Managing the App Store can be one of the most difficult experiences for new developers. Getting noticed is hard, the experience isn’t that great, and now Apple is allowing search ads. And to make things more interesting, there’s a lot of interest in different platforms beyond traditional apps — including messaging bots. Eventually, there will have to be a way to… Read More
Whether you’re working out of a dorm room or running a billion-dollar company, a little pivot can go a long way. At their worst, pivots can derail a company’s success, but at their best, they demonstrate a company is still attuned to its user base — no matter how big it gets. Digit, a fintech service that helps people save, launched a year and a half ago with the… Read More
Online merchants spend a lot of money on chargebacks, which are demands by credit card providers to reimburse for fraudulent charges. That’s why Signifyd created technology that assesses a transaction risk before the card is processed. The San Jose-based company is raising $19 million in financing for its fraud protection services. Investors include Menlo Ventures, TriplePoint Capital… Read More
There is a new generation of companies exerting such great influence on society that they’re essentially becoming utilities. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Uber are near monopolies that provide services as integral to our modern life as power, telephone and transportation systems were a century ago. But there is a key difference between last century’s utilities and today’s… Read More
Pokémon Go has achieved a number of records since its debut – the most downloaded app in its first week ever and the fastest to reach 50 million installs on Google Play, for example – but now you can add one more to the list: the fastest game to reach $500 million in revenue. According to a new report from App Annie, Pokémon Go has now surpassed $500 million in worldwide… Read More
2016 might be the year that HTTP finally dies. Chrome’s security team announced today that the browser will start marking websites that use insecure HTTP connections to transmit passwords and credit card data as insecure, beginning in January 2017. The warning will appear in the address bar of the browser and will call users’ attention to the fact that their personal information… Read More
Do you have to keep your hands busy to think straight? Fidget Cube is a little device that lets you click, flip, roll, and slide its different buttons so you can stay calm. You can nab one for $19 on Kickstarter, and it’s supposed to ship in December, though every crowdfunded project seems to get delayed. Your startup’s next pivot? Should you quit your job? Is this the house you… Read More
Twitter rolled out an update to its service this morning that aims to make the social app more competitive with mobile messaging clients, including the recently upgraded iMessage arriving in iOS 10. The company says it’s introducing a number of new features for Direct Messages – its private messaging feature – including things like Read Receipts, typing indicators, and web… Read More
Need to post content to multiple social networks at the same time? A new chatbot called Yala wants to help. The bot, live now on Slack with Facebook Messenger support coming soon, not only does the work of posting for you, it’s also intelligent enough to know when to post. That is, Yala uses algorithms and machine learning to determine the best time to post in order to increase… Read More
In what is certainly the first of many pieces of VR original content to receive a prestigious award, “Henry,” a short film by Oculus, has just received an Emmy for Outstanding Original Interactive Program. The virtual reality film chronicles the story of Henry, a cute little hedgehog that loves to hug despite his prickly spines. Things turn interesting rather quickly when he has… Read More
Earlier this year, Glassdoor raised $40 million at a $1 billion valuation; and now it is putting some of that investment to use to grow internationally. The employee review and job-search platform has acquired Love Mondays, a startup based out of Sao Paulo that also lets workers post reviews of their workplaces. It’s even been described as “the Glassdoor of Latin… Read More
Pre-orders for the two new iPhones start on Friday, with store availability from September 16. But, unlike in previous new iPhone release cycles, come Monday Apple won’t be saying how many handsets it’s shifted. Read More
The young Bay Area accelerator NFX Guild hosted its third “demo day” yesterday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and the attendees were a veritable who’s who of venture and angel investing.
It wasn’t necessarily a surprise that roughly 200 top investors were sitting elbow to elbow to see the presenting companies. NFX Guild prides itself on being… Read More
it’s the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, counting from the airing of the first episode of the original 1966 Star Trek series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Facebook is marking the occasion, in a few different ways. First, there’s a personalized greeting appearing atop News Feeds of users who’ve liked or otherwise interacted with Star Trek or sci-fi content on FB,… Read More
Artificial intelligence is changing the way we interact with our devices, friends and data. It promises to revolutionize how we work, shop, socialize, date, bank, heal, navigate… how we live. Yet here I am in the engine room of the revolution, getting increasingly frustrated with the prevalent AI conversations and memes. Read More
Dish Network’s streaming service for cord cutters, Sling TV, has made its way to Windows 10. The company announced today the launch of its on-demand TV service for Windows 10 PCs and tablets, through a new application live now in the Windows App Store. While Sling TV’s legacy PC software will continue to be supported, the new Windows 10 application has been designed to take… Read More
In just 30 seconds, you can enjoyably consume a viral video or a few Facebook stories. But until now, the shortest thing you could typically listen to was a three minute song, especially when you factor in the time to get your headphones untangled, on, and playing. Hearing anything shorter was more trouble than it was worth. Yet with wireless earbuds going mainstream thanks to the unveiling… Read More
The speaker that speaks might soon speak without you speaking to ask it to speak. Amazon’s Echo is set to get push notifications, according to The Information, which would allow it to give you a heads up about activity from its connected services, so it could, for example, tell you when your connected doorbell rings or pipe up and tell you when a loved one’s flight has… Read More
Europe’s top court has ruled that knowingly posting links to copyrighted material can be an infringement of rights holders’ rights — even though the copyrighted material in question is being hosted elsewhere. People posting links in a for-profit scenario also have an obligation to have checked they are not infringing copyright, in the court’s view. Read More
Airbnb has been under fire lately for instances of racism and discrimination exhibited by some hosts on the home-sharing platform. In order to combat that, Airbnb is making several positive changes to the platform and its company policies, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky sent in an email to hosts and guests this morning.
This includes guaranteeing short-term bookings for people who have been… Read More
