An interview with TC’s cybersecurity reporter Kate Conger about the NSA hack, Instagram brings us concerts and sporting events, Casper now offers dog beds for delivery, Amazon has a curated store for Product Hunt’s featured items, and Univision buys Gawker. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
While most kids their age are glued to various digital devices, often wasting hours playing mindless games or watching cat videos, 164 fourth and fifth graders, along with eight elementary school teachers, have been using those same devices to explore new paths to learning. Read More
Reigns is a new gaming app, currently featured as a favorite by Apple. You are a king and the answer to whether you live or die — and how — is in the cards. Quite literally. As ruler, you are presented with a deck. Each card is someone in your kingdom who is asking for help or notifying you of a problem on the rise. How you answer determines your fate.
A swipe to the left is one… Read More
It’s a magical world we live in, people. Where once our brilliant crayon drawings were condemned to live forever two-dimensionally on a piece of dog-eared construction paper, now they can be given the life they deserve — either as an endearingly grotesque plush doll or, with this new service, an awesome dress. Read More
In a blog post, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller announced she is leaving the company to join Alphabet subsidiary Calico. Koller founded Coursera with Andrew Ng back in 2012 after working together on artificial intelligence research at Stanford. The two supported the company’s growth until Ng left to become chief scientist at Baidu’s research arm. Today Coursera has grown… Read More
Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, Instavest is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity.
The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market.
Today the startup announced… Read More
Blockai is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching a new feature to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter.
Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the blockchain) stating that they’re the… Read More
There have been quite a few “clean” vitamin and supplement startups popping up lately — Olly, Ritual, Elysium Health and Nootrobox are just a few of the venture-backed chosen in the space — and many offer different combinations for better hair, brain power, focus and energy in several different packages and subscription plans. Elysium even claims to help with… Read More
A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers dumped data online this weekend that it claimed to have stolen from the Equation Group, a hacking team widely believed to be associated with the NSA. Firewall makers Cisco and Fortinet have now confirmed that vulnerabilities included in the data dump affected their products — a disclosure that lends credence to the theory that the Equation Group… Read More
If we’re ever to have things like smart contact lenses and permanent brain implants, one of the things we need to figure out is the power problem. Those devices need energy for collecting, processing and especially transmitting data — but that last one might not be a problem anymore, thanks to a new technique called interscatter communication. Read More
The most recent numbers out of analyst firm IDC show a major shakeup in the Chinese smartphone market for Q2. During an especially rough quarter, local handset maker Xiaomi’s shipment dipped significantly from 17.1 to 10.5 million year over year, according to the firm. The 38 percent drop was enough to knock the company down to the fourth position, as Huawei took over the top spot with… Read More
The hit cybersecurity-focused TV show “Mr. Robot,” a psychological thriller popular among the tech crowd for its relatively accurate portrayal of hacking, is now a mobile game. Released by Telltale Games in association with NBCUniversal, and developed by Night School Studio in collaboration with Universal Cable Productions, the game is played through the fictional E-Corp messaging… Read More
We caught wind earlier this week that Cisco was planning a major cost-cutting operation to reduce its costs by around 15% throughout the month. It looks like the first stage of that is a round of cut jobs, with Cisco announcing as part of its earnings report that it will cut up to 5,500 jobs, or 7% of its workforce. The move isn’t unexpected as Cisco works to transition to a new era where… Read More
Ford might be looking to put self-driving cars into service for on-demand taxi scenarios by 2021, but that’s thinking small by Airbus standards – the aircraft manufacturer wants to make autonomous flying taxis a real thing for dense urban areas where traffic congestion is a real and growing problem. You probably won’t be able to hail a flying taxi by 2021, but Airbus wants to… Read More
The latest move by McDonalds to distance itself from its enduring image as a greasy, unhealthy fast food apocalypse is once sure to please fitness-conscious parents: for a limited time, every Happy Meal now comes with a working pedometer. The Step-it is a simple device that comes in six colors that, once activated, tracks a kid’s steps and their general activity level. Steps show on an… Read More
Mathias Biilmann — a former CTO of a firm that built websites for small businesses — says developers have gotten so used to using Github as a central workflow, they expect the entire rest of the developer experience to work the same way. “The way that a front-end developer would work would be to go into a server and change how things were structured, but then Git came in… Read More
Pretty soon, there will be a Marvel universe version of every kind of content, and the next genre up for inclusion is the teen drama. Hulu has placed an order for an adaptation of Runaways, the Marvel Comics series featuring a rag-tag bunch of teenagers trying to be heroes in the face of the ultimate arch-nemeses – their parents. Runways is relatively young by Marvel lore standards… Read More
One of the things I really love about working with startup founders is that they are by nature an optimistic crowd: They set out to build amazing things, change the world and fundamentally shift the way people view things. What they often don’t realize, though, is that in the midst of brutal competition, the path to scale and success is often lined with unexpected co-travelers and events. Read More
Make way for robot! Two driverless buses will be hitting the streets in Helsinki for some real-world testing for the next month or so. The EasyMile minibuses have previously been tested on public roads in Finland and elsewhere, but this is the first time they’ll be mixing it up with everyday traffic there. Read More
Smart home technology offers a lot of potential to make things generally easier, but in practice, it can add a lot of complexity and confusion to a person’s life – especially if you really dive in. Logitech’s new Pop Home Switch tries to reverse the trend, delivery light-switch level simplicity for even the most sophisticated smart home setup. And it succeeds, turning… Read More
