Google today announced that it plans to set up a new space for developers and startups at 301 Howard Street in San Francisco, just a few blocks from its main San Francisco office on Spear Street. The idea here is to provide a 14,000 square-foot space (which accounts for about one floor in the building) for the next class of Google’s equity-free Launchpad Accelerator and to offer an… Read More
Every week it seems like another retailer, bank, or technology company launches a mobile payments solution. Apple Pay, Android Pay, CVS Pay, Walmart Pay…Pre Pay…Over Pay…Tai Pay…it’s all a bit much. Rather than money or hardware, the mobile payments battle is a fight for ownership of the customer. Retailers care a lot about the top 20 percent of their shoppers.… Read More
Twitter just unveiled a new feature that will let everyone filter low quality notifications from bots and spammers. Twitter has had bullying issues in the past, and the company is now taking actions to make it a more welcoming place.
Twitter is wording this new quality filter as a tool to hide notifications from bots and duplicate tweets from spammers. But it could also be a way to prevent… Read More
Score another win for CRISPR. Scientists at MIT are using the ever-intriguing genome-editing system to engineer human cells capable of recording and reporting the intensity and duration past events. The analog memory storage system builds upon past work developed by scientists that programmed cells to flip DNA sections when events – like exposure to specific chemicals – occurred.… Read More
Coding bootcamps can be quite costly. In order to combat that, the U.S. Department of Education has launched a new experimental initiative in partnership with colleges and universities to enable students to pay for certain coding bootcamps using federal financial aid. Through the Educational Quality through Innovation Partnerships, students will be able to apply for federal financial aid… Read More
French startup Whyd started off as a social network for music lovers but recently announced that it would switch its focus for a hardware project. The company just unveiled this secret hardware project — it’s a high-fidelity connected speaker that combines voice recognition with all music streaming services out there.
The company isn’t doing a Kickstarter. Instead, Whyd is… Read More
CNN has been using drones to gather video for some time now, having employed aerial vehicles to cover such recent key stories as the Flint, Michigan water crisis and the floods that ravaged Louisiana. Unmanned aerial vehicles were also put to work during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions and town halls. The cable news network is looking to double-down on the technology… Read More
Gawker.com, pioneering web publication and the brainchild of Nick Denton, will be shut down as of next week, according to Gawker itself. The closure of the site comes after Univision’s winning bid for the Gawker Media company, which was forced into bankruptcy following a successful lawsuit by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) funded by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. Univision’s bid… Read More
Before there were Apple Stores in Williamsburg, Grand Central Station and the World Trade Center – heck, before there were Apple Stores at all – there was Tekserve. For nearly 30 years, the Mac specialist dutifully served Manhattan, before throwing in the towel earlier this week. Now Tekserve is cleaning shop. After closing its doors on the 15th, the iconic computer retailer is… Read More
Over the last year, Twitter has been suspending accounts for promoting terrorism. The social network had already made it public that 125,000 accounts were suspended between mid-2015 and early 2016. Today we learned that Twitter has added an additional 235,000 suspensions, bringing their two-year total to 360,000 accounts. By Twitter’s own admission, quickly identifying accounts… Read More
Dish Network’s Sling TV has so far offered a different way for cord cutters to subscribe to the “best of TV” via its online streaming TV service. However, that hasn’t included access to local channels that you receive over-the-air. But that may be changing, according to an Amazon listing which touts a new hardware device called AirTV. The device works with an antenna… Read More
John Maeda is leaving VC firm KPCB where he was a design partner to join Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a bunch of other things. Maeda will have a long, elaborate title at Automattic — he’s the company’s new Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion. Before KPCB, Maeda was a research faculty member at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s. “I wanted to… Read More
A couple of times a week for about 3-5 hours, Sam Triplett sits in his abode in China, opens a live-streaming app called Huajiao and talks about anything and everything, prompted mostly by commenters who are watching. Ricey Chen does the same thing using the same app, but she does it for about 20 hours per week. Triplett makes between $100 and $150 per stream and Chen makes about $7,500 per week. Read More
Every day, billions of pieces of content are shared on Facebook. To keep up with the data, Facebook has been using a variety of tools to classify text. Traditional methods of classification, like deep neural networks are accurate, but have serious training requirements. In an effort to classify both accurately and easily, Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab… Read More
IT monitoring specialist ScienceLogic today announced that it has acquired AppFirst, a service to give IT admins deeper visibility in what apps and services run across a company’s servers, virtual machines and cloud instances. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Minnesota-based AppFirst was founded in 2009 and raised a total of $15.2 million,… Read More
We’ve extended the deadline once, but it won’t be happening again. Tomorrow is your last chance to score early bird tickets to Disrupt SF 2016 for the super-low price of $1,995 each, a full $1,000 cheaper than they’ll be on Saturday. Sure, if you still wanted to procrastinate just a little longer, you could wait until tomorrow, but why risk missing out on a deal this good? Get… Read More
Microsoft today announced that it is open sourcing PowerShell and bringing it to Linux and OS X. PowerShell is Microsoft’s command line shell for Windows power users, as well as an extensible scripting language for automating system tasks. It’s not unlike Bash on Linux (and now Windows, too), but with deeper hooks into Windows. Microsoft is changing, though, and as its CEO… Read More
After struggling to find a sustainable business model and sizable user base, The New York Times today announced it will shut down its news summary application NYT Now. The publisher claims that the innovations developed in the app have now been incorporated into the Times’ other digital platforms, including its flagship NYTimes app. Specifically, the main app has the same curated… Read More
The name “MiniStudio” should give you a pretty clear idea of what you’re in for with Tascam’s new offerings. The two devices are essentially little boards designed to recreate a radio studio on a small scale at home for podcasting purposes. Both boards are Windows and Mac compatible, connecting to a computer (and powering) via USB, and using the Apple Camera Kit,… Read More
Redbooth, makers of project management and collaboration software, announced a new Apple TV app today that brings their service directly to Apple TV. We mostly think of Apple TV as a consumer device, designed to give us access to entertainment and games or to project the contents of one of our Apple devices onto a bigger screen. That changed to some extent last year when Apple announced… Read More
