The University of Waterloo has a team dedicated to making a real, working pod system for the ambitious Hyperloop transportation system envisioned by Tesla founder Elon Musk. The so-called ‘Waterloop,’ (bonus points for puns) got a test run yesterday, making the team the first to demonstrate a functioning, pneumatic levitation system on a test track using nothing but air to float… Read More
Remember Samsung’s original Galaxy Gear watch? It’s all right if you say don’t. It was big – in the sense of being physically large, due in part to the inclusion of a camera in the bezel/strap. The company was clearly looking to jam all of the functionality possible into the device and came out the other side with an extremely large product. That’s likely a big… Read More
FilmStruck, a new streaming service aimed at film geeks developed by Turner Classic Movies, has now launched. Announced earlier this year for a mid-October arrival, the service belatedly debuted with a collection of hundreds of classic, indie, foreign, and cult film, as promised. The company also announced the pricing for its new Netflix-like competitor: a somewhat costly, comparatively… Read More
UK insurance firm Admiral had intended to launch an app this week offering discounted car insurance premiums to first time drivers based on an algorithmic assessment of their Facebook posts. Read More
Spotify — the music streaming service with 40 million paying subscribers — has made an acquisition that it hopes will help it hold on to them, and build up those numbers against encroaching streaming music competition from Apple, Pandora, Google, Amazon and more. The company has acquired a company called Preact, a cloud-based platform and service developed for companies that… Read More
The Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, the successor to Olympus’ pro-level micro four thirds camera body, will go on sale from the end of December 2016, the company revealed today. The E-M1 Mark II will be priced at $1999.99 in the U.S., and $2,499.99 in Canada. Olympus also announced a couple of new accessories today, including the STF-8 Macro Flash, and a new first-party Olympus camera… Read More
You’ve seen the hype, surely. LeEco put on a heck of a spectacle in San Francisco the other week, with a US debut that featured everything from bicycles and electric cars to a cameo appearance by beloved indie filmmaker Michael Bay, the auteur behind such mumblecore fare as Transformers 3 and Transformers 4 shot on the set of Transformers 5. The company threw a LOT against the wall when… Read More
Adobe today announced that it has partnered with Reuters to bring the news agency’s video and photography to its Adobe Stock marketplace. Until now, Adobe Stock mostly focused on creative images and videos, but with this partnership, it is also adding editorial content. This includes Reuters photos that cover current news, sports and entertainment events. There are currently twelve… Read More
Computers have perfect memories. So why is it so hard to find stuff on them? Probably because our own memories don’t work the same way. Atlas Recall aims to fix that with “one search to rule them all,” indexing everything you see and do on all your devices, but organizing it in very human fashion. The service enters open beta today. Read More
Adobe is hosting its annual MAX conference for its creative community in San Diego this week. Unsurprisingly, the company is using this event, which will feature keynotes by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, to announce a lot of news around its Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere, as well as its new tools for interactive designers like Adobe Experience Design.… Read More
LinkedIn — the professionally-oriented social networking platform that’s being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion — has made a play to build what it refers to as “the economic graph“, a concept that combines your profile with LinkedIn’s own analytics and data trove to chart the connections between you, your career, your industry and the wider economy. Read More
Typekit, the font subscription service Adobe acquired back in 2011, always offered an all-you-can-use model for accessing the thousands of fonts in its library. That model isn’t going away, but in addition to its subscription plans, Adobe today announced the Typekit Marketplace that makes more than 6,000 fonts available for individual purchase with a perpetual license without the need… Read More
Here’s a fun offering from Play-Doh. The $40 Touch Shape to Life Studio brings a little tactility to the digital world, with seven cans of Play-dog, four tools, 15 cutters and 10 stamps for building sculptures. Once done, the creations get placed on the star-shaped plastic studio platform and captured with an iPad or iPhone. The Play-Doh touch app creates a digital version of the… Read More
More than ever, graphic designers today are expected to be able to create eye-catching photorealistic images; to do so, they often must combine 2D and 3D assets into a single scene. Traditionally, that’s been a very complex and time-consuming task, but with Project Felix, Adobe today announced a new project that makes it surprisingly easy to take 3D assets and integrate them into 2D… Read More
There are leadership changes afoot at Highway1, the hardware accelerator arm of PCH. Co-founder Brady Forrest is stepping down from his role leading the accelerator, though he’ll be staying on as an advisor. Brady says he’ll be focusing on other projects for now, including the series of talks he co-founded, Ignite, where speakers have 5 minutes to talk on a subject with their… Read More
LastPass, the password manager owned by LogMeIn, is making a core component of its service free. LastPass helps improve password security by allowing users to generate random passwords and storing them securely, so users don’t have to worry about password reuse leading to one of their accounts being breached. The company’s payment model has always been sort of… Read More
Whenever I receive bad service from a brand, I typically fire off an angry tweet and hope the company or organisation I’m complaining about notices the blue tick next to my name and takes action accordingly. It’s ungracious, makes me look like a bit of a dick, and similar to trying to shift a caffeine-induced headache by consuming more caffeine, it may feel good momentarily but… Read More
Rapids is a cute new kids app from Amazon using a playful chat style to help kids ages six to twelve enjoy reading.
A lot of kid’s reading apps are a take on the traditional storybook and Amazon already has a Kindle for kids, but Amazon’s Rohit Agarwal, who headed up the project, noticed his own kids were already using the phone to chat via text with their friends and… Read More
Broadcom, Ltd bought Brocade Communications Systems today for $5.9 billion, giving the company a strong offering in networking storage business. It’s quite a nice deal for Brocade shareholders, who gain a 47 percent premium over the $8.69 closing price last Friday night (October 28th). Under the terms of the deal, Broadcom will pay $12.75 per share. It’s an all-cash $5.5… Read More
ValiMail helps enterprises protect their inboxes by making it easier to authenticate incoming emails with the help of the DMARC standard and related open protocols. At its core, this allows businesses to ensure that nobody can use their own domain names for a phishing attack against their employees, and gives enterprises more insight into how their internal and external email services are… Read More
