Quick! What’s your gym locker combination? Your girlfriend’s favorite Starbucks order? The type of ink your printer uses? Can’t remember? Gotta look it up? There’s a lot of information that we can’t access via a Google search, but instead tend to make a mental note of in order to recall. Sometimes, we might jot these things down in Notepad, but often we forget to… Read More
Minecraft in virtual reality: It’s a dream for fans of the immersive crafting and world building sim, and it’s going to be a reality for Oculus Rift owners starting next week.
The VR version of the popular Microsoft-owned game was tipped for launch in “the next few weeks” on Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta late last month, and was supposed to arrive with the 0.15.6… Read More
Happy birthday, you old rascal, you. Thirty-five years ago today you came into world with a compact design and a $1,565 price tag, at time when IBM’s entry-level “microcomputer” run $90,000 and looked more like a washer and dryer set.
Of course, not everyone was excited about you. As the company notes in its own online history, one of the company’s senior execs asked… Read More
Not many startups have spent a decade fine-tuning their tech platform prior to launch. But not many startups are trying to radically rethink the structure of the Internet… Read More
We’ve already written extensively about “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World“, the new Werner Herzog documentary/tone poem on the Internet. The new feature is less an exhaustive review of the history of the technology that has transformed modern society, then a sort of meditative look at its past, present and future. It’s an excellent work on a subject… Read More
Artificial intelligence originally aspired to replace doctors. Researchers imagined robots that could ask you questions, run the answers through an algorithm that would learn with experience and tell whether you had the flu or a cold. However, those promises largely failed, as artificial intelligent algorithms were too rudimentary to perform those functions. Read More
After twelve months, eight patients and 2,052 sessions spread over 1,958 hours, Duke University is publishing some promising results from a study seeking to demonstrate the ability for brain-machine interfaces to help restore mobility in humans. The study, which appeared this week in Scientific Reports, looked at a group of paraplegic patients suffering from a chronic spinal cord injury.… Read More
David Sacks has pulled off a number of impressive feats during his career. Part of the early team at PayPal, where he was COO for several years, Sacks went on to create a couple of other software companies, including the family history site Geni, which was snapped up for undisclosed terms by rival MyHeritage in 2012, and the workplace chat service Yammer, scooped up by Microsoft for $1.2… Read More
Everyone loves a good plant in their home, but few have the time and dedication to keep it healthy over the course of the year. Changing temperatures and humidity levels paired with vacations or business trips can limit the variety of plant-life that most people can sustain in their homes. That’s where the Grow Box comes in. Developed by former Apple engineer Andrew Pletenetskyy, the… Read More
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
