Category: Tech news

 Google Home has spent the past year catching up. No surprise, really. The Echo had a roughly two-year head start on the device. This week, the smart home hub celebrated the one-year anniversary at I/O of its announcements with a few key additions aimed at making its product a true competitor. From the looks of it, the company is playing the long game here, seeding mobile devices with Assistant… Read More

 Tech titans like IBM and Google have emerged major players in New York’s startup ecosystem. Here’s a look at how their New York offices stack up to their west coast counterparts. Read More

 On this week’s Technotopia I interviewed Cindy Gallop, the outspoken TED speaker and found of MakeLoveNotPorn. Cindy worked tirelessly to bring SexTech and FemTech out of the shadows and she’s bringing all her attention to bear on the creation of technology that will bring us closer together and make us happier – something few founders think about.
Gallop believes that the… Read More

 As we inch closer to E3, games are top of mind.
The Destiny 2 gameplay trailer was finally released earlier this week, which you can check out below.
But as Forbes pointed out, there is still a hint of mystery and a dash of disappointment when it comes to the Destiny 2 PC port.
For one, Destiny 2 for PC is not officially slated for the same September 8 release date as its PS4 and Xbox One… Read More

 Call it the Triumph of the Stacks. I attended Google I/O this week, and saw a lot of cool things: but what really hit home for me, at the keynote and the demos and the developer sessions, was just how dominant Google has become, in so many different domains … and, especially, how its only real competition comes from the four other tech behemoths who dominate our industry’s… Read More

 The world’s most popular cryptocurrency is now worth over $2,000 per coin.  That’s according to a range of bitcoin exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken. That valuation puts the total market cap of bitcoin — the total number of coins in circulation — at $32.92 billion. Bitcoin has been on a tear this year, as this chart from Coindesk shows. Bitcoin first broke… Read More

 SoftBank’s huge $100 billion investment fund — the largest tech fund in history — announced its first close today… and it’s huge. The Japanese telecom giant revealed that its VisionFund has closed an initial commitment of $93 billion from a bevy of high profile backers. They include Apple, Qualcomm, UAE-based Mubadala Investment Company, Saudi Arabia’s… Read More

 Startups put great effort into finding the perfect name. Ideally, it should be short, memorable, descriptive, and easy to pronounce. Names that meet all the criteria are commonly taken, however, so most founders find a compromise. They settle on a creative misspelling, add a word or just string together sounds they like. In the end, the hope is that a well-named startup will have an easier… Read More

 People are taking photos and videos all over major cities, all the time, from every angle. Theoretically, with enough of them, you could map every street and building — wait, did I say theoretically? I meant in practice, as the VarCity project has demonstrated with Zurich, Switzerland. Read More

 Deep Algo was one of the more fascinating companies on display in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The French team aims to make coding languages more accessible for the masses with SaaS (software as a service) offering that promises to do for languages like C++, C Sharp and Javascript what WYSIWYG does for HTML. It’s a pretty bold claim, but the company is confident that… Read More

 Portland, Oregon, continued to keep it weird (and cute) this week when it rolled out Parking Kitty, a new app that lets you pay for metered parking. The app is based on Passport, one of the largest parking payment vendors in the United States. “We didn’t make a lot of changes,” said Malisa McCreedy, the parking division manager at the Portland Department of Transportation. Read More

 Salesforce is on a steady climb toward a $10 billion revenue run rate. And while it’s not quite there yet, its recent, nearly $2.4 billion quarter puts it squarely in the neighborhood. According to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s revenue growth results give it “the fastest growth of any top [five] enterprise software company.” It’s clear… Read More

 The next few months will be full of bitter dissent regarding the FCC’s net neutrality rules, how they should be enforced, and indeed whether they should exist at all. Several primary arguments against the rules as they stand have appeared as talking points or recurring themes; they are worth considering seriously and refuting definitively if possible. That’s what I’m hoping… Read More

 Uber has issued a sternly worded letter to Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of a lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets from Google parent Alphabet’s self-driving technology unit Waymo. The gist? Comply with the court’s orders or risk being terminated. Read More

 The FAA’s drone database hit a major snag this week, courtesy of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. The D.C.-based court sided with drone hobbyist John Taylor, who argued that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have jurisdiction over what the law classifies as model aircraft. “Taylor does not think that the FAA had the statutory authority to issue the Registration Rule… Read More