The developing world can’t join the age of social video since streaming sucks up too much costly data and is sluggish on slow connections. But Facebook wants to change that with a new video download option it will start testing on July 11th with a small percentage of users in India. While on WiFi, people can sync videos to their device for offline viewing within Facebook’s… Read More
Tesla’s Autopilot feature might be a bigger problem than the company realizes. A Detroit art gallery owner informed police that he had his 2016 Tesla Model X in Autopilot mode when it crashed and rolled over on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last Friday, as reported by the Detroit Free Press on Wednesday morning. Read More
Facebook is clearly very serious about its mission to connect the world and in the process, it has launched solar-powered drones that use lasers to connect to each other and the ground, and more prosaic efforts like new antennas for covering both urban and rural areas. Today, Facebook is expanding this work with the launch of OpenCellular, a new open source hardware and software project that… Read More
If you’re anything like me you want your apps to let others follow you around but refuse to let them share photographs of your food. But how can you tell each individual app on your phone what you will and won’t share? Researchers at CMU have some ideas. Their app is a smart privacy system that learns your preferences (“Don’t share pictures from delis”) and… Read More
Dell will no longer sell or upgrade its Android tablet line and will instead focus on Windows devices. The news broke last week but I suspect the holiday – and the collective yawn that was the Dell Venue line – put a damper on its spread.
The company will instead focus on 2-in-1 Windows machines, the laptop/slate hybrids that take advantage of Windows’ touchscreen capabilities. Read More
It’s tough standing out in the increasingly overcrowded world of fitness trackers. Though, to be fair, standing out from the pack has never really been one of Atlas Wearables‘ issues. It’s a strange-looking thing. The sort of thing that, even in this enlightened age of ubiquitous wearables, people look at the Wristband 2 with slight disbelief. It’s an odd-looking thing.… Read More
Google today announced the next version of Kubernetes, its open source orchestration service for deploying, scaling and managing software containers. The focus of version 1.3 is on providing Kubernetes users with a more scalable and robust system for managing their containers in production. In addition, Kubernetes now also supports more emerging standards including CoreOS’s rkt,… Read More
It seems Twitter decided to do a soft launch of its sports live-streaming tool today, but you should save the link. Seriously, because it’s not easy to find. The company began streaming Wimbledon, with coverage beginning on day 9, with the men’s quarterfinals. But tennis fans who also happen to be Twitter users were left in the dark about the new feature. There were no messages… Read More
Everyone’s picking teams for the coming connected car wars, and Volkswagen and LG have chosen each other. The new smart car squad announced a “memorandum of understanding” to collaborate on R&D related to a connected car platform to be developed “over the coming years” today. So what, exactly, does this partnership entail? It’s not just the premise for… Read More
Agriculture tech startup KisanHub is on a mission to make farming more ‘connected’ to help farmers “grow more and use less,” says co-founder and CEO Sachin Shende. Read More
It’s like Twitter, but for the stock market. The inventor of the “cash tag,” StockTwits, is announcing some big changes.
Armed with an additional $2 million in funding led by Social Leverage, Ian Rosen, co-founder of Even Financial and former general manager at MarketWatch, will be taking the helm as CEO. StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon will be moving into the executive… Read More
Memories fundamentally shifts Snapchat to encompass the past rather than only being about the present. Yet by allowing you to modify previously shot content and add it to your story with a white border that signifies it’s a memory, Snapchat lets you share later and stay in the now Capture now, live, then share later. Snapchat tells me it set out to create the most human camera, and… Read More
Now on Tap was one of the marquee features of Android Marshmallow when Google first announced this update to its mobile operating system last year (which is now already being eclipsed by the next version: Android Nougat). It allows you to quickly find more relevant information and context about what’s currently on your phone’s or tablet’s screen when you press and hold the… Read More
IBM’s Cloud Video division is releasing the results of a new survey looking at the behavior of subscribers to video-on-demand services like Netflix and Hulu. Perhaps the most interesting answers were about how many people canceled their subscriptions and why. According to IBM, 31 percent of respondents said they’d canceled a streaming video subscription in the past, but that… Read More
Farmers are adopting smart-sensor technologies and connected farm equipment more quickly than ever, stretching each season to eke out greater yield from finite acreage. This rise in so-called precision agriculture has precipitated a massive influx in unstructured “bushels to bytes” farm data, creating new opportunities for an industry that has previously operated solely in the… Read More
Not all businesses are meant for venture capital. To be more precise, according to our latest interview with Ann Miura Ko, “roughly 25 companies per year exit for $500 million-plus.” Floodgate and Miura Ko describe these companies as ‘thunderlizards’, and they enumerate four required powers that make these companies successful. 1.) Proprietary Power This special… Read More
iPhone rumor season is upon us, the latest tidbit has to do with internal storage. According to the WSJ, the next-generation iPhone will start at 32GB of internal storage opposed to the 16GB entry-level option. If true, this is actually rather surprising. From a user perspective, 32GB at the entry level makes far more sense. At 16GB, including the storage space taken up by the OS itself,… Read More
Service Partner One is a Berlin-headquartered startup that is bringing the booking and management of various office management services online, via its website and/or iPad and iPad app combo. Read More
Airborne drone delivery is still more PR than public reality, but wheeled, self-driving delivery bots could be trundling down a sidewalk near you sooner than you think. London-based Starship Technologies, which counts Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis among its founding team, is launching a broad testing phase of its autonomous delivery bots in parts of the UK, Germany and… Read More
