Category: Tech news

Facebook plans to bring Internet to the third-world via drones, satellites, lasers, and more. Today Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s Connectivity Lab which will work on the Internet.org project. It’s powered by talent acqhired from solar-powered drone maker Ascenta as well as poached from NASA. Read More

Facebook’s quest to become a newspaper has seen it launch multiple News Feeds, the standalone Paper app, trending topics, and more. But you’re not always able to stop what you’re doing and read what you discover, so Facebook is now testing a read-it-later Save button on feed articles that creates a section of bookmarked websites on your profile. Read More

Today the government announced that the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, has passed the 6 million signup mark, putting it within striking distance of its original goals. The enrollment level is notable due to the law’s troubled technological rollout. The catastrophic failure of Healthcare.gov is the stuff of legends now. To accelerate sign-ups and generate more attention, the Obama… Read More

This morning Microsoft unveiled and launched Office for iPad, as well as new tools to help companies manage devices that run on platforms other than Windows. The move, while expected, underscored a shift at Microsoft, a lessening the internal hegemony of Windows, long the product considered to be the soul of the software company. At the end of the event, Microsoft’s newly installed CEO… Read More

In the long, kabuki saga that is the fall of Mt. Gox, one point seemed always clear: the company lost loads of bitcoin to hackers using a bug called transaction malleability. It seems, however that this is wrong. According to a team at the ETH Zurich University, the company allegedly lost only 386 BTC or $200,000, nowhere close to the 744,408 bitcoins rumored to have been lost in the attack. Read More

TechCrunch has learned from sources that Dropbox is in talks to acqui-hire Berlin-based Readmill, the social and shareable reading platform. Read More

At a media event in San Francisco today, Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella announced the launch of the company’s new Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS). The company says this bundle of services will make it easier for IT organizations in large businesses to manage all of the devices their employees carry with them, whether they are Windows devices, Android phone or tablets, iPads or iPhones. Read More

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz just announced that it has closed its Fund IV. And it’s a massive $1.5 billion fund for all sorts of investments from seed rounds to late-stage rounds. Previously, Andreessen Horowitz had raised $300 million in 2009 (Fund I), $650 million in 2010 (Fund II), $200 million in 2011 (Growth fund) and $1.5 billion in 2012 (Fund III). Read More

Apple is said to be readying to release its next iPhone in both 4.7- and 5.5-inch screen sizes, with a launch as early as September, according to a report by Japanese business news publication Nikkei today. The production cycle is already ramping up, with component makers producing elements like fingerprint sensors and LCD driver chips, according to the paper, with LCD mass production kicking off… Read More

In another validation of the bitcoin space, YC’s biggest payments company, Stripe, said it has started to test bitcoin and ACH payments with a select number of users. They didn’t disclose who they’re partnering with, so it appears that they might be going their own way on this. Two of their better-known and funded competitors for processing merchant payments using bitcoin are Coinbase, another… Read More

Google has seen a tremendous increase in requests for information made by the government, the company revealed in an update to its Transparency Report today. The updated report includes the number of requests made during the second half of 2013, and Google notes in its blog post announcing the news that total requests are up 120 percent since Google first began publishing these numbers. Google… Read More

Zoobean, one of many startups to experiment with the “Netflix for kids’ books” business model – meaning, a subscription-based children’s books service where new books arrive monthly – is today shifting to become a broader recommendations platform instead. Going forward, the company aims to become something that’s more like a “Pandora for… Read More

Putting full-bore Windows 8 on an 8-inch tablet that weighs less than a pound is no easy feat. But with the ThinkPad 8, Lenovo has crammed an awful lot of computer into a tiny, unobtrusive package.

A solid, though relatively unexciting, upgrade to the previous One, this is instantly one of the two or three best Android handsets out there.

For years, pundits and analysts have been suggesting that the only way for Apple to compete against cheap Android phones, especially in China and throughout Asia, was to produce a cheap iPhone. Well, Apple finally relented (sort of) when it released the cheapish iPhone 5c –only data suggests that the Chinese prefer the higher-end iPhone. Read More