposite. Like spending $500 on Sunday Night Football tickets to watch your team lose to the Cardinals… Read More
A couple of weeks ago, we saw an Indiegogo campaign launch from Insta360 for an Android-only 360 camera accessory that attached to the headphone jack of the phone. As with most VR-related (and headphone jack-related) things, iPhone users were left in the cold. Today, Giroptic is introducing a camera that brings 360 photo and video capture to the iPhone along with instant stitching that… Read More
A bit of a mutual admiration society has developed between the two finalists in Qualcomm’s $10 million Tricorder XPRIZE competition. Whatever animus might have developed in the nearly half-decade since the contest was announced at CES 2012 has seemingly taken a back seat to an appreciation for what the other team has accomplished. In fact, at one point during our meeting ahead of… Read More
Cloudflare announced today that it has acquired Eager, a tool for easily integrating apps into any website. The company did not disclose the purchase price, but Eager’s four employees will be joining Cloudflare, and continuing to work out of their Cambridge, MA office, at least for the time being. Eager was founded in 2014 by two former Hubspot employees, Zack Bloom and Adam Schwartz.… Read More
Tinder’s latest app is actually designed for collaborative consumption. The practice of Tindering for friends is hardly a secret, but now the dating app-maker is acknowledging that impulse and making it easier to group swipe with a new Apple TV app (built into the existing iOS one) that puts potential matches on the big screen, and lets you swipe either left or right using the Apple… Read More
Microsoft’s virtual assistant might soon appear in a whole lot more places – wherever there’s a screen and the ability to run Windows 10 IoT Core, the lightweight version of Windows 10 that’s designed for things like refrigerators and connected thermostats. At a recent event as detailed by MSPoweruser, Microsoft revealed that Cortana will be available to any device… Read More
As more and more people use SMS and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to interact with friends, it’s only logical that they want to interact with business that way too — and today Salesforce launched LiveMessage, a tool that helps customer service reps manage messaging traffic just like any customer interactions in Service Cloud. For starters, it supports SMS/MMS and… Read More
Lygos uses microbugs to convert low-cost sugar into specialty chemicals used in manufacturing and is now releasing a technique to make malic acid, an ingredient needed in the mass production of electronics.
To do so, the company announced today it has raised $13 million in Series A funding lead by OS Fund and IA Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator’s… Read More
Clear Labs, a genomic data platform hoping to stop E-coli outbreaks in your favorite burrito chain before they start, has pulled in $13 million in Series B funding to build a next generation sequencing-based (NGS) microbiome test and grow the business. It’s often hard for food manufacturers to know the origins of an infected batch before it goes out to the public. However, Clear Labs… Read More
Opera’s latest trick for its desktop browser is built-in currency conversion. The company added a VPN and an ad blocker in two major releases this year, and now it is simplifying things for the growing numbers of people who make online purchases from overseas. Read More
There are a plethora of companies in the ‘media monitoring’ space, such as Cision, Factiva and Meltwater, but London-based Signal Media reckons that it can give them all a run for their money.
By employing AI, the company claims to be able to offer more certainty that a news source can be trusted and that a story is relevant, thus helping to reduce the impact of rumour and false… Read More
Android Pay continues its international rollout with a launch in Japan today, some six weeks after Apple’s own mobile payment service reached Japanese shores. Read More
