If you were to write a history of Silicon Valley, you could do it by looking at a series of major diaspora. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Oracle and PayPal attract top talent for years; when they reach maturity or a major liquidity event, their talent disperses and germinates into the next generation of companies. It’s quite possible that Snapchat could do the same for L.A. Read More
This week, AT&T unveiled its new TV streaming service for cord cutters, who aren’t ready to subsist entirely on Netflix, YouTube and whatever else they can watch for free around the web. Launched on Tuesday, DirecTV Now offers access to over 120 live TV channels, in addition to on-demand programming, and the option to add on premium networks like HBO and Cinemax for just $5 more… Read More
Lost and stolen iOS devices could be at risk if ne’er-do-wells learn of this blunt-force method of getting past Activation Lock. No special equipment or technical know-how is required, which means any geek off the streets can do it. Fortunately, it’s easily fixed — but until that happens, you might want to be a little extra careful about leaving your phone unattended. Read More
Across the Bay Area, affordable housing remains hard to come by. In a climate where many displaced residents point their blame at the techies, Facebook has decided to invest $20 million in what it calls “A partnership to strengthen our local community.” In just the last six years, San Mateo County has added 54,000 new jobs while only building 2,148 new housing units to support… Read More
Jolted into existence with a $500,000 Indiegogo campaign back in 2013, followed by a version 2 that was sold in Apple Stores all over the world, Beddit is back with a third generation of its popular addition to the Quantified Self movement: sleep tracking. The product went on sale in September and immediately sold out, and the company is still selling Beddit 3 faster than it can make them. Read More
Africa’s two leading e-commerce startups, Jumia and Konga, topped their 2015 Black Friday merchandise sales in Nigeria—even as the country weathers currency volatility and recession. The shopping spree of the continent’s most populous nation has become a de facto test event for each venture’s business model. Collectively backed by over $400 million in VC funding, both… Read More
Internet radio pioneer Pandora, saw its shares jump over 11% on Friday to $12.77, amid renewed acquisition speculation. A report from CNBC indicated that Pandora and SiriusXM are expected to discuss a possible purchase. The story cautions that there is “no assurance” that Pandora will reach a deal with SiriusXM or any other prospective buyers. This isn’t the first time… Read More
Not only is Facebook not providing little red warnings along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the plugin that did.
Over the past week, some Facebook users reported seeing content warnings next to links from established fake news domains, apparently without realizing a third party was responsible. We reported this phenomenon, later clarifying that B.S. Read More
AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference this week — and as it revealed one new service after another, one thing became clear: the company with a marketshare lead that is by Gartner’s estimate 10 times bigger than its 14 closest competitors combined, has no plans to slow down or rest on its laurels.
If that market lead isn’t enough to shake up the competition… Read More
Emotional intelligence is a hard thing to achieve, even in humans. But it’s especially difficult in robots, and maybe even more so in chatbots, whose available tools for picking up on emotional cues are quite limited. Emotibot is a Chinese startup focused on making sure personal assistants, chatbots and virtual customer service agents can accurately understand the emotional state of… Read More
CBS this week announced a significant deal with the NFL that could bring more subscribers to its over-the-top streaming service aimed at cord cutters, CBS All Access. Starting this Sunday, viewers will be able to watch all NFL games on CBS via the service, including regular, preseason, and postseason games. CBS All Access, in case you’re unfamiliar, is the network’s attempt at… Read More
Media server software Plex, which helps you organize your own library of movies, TV shows, photos, and music, is now making it easier to access the content you’ve saved on other cloud storage services with an expansion of its Plex Cloud service. The company has added support for online services Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s OneDrive – meaning you can stream your… Read More
Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson are officially official. This week, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry added numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 to the Period table of elements (114 and 116 – Livermorium and Flerovium – were added in 2012).
While all of the above were initially synthesized between 2002 and 2010 and officially recognized by the IUPAC in… Read More
Uber’s European business has been indicted in a Danish court on charges of assisting two drivers of breaking local taxi laws, Reuters reports. Read More
China’s Didi Chuxing made headlines this year when it announced along with Uber that it would be taking over Uber’s business in its own country. Uber’s sale of its Chinese business included taking a 5.89 percent stake in Didi, and as Didi disentangles Uber China from the rest of the Uber network this week, we spoke to Didi co-founder and CTO Bob Zhang about what the company… Read More
The Hackathon begins tomorrow and we are thrilled to announce that Claire Donoghue and Marily Nika will be joining us as MCs. Here’s a little bit more about the dynamic duo who will be running our Hackathon. Marily Nika received a PhD from the Dpt. of Computing Science at Imperial College London, where she created a model for predicting internet-based phenomena, such as virality.… Read More
Users of WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, are having conversations secretly censored without their knowledge, according to a new report from Citizen Lab. Read More
Update: The feature appears to be an implementation of the Chrome plugin B.S. Detector, which some users took as a test by Facebook itself. We’ll continue to investigate but for now it looks like this is not a Facebook feature. Yes, the irony is rich.
Facebook is showing red warning labels above fake news links in the News Feed for some users in what appears to be a limited test. Read More
Spectacles are all the rage, but me and this week’s guest Fitz Tepper have already stopped using ours pretty much. Maybe we’re just not cool. Still, the hardware from Snapchat parent Snap, Inc. is the most interesting gadget created in recent memory, and Snap’s future plays in hardware should be exciting to watch. Fitz is also set to get Oculus Touch next week at launch,… Read More
One-hundred and forty-three. That’s not the new character limit or the number of heads of product Twitter has employed over the few years (though close). That, rather, is the amount of times the new fellow filling that role has tweeted over the course of the past nine years — a number that includes two recent updates from the past couple of hours acknowledging the gig, one of… Read More
