Music to game to – it’s a real thing. From the ambient, otherworldly soundtrack of No Man’s Sky, to the songs you most associate with playing a certain title (Busta Rhymes When Disaster Strikes is forever linked to Goldeneye 007 for me, for instance), music and games go hand in hand, which is why it makes perfect sense that Spotify has launched a dedicated Gaming section.… Read More
Hiring and training sales staff gets repetitive and, given the often high churn, it can be a real time suck. That’s why Saleswhale, a Singapore-based company that is part of Y Combinator’s current batch, has a platform to help automate a lot of the pain and make things more efficient. Read More
This incredible find from the Verge might just be the greatest GIF I’ve ever seen — it is certainly one of the funniest to land on the internet. We currently know nothing about where it came from or how it came to be, other than that there is so much comedy going on in just a few seconds. It’s almost like an old school slapstick routine. Read More
Arianna Huffington leaves the Huffington Post to start Thrive, Crave’s new app finds celeb fashions, BMW LeEco and Karma all want to give Tesla a run for its money in electric vehicles, Logitech’s new Pop Home Switch gives you control over smart things, and Facebook’s blocker-blocking ads blocked by Adblock Plus. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Whoaaa. While most new Star Wars trailers tend to drop in the wee hours of the morning, Disney just blasted one out right as most people on the east coast were prepping for bed. Thanks, Olympics! Here’s the second trailer for Rogue One, the first of Disney’s spinoff/origin movies, which is coming out on December 16th — or a little more than four months from now.… Read More
Pay-per-article journalism startup Blendle, which aggregates the written work of different publishers onto a single, ad-free platform where readers can pick and choose which stories to consume, paying a few cents per article, is touting passing one million registered users. Read More
Earlier this month the ride-sharing world faced its first major shakeup when Uber announced that it would sell its China business to primary competitor Didi for an ownership stake of 18% in the combined China entity, valued at $35 billion, with Didi also buying a $1 billion stake in Uber.
While some may focus on the terms of the deal, the crux is that Uber was in a no-win situation in… Read More
By using technology and finding the right collaborations, companies can disrupt new markets, solve customer pain points and distribute value across the chain. Here are the top four marketing principles of today’s disruptors. Read More
During every U.S. presidential election season, at least one candidate vows to repeal carried interest deductions. Meanwhile, venture capitalists do their part and argue against it. The issue is near and dear to their hearts because carried interest treats investment partners’ salary as an investment and not income, taxing it at long-term capital gains rates and not as ordinary… Read More
Update: and just like that it’s back. Goodbye productivity, hello r/birdswitharms I’ve gotten so much work done in the past 90 minutes or so that Reddit has been down. Like it’s almost hard to believe. I returned some calls, responded to a bunch of emails and worked on writing out some thoughts for another story. I did all this while refreshing Reddit’s home page… Read More
The Perseid meteor shower, which comes around every year at this time, will peak tonight and early tomorrow. This year’s event is particularly special because astronomers are predicting an outburst of shooting stars at twice the normal rate. The best time to watch the show is between midnight tonight and dawn Friday morning. Before finding a good place to lay down and look up, there are… Read More
We’ve come a long way since the days of selecting a CPU player for the other Pong paddle, tank or hand-to-hand combatant. Now the computers are taking it to us, in meatspace, and seemingly no tabletop activity is safe from their depredations. The latest to succumb to computer domination? Foosball. Read More
Adblock Plus launched a workaround to Facebook’s ad block bypass today that ham-handedly removes posts from friends and Pages, not just ads, according to a statement provided by Facebook to TechCrunch. “We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages.… Read More
The last decade-plus hasn’t been great for SGI. The company formerly known as Silicon Graphics declared Chapter 11 in 2009. That same year, it was sold to Rackable for a song, with that company somewhat confusingly changing its own name to SGI (short for Silicon Graphics International) during the process. Now former competitor Hewlett Packard Enterprise (which spun out from HP last year)… Read More
The spa industry is in need of a technology makeover and Zenoti thinks it can help. The Seattle-based startup is raising $15 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners to help salons run their businesses. A cloud-based management platform, Zenoti helps spa chains with everything from billing to inventory management. They aim to create a tailored enterprise software experience for what… Read More
If you’re not using Simplenote, you’re missing out. This… well, simple note app has been a standby and lifesaver for me for years, though occasionally I have worried about its future: Will it survive if Automattic, which bought it back in 2013, goes under or gets bought itself? What if the servers go down? Is there a god, and if so, does he or she use Simplenote, too? Read More
Just days after Deliveroo, a popular on-demand restaurant food delivery startup in Europe, announced that it had raised another $275 million in funding, a number of the startup’s self-employed couriers in London have been holding a protest over possible changes to the way they are paid. Read More
Songster and perpetual master of subtlety Morrissey has teamed up with pals at PETA to produce This Beautiful Creature Must Die, a mobile and desktop browser-based app that turns saving cuddly 8-bit farm animals from a gruesome death into a fun, Tetris-like puzzle game. Morrissey believes his bloody new anti-meat mobile game is more important than “Pokémon Go.” The game features… Read More
The Kickstarter campaign for the Doohan EV3 iTank three-wheeled scooter began this week. It’s brought to you by Kartik Ram, the same guy behind the Zeitgeist electric bike that debuted this spring. Before we get into the question of whether a three-wheeled scooter really is the future, as Ram said in a phone interview, here are the details of the iTank: Bosch motor goes from 0-28 mph in… Read More
It’s not easy for the average user to determine whether or not the apps on his or her iPhone are trustworthy. Some apps scoop up contact lists, others unnecessarily harvest your location data, and some even send your login credentials over insecure HTTP connections.
But, if you’re not a developer, it can be difficult to tell which apps are collecting or leaking your personal… Read More
