IFTTT made a name for itself as a platform for people to easily build (or pick up pre-built) scripts to automate tasks in and between various apps — say, to turn on the air conditioner using your home’s smart thermostat when your car tells it that you are 20 minutes’ drive away. Now, as part of the company’s bid to grow in ubiquity, it is taking the next natural… Read More
It is, sadly, just for businesses, so slow your roll before you start daydreaming about what you’ll load onto yours. The company showed off a few new products at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, but nothing quite as jaw dropping as what the company is calling “the largest SSD ever demonstrated.” The 60TB SSD is firmly in demonstration mode, meaning it’s sort of… Read More
I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday, August 10, to hold a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar and pitching shoes. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270. We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8pm or so we’ll have an open stage with live music – I’m going to… Read More
BMW is working on an Alexa skill for its new BMW Connected app, which will arrive later this year and let car owners do things like check their remaining fuel levels and lock their car doors via voice commands to their Echo speaker.
The new BMW Connected app arrived in the North American App Store in April, and will roll out in the UK. It’s able to connect to any car with… Read More
Sending a letter to the White House is getting a digital upgrade today. In addition to accepting hand-written missives by postal mail and emails, the public can now send a note to President Obama via Facebook. On the the White House’s Facebook page, you can use Messenger to “speak” to the administration by way of the newly launched White House Messenger bot. To use the… Read More
JD.com, Alibaba’s closest rival in China, is targeting profitability after reported its Q2 2016 earnings which, while on target with expectations, saw revenue growth continue to slow. Read More
The Apple App Store shows no signs of slowing down, despite the fact that people seem to limit the number of apps they use regularly to just a small handful. But developers keep building, so the apps keep coming. According to new analysis out this morning from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the App Store is expected to more than double its size over the next four years, reaching 5… Read More
Your next Adidas runners might be made in America – by a robot. The shoemaker revealed more details today about its coming ‘Speedfactory,’ which it previously announced would be coming to the U.S. in 2017. The factory will call Atlanta home, and feature 74,000 square feet of robot shoemaking capability, with full operational status target for the end of next year. The factory… Read More
Apples are the second most commonly consumed fruit in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but the way apples are harvested in the orchard hasn’t changed much in the past two centuries. It’s still a manual process, by and large. Now, SRI Ventures, a kind of startup incubator within the Menlo Park research and development firm SRI International,… Read More
Apple’s iPhone SE strategy looks to be going as planned. The new four-inch iPhone looks gave Apple a welcome sales bump in key markets between April and June. Read More
You don’t do things halfway when it comes to tasks like mapping the light of millions of galaxies. That sort of job requires a fairly massive undertaking like, say, 5,000 ten-inch cylindrical robots each measuring the width of a finger that are tasked with gathering light from galaxies, stars and supermassive blackhole-powered quasars. And, of course, one doesn’t simply flip… Read More
Get ready for a massive MacBook Pro update. Apple is planning to unveil new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops with retina displays soon. According to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is building a completely new pro laptop with many new features, such as a Touch ID sensor and an OLED mini screen above the keyboard. If you’ve been following MacBook Pro rumors,… Read More
It was never really a question of whether GoPro would do the VR thing, it was more a question of how — or, rather, where — it would fit in. After all, it’s probably a little late in the game for the company to more or less own the space as it’s managed to do with action cameras (becoming more or less synonymous), but while there are other VR camera solutions out… Read More
There’s no doubt that technology has drastically evolved since President Barack Obama took office in 2008. Obama acknowledged it himself during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit this year — while on stage with Mark Zuckerberg, he mentioned using “this new thing called MySpace” on the campaign trail.
But the popularity of Myspace certainly isn’t the only thing… Read More
As LinkedIn inches closer to completing its $26 billion acquisition by Microsoft, smaller rivals have stepped up their game building viable alternatives for those who might want more independent products when it comes to managing contacts in their professional networks. FullContact — one such competitor — has now raised a further $25 million. The funding brings the total… Read More
What if your entire roof was made up entirely of dedicated solar power cells? No, not adorned with the current kind of solar panels you’ve likely seen on the existing roofs of a few neighbour houses – an entire roof actually made up of solar gathering material, rather than add-ons that install after the fact. That’s the vision described by Elon Musk in SolarCity’s… Read More
The used car industry is an interesting business. The market is huge – 45 million used cars are bought each year in the U.S. But the biggest player, CarMax, only controls about 2% of the market – but is still valued at about $12 billion by Wall Street. So that makes the market not only ripe for disruption, but also extremely lucrative. Carvana is a used car dealer that thinks… Read More
September 7 is going to be a busy day. Sony sent out invites for a press event in New York. The company will likely unveil the successor to the PlayStation 4. On the same day, Apple could also hold its usual iPhone launch event for the rumored iPhone 7. The event is called “PlayStation Meeting,” and the company plans to “share details about the PlayStation business.”… Read More
Netflix began helping its users test their internet connection for streaming speeds in May when it introduced Fast.com. Now it is bringing that service to mobile with the launch of apps for iOS and Android, as first spotted by 9to5Mac. Read More
As the world turns, customer service seems to evolve much more slowly than most all other services. The problems that induce more hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing than solutions only seeming to be further abstracted by bad tech and the customer is these days left hanging up the phone after cussing out a robot.
For how much effort has been paid to stepping up the subpar quality of Siri and… Read More
