Category: Tech news

 While companies like Warby Parker and Toms Shoes have made corporate responsibility more popular over the past few years, the technology industry hasn’t adapted as quickly. Meet LSTN, a headphone company where proceeds from each sale help someone hear for the first time. The company has partnered with the Starkey Hearing Foundation, and has already helped over 20,000 people in more… Read More

 Facebook wants to become your favorite Internet TV by tracking what a television never could. Today it announced a News Feed algorithm change that will show you more videos similar to ones you expand to full-screen, un-mute or opt to watch in HD, even if you don’t Like, share or comment. Those same signals will tell Facebook that a video is enjoyable so the News Feed shows it to more people. Read More

 Construct co-founders Drew Beaurline and Patrick Albert are taking on one of the nation’s most corrupt and bureaucratic industries – possibly a job only twenty-something foreigners with no particular background in construction would be naïve enough to attempt. Read More

 It’s the eve of Apple Music, which launches tomorrow, and all through the house, not a creature was withholding their content, not even a Taylor Swift. Also, Force Touch is basically a lock for iPhone 6/6 Plus S this fall, according to a new report from Bloomberg that says production on devices with the tech has begun. Apple Music arrives with iOS 8.4 at 8 AM PT tomorrow, and despite… Read More

 Following last week’s eavesdropping reports, WikiLeaks shared new documents with Libération and Mediapart. This time, the new documents reveal that the NSA was spying on France’s best performing companies for economic intelligence purposes. Read More

 Livecoding.tv, a startup in Y Combinator’s current class, is launching today to help coders learn from their peers in real time.
The way Livecoding works is pretty simple. Developers stream live video of themselves coding, and users watching can ask questions or give feedback. Read More

 Digital privacy is on the ropes, and public cynicism is running high. But there are glimmers of innovation in what could be a new phase for Big Data: empowering the customer. Read More

 Uber will acquire assets from Microsoft Bing, including roughly 100 employees focused on the product’s image collection activities. In short, Uber is absorbing data-collection engineers from Microsoft to bolster its own mapping work. The companies confirmed the transaction with TechCrunch, but each declined to name the terms of the agreement. The excision of a slice of opex from Bing… Read More

 French Minister of State for the digital economy Axelle Lemaire announced last week a new entrepreneur visa package called the French Tech Ticket. With this package, foreign entrepreneurs could get a work visa, a $14,000-$28,000 grant (€12,500-€25,000) for each team member, free office space in an incubator in Paris as well as an English-speaking administrative advisor. Announced at La… Read More

 Diversity is a problem even Silicon Valley cannot solve — something Tracy Chou plainly highlighted in 2013 when she set up a database to help quantify the Valley’s diversity issue with the hopes of bringing to light just how few women engineers there are at top tech firms. Now, in 2015, companies inside and out of the Valley are striving to solve this issue and we’re… Read More

 The worldwide eSports market has now reached 143 million viewers, but there is still no easy way to get up-to-date information on these competitive video game tournaments, which include games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike. Part of the Summer YC 2015 class, Instant eSports is building a mobile platform that displays news, scores, and schedules from the most popular… Read More

 PayPal today announced it’s updating its User Agreement to clarify the language it uses to communicate to customers how the company is allowed to contact them. The company had recently come under fire from consumer advocacy groups who reported PayPal’s possible violations around robocalls to the FCC following media reports of a change to PayPal’s terms. In an update to the… Read More

 Microsoft today announced that Visual Studio 2015 (VS 2015), the latest version of the company’s integrated development environment, will launch on July 20.
This latest version greatly emphasizes cross-platform development, with support for targeting Windows, iOS and Android, in part through its support for the Apache Cordova project and Xamarin’s app development platform. Read More

 It’s been said that Facebook Video is becoming bigger than YouTube, as brands upload more video directly to the social network than ever before. Now, Facebook is catering to the needs of video publishers with the launch of a new Videos tab in Page Insights, which will allow publishers to better track the performance of videos across data ranges, along with other data, in a more… Read More

 A week after Craigslist finally got its emancipation from eBay, some closure on another long-standing legal battle for the listings site: the local listings giant has now finally reached a settlement with big data company 3taps over claims that 3taps and companies using its data were scraping and stealing Craigslist IP, and counterclaims from 3taps that Craigslist was violating antitrust laws. Read More