Oculus is now taking pre-orders for their Touch motion controllers that bring your hands and body into VR on their Rift headset. The company announced details regarding the controllers, including the $199 price and December 6 ship date, at their Oculus Connect developers conference last week. Oculus Touch pre-orders are now live! Ships December 6. https://t.co/JuWpkTXc11 — Brendan… Read More
Following Yahoo’s September announcement of a data breach affecting 500 million user accounts, the company has made it more difficult for Yahoo Mail users to transition to another email service. At the beginning of October, Yahoo disabled an email forwarding feature, which would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails sent to their Yahoo address to another… Read More
Last year Apttus, which provides pricing, quoting and contract building on the Salesforce platform was growing at a crazy rate. It appeared to be headed to IPO or a Salesforce purchase when it got a punch to the gut. Salesforce bought Steelbrick instead.
Sources say, Apttus might have gotten greedy, thinking it was the only enterprise CPQ product out there that provided the best fit for… Read More
A new study from Germany’s Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) found that the autopilot feature of the Tesla Model S constitutes a “considerable traffic hazard,” according to a report in Der Spiegel.
Unsurprisingly, Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t agree and today said in a tweet that those reports were “not actually based on science,” and repeated… Read More
The Barnacle is a new way for parking patrols to immobilize vehicles. Instead of using a boot to keep a wheel from moving, officers can slap a Barnacle across the windshield, suction it to the glass, and arm it with a keypad. The Barnacle is a bright yellow 20-pound piece of plastic that sticks to the windshield with 750 pounds of force. The parking enforcement officer only has to pump the… Read More
Venture capitalists and their financial backers may be feeling a skip in their step this week, following the recently successful IPOs of several tech companies, including the cloud software companies Nutanix, Apptio and Coupa Software. In fact, media outlets are already tallying up who’s going to make what off each of the deals. If only it were so simple. While there’s plenty… Read More
Why was the patriot pig wearing tap shoes? Because it was in the pen dance day. That’s a bad joke. Even by smart home assistant standards it’s a bad joke. It’s one that Alexa told me last week while I was reviewing the new Echo Dot. That’s the thing — however intelligent your AI might be, that doesn’t mean it’s got a good sense of humor. To really… Read More
Cyanogen, a startup behind its own, alternative version of the Android operating system, now has a new CEO. In the wake of reports that the company exaggerated its success in terms of active users, layoffs, and difficulties scaling, Cyanogen’s co-founder and CEO Kirt McMaster will be transitioning into an “Executive Chairman” role, while Lior Tal, previously COO, will now… Read More
It’s easy to feel like you’re missing out on a great restaurant or a nice museum when you’re walking around an unknown city. Journy wants to help you get the most out of your next vacation by planning the best itinerary for you.
Unlike many startups out there, Journy isn’t a concierge app to book flights and hotels. Journy is (mostly) about all the other… Read More
After 20 months in a closed beta under the working title Facebook at Work, (as we predicted it would the other week) today Facebook is finally bringing its enterprise-focused messaging and social networking service to market under a new name, Workplace. It’s not only armed with a new brand: Workplace is launching with a new kind of pricing model based on Facebook-style… Read More
Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 10, has seen faster adoption than any other OS version, according to data released by mobile marketing firm Fiksu. Currently, iOS 10 is installed on 66.7 percent of active devices, roughly a month after its launch. That means the majority of iOS device users are now running the latest OS – which is something of a surprise, given that… Read More
Two European Airbnb rivals have agreed to join forces. An early Rocket Internet Airbnb clone, Wimdu, and another accommodation platform originally headquartered in Germany, 9flats, are merging some five years after firing up their respective businesses. Read More
Millennials hate advertising and don’t respect brands – so what is a self-respecting 21st century marketer to do? Callum Negus-Fancey and his company StreetTeam would have you leverage the power of the upwardly mobile ambitious twenty-somethings themselves.
StreetTeam helps brands build, deploy, and manage large decentralized ambassador programs to sell more goods. The English… Read More
After doing heavy damage to KrebsOnSecurity and other web servers the creator of the Mirai botnet, a program designed to harness insecure IoT devices to run massive denial of service attacks, has apparently released the source code on Github. The compact C code is designed to run on IP cameras and other Internet-connected devices. It tries various hardcoded root passwords, infects the device,… Read More
During a contentious election filled with accusations of lies and denials, not to mention overworked fact-checkers, a company that can help journalists more easily find soundbites in audio recordings, Deepgram, is making its service free to journalists. The audio search technology relies on artificial intelligence, and has been likened to a “Google for sound” – meaning that… Read More
Researchers at Disney Research in Pittsburgh have built a single-legged hopping robot that can currently bounce around 19 times without falling over. The project by Zachary Batts, Joohyung Kim, and Katsu Yamane began as a computer simulation and finally a hardware product. The researchers based their system on Marc Raibert’s hopping controller and it’s controlled by a linear… Read More
This is probably about as close to a full confirmation of last night’s reporting that Samsung has temporarily halting production of the Galaxy Note 7. In another cautiously worded statement issued this morning, the hardware maker told TechCrunch, We are temporarily adjusting the Galaxy Note7 production schedule in order to take further steps to ensure quality and safety matters. The… Read More
It’s hard to remember a time when Microsoft Paint wasn’t shorthand for something ham-handedly drawn on a free computer art program. And the while, the software giant has upgraded the app with some regularity in the 30+ plus years since it was first introduced along with Windows 1.0, it will take a lot of doing to remove its association with poorly crafted memes. It seems likely… Read More
Soundtrap, a cloud-based music and audio recording platform, has raised $6 million in Series A funding. Nordic VC firm Industrifonden led the round, with participation from an array of existing investors and other new backers, including Peter Sterky, former CFO and COO of Spotify. It brings total funding to $8.5 million. Read More
Glisser, a London-based startup on a mission to end tedious presentations by letting presenters include real-time polls and Q&As, has closed a $1 million seed round. Read More
