Category: Tech news

In celebration of 4/20 on Sunday, Mat and Mike spend this week’s show getting high — on technology!

Little more than six months after Apple tried to rev up a more diversified market for its iPhones by releasing a “premium” model (the 5s) and a “cheap” model (the 5c), the supposedly fancier phone is now available for free.

Bonobos have earned a reputation as a “sexy” ape. Sexual activity — in many creative forms — plays a large role in bonobo society. Sexual contacts occur often, in virtually all partner combinations and in a slew of different positions. Bonobo society is also known to be more egalitarian and peaceful, especially compared with their […]

Welcome to the weekly roundup of comments on WIRED that really added something to the conversation. Below are the best conversations going on across the site this week.

Osmia bicolor is one of the first bees of spring, emerging as early as February in their native range of South England and Wales. As solitary bees, there are no queens and workers; females build their nests alone. Males emerge, mate, and then die.

What makes these little bees so captivating is where they make their nests. They repurpose empty snail shells, belonging to a small group of bees known as “helicophiles” (snail-lovers). As a single mom, letting a snail do all the construction work for a home seems much more sensible than building your own from scratch.

Colorful hummingbirds and butterflies flit across the page in constant motion, like an Audubon guide come to life

Adding a physical keyboard to an iPad mini is an easy and inexpensive way of converting the small tablet into something closer to a laptop. OK, more like a netbook.

 If Bo knows football and every other sport, Karl Jacob knows startups. Depending on how you count it, Jacob, a former Apple intern and Benchmark EIR, is on his sixth (or seventh?) startup: Hangtime, which aggregates future events in a single app and database. In his career, Jacob has raised over $200 million in venture capital across the companies he’s founded, and in this discussion, he… Read More

 SpoonRocket is about to have some competition in the lunch on demand market. Sprig, currently dinner-only, will soon start serving lunch, according to a source who said Sprig now delivers 1000 meals per day. Sprig just raised a $10 million Series A two weeks ago, and is wasting no time in ramping up the fight for our stomachs. Read More

 In the year since its launch, Tuition.io, the company billing itself as the Mint.com for managing student loans, has grown to manage over $1 billion in loans. The company, which provides a monitoring and management service for student loan payments, has just picked up an investment from Raj Date, the former second-in-command at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency, through Fenway Summer,… Read More

 Attention, startups!

This is a code red situation.

I have infiltrated the Disrupt Startup Alley application system and left registrations open. (Cue evil laugh.) Read More

 The tech/startup industry is about as incestuous as it gets, and that’s without any clear tools to help people switch from one moonshot to the next. So imagine a world in which there are two!

Allow me to proudly introduce PoachBox, the anonymous employee auction site, and Underdog, the NY-based site for finding your next employer. Read More

 On-demand grocery startup Instacart is working on raising a big new round of funding, according to sources. The new financing, which we’ve heard is being led by non-VC investors, would value the company at $400 million. Read More

 AngelPad, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator founded by early Googler and tech investor Thomas Korte, is holding demo day for its Spring 2014 class in San Francisco today. Since its inception back in 2010, AngelPad has established itself as a top player in the ever-expanding field of tech incubators. Now with operations in New York City (AngelPad’s brand new NYC office is pictured… Read More

 Passwords, geez those things suck. You may not need them to login to your computer in the future, and Chromebooks might be the first PC device to offer that feature natively, according to some hints found in the developer preview channel of Chrome OS by Android Police (via 9to5Google). Early code included in the latest build suggests there will one day be a way to unlock your Chromebook just by… Read More