These days, musician is pretty far down on Will.i.am’s resume. The lead Black Eyed Pea has been kicking around the halls of CES a bunch over the past several years with a series of often odd takes on various consumer electronic categories.
Remember the foto.sosho, the $475 iPhone camera case he launched with the guy who made the JooJoo/Grid 10? Or how about that giant Puls smart bracelet? Read More
CNN is launching a new app for Amazon’s Alexa platform and its line of Echo speakers that will connect the news network’s TV network more directly with the voice-based computing platform. With the new CNN skill, the company is making its on-air content available to Echo owners and other Alexa-powered devices as quickly as five minutes after it has been broadcast on television,… Read More
It seems that after about nine months of irrational exuberance followed by roughly six months of equally as irrational disconsolation, venture investors have gotten their groove back. At least that’s the conclusion lawyers from Cooley LLP are drawing from their latest analysis of the state of the venture market these days. The firm’s latest report illustrates that (barring a few… Read More
Politwoops, the service that preserves politicians’ deleted tweets for posterity and to hold them to account, has a new parent: nonprofit, public interest investigative journalism corporation ProPublica. Read More
Teforia has raised $12 million in a Series A round of venture funding to take its smart kitchen appliances mainstream. The company’s flagship product is an internet connected tea infuser that can brew teas from the company’s own line of pre-packed “Sips,” or from loose leaf teas that customers pack into the machine’s “infusion globe” on their own.… Read More
You can now cast Harry Potter spells from your Android phone, thanks to Google and Warner Bros. Pictures, who have teamed up to promote the new movie, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” This clever trick, which Google tells us is part of a wider partnership between the two companies, lets you speak to Google’s voice assistant by saying “OK Google,” followed… Read More
IBM has made another acquisition to beef up Watson, a week after it announced a raft of new features and milestones for its artificial intelligence effort: it has acquired a business called Expert Personal Shopper (XPS), a platform, and bot, that holds conversations with people online to help figure out what they need to buy, and to help them buy it. XPS had originally been built by Fluid,… Read More
There’s nothing quite so quotidian as getting caught up with the day’s news, which is probably why the New York Times’ new The Daily 360 project has such strong support from Samsung. Samsung is providing Gear 360 cameras and other equipment to Times reporters for capturing 360-degree footage while in the field, and NYT is committing to publishing at least one immersive… Read More
Twitter has been expanding the customer service side of its product, with recent additions including a Customer Service settings page for businesses. Today it’s adding a couple more features — namely, an automated welcome message that shows up whenever a customer starts a Direct Message conversation with a business’ account, and “quick replies” that ask the… Read More
With Alexa and Google Assistant are gunning for control over the general voice-driven experience with technology, that might open doors for some more targeted verticals that are centered around voice. It’s not an unheard of strategy — building services and tools around specific experiences rather than trying to do it all at once has been an effective approach for many startups… Read More
Following its acquisition by Pinterest in August, Instapaper’s premium version will now be to all users, the company said today. As part of the acquisition, Instapaper’s team would begin working on Pinterest’s core experience. But the company also said that the app would live on as a separate entity and continue to get updates from the Instapaper team at Pinterest. Now, under… Read More
Meet Melody. Despite looking like a giant egg with a TV for a heart, she actually may be the first thing to put a smile on your face this morning. She can recognize you, listen to you, and even sing for you — all the while being a hub for home IoT. The whole package may seem a bit corny, albeit in a cute candy corn kinda way, but for investors in Rokid, Melody’s maker, the device… Read More
I don’t tend to get too excited about new color options for smartphones, but Blue Coral was one of the overlooked causalities of the Note 7’s untimely end. It was a really nice addition to the Galaxy line, in a world full of black, white, silver and gold. Since Samsung officially put the kibosh on the new Note, the closest we’ve been able to Blue Coral is Google’s… Read More
Digital advertising spend increased to $32.7 billion during the first six months of 2016, according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (a trade group for digital publishers and advertisers). That’s up 19 percent from the same period last year, and it represents an all-time high. David Doty, the IAB’s executive vice president… Read More
Instagram wants you to shop without always having to interrupt your scrolling with a browser window. That’s why today it will start showing shoppable tags on photos from 20 retail brands like Kate Spade and JackThreads to iOS users in the US. The retailers tag products in their photos, which are hidden behind a “Tap to view products” button. After selecting their product… Read More
Slowly but surely, Sonos is opening itself up to third party functionality, much to the delight of those frustrated by the audio company’s fairly unpopular proprietary offering. A few months back, the company promised that it would launch a Spotify app control via its public beta. The feature, initially set for an October release, is now available to all those who sign up with the… Read More
Action cameras are great. Shaky videos are not. Enter gimbals. Long a tool of professionals, these handheld devices keep the camera steady and smooth out the shot. DJI launched its Osmo handheld gimbal in 2015 and GoPro just released its first alongside the Karma drone. We took both to South Korea and put them to the test. In the end, both work great and produce quality video that’s… Read More
Following months of testing and free trials for early adopters, Microsoft announced this morning that its learning-focused version of the popular Minecraft game, Minecraft: Education Edition, is now available for purchase. The game is available in 50 countries and in 11 different languages, the company said, and will include the Classroom Mode companion app that lets teachers manage settings… Read More
Hipchat, the workplace collaboration platform from Atlassian that competes against the likes of Slack, Yammer and (soon?) Skype Teams, is today announcing a new service that — figuratively and literally — speaks to a new way of using not just Hipchat, but another popular tech product, the Amazon Echo. The company is announcing a new integration called VoiceMyBot, which lets you… Read More
More users around the world are accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers for the first time, according to internet monitoring firm StatCounter. The combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 51.2 percent, vs. 48.7 percent for desktop access, marking the first time this has happened since StatCounter began tracking stats for internet… Read More
