Category: Tech news

 Google and Kaggle today announced a new machine learning challenge that asks developers to find the best way to automatically tag videos. The challenge, which comes with a $30,000 prize for the first-place finisher (and $25,000, $20,000, $15,000 and $10,000 for the next four teams), asks developers to classify and tag videos from Google’s updated YouTube-8M V2 data set. This data… Read More

 The front page of reddit is a good place to catch up on the latest internets, or so an increasing number of users think. To broaden the appeal of the site to lurkers and first-time visitors, the company is making some small but significant changes to the front page that gets presented to anyone who isn’t logged in. Read More

 U.K. startup PawSquad is expanding coverage for an on-demand service that brings vets to pets — offering convenience and reduced stress for pet owners willing to stump up a little more than they’d pay for a check-up at a bricks-and-mortar vet. Read More

 Last year, Huawei leapfrogged a couple of fellow Chinese hardware companies to secure its spot as the third-largest smartphone maker worldwide. As the company takes aim at the No. 2 spot, it’s apparently working to differentiate itself even more from the competition by developing more proprietary tech, adding to a list of components that already includes its own in-house chips. According… Read More

 Tesla CEO Elon Musk addressed President Trump’s immigration ban on Muslim majority nations directly via Twitter on Wednesday, saying that the order is “not right” and refers to it as a “Muslim immigration ban” — but he then deleted those tweets almost immediately, referring to them as “earlier drafts.” The specific wording was very strong,… Read More

 It’s no secret that the criminal justice system in the United States is broken. With 2.2 million people behind bars in prisons and jails in the country, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. In our first episode of Bullish since taking a break in May, I sat down with Chris Redlitz, a general partner at Transmedia Capital and co-founder of The Last Mile, to talk about… Read More

 There are a few beautiful lines in Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows that came to me when I saw that Nokia – or whatever shambling shell of Nokia remains – is re-releasing the 3110, that old warhorse of a phone that carried so many of us from the turn of the century into the modern age of endless information. “It’s strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in… Read More

 LinkedIn has neglected two big opportunities Facebook is now capitalizing on: helping lower-skilled workers and people who aren’t actively looking for a job. Today Facebook is rolling out a slew of new Jobs features we spotted it testing last year. They could hurt LinkedIn’s growth prospects and divert recruiting ad dollars. Business Pages will now be able to post job openings to… Read More

 Valentine’s Day is over, but if you’re looking for a way to make those fleeting expressions of vestigial patriarchy more permanent, Rare Carat has the service for you. Read More

 Following a high-profile and very heated court hearing over ownership of the patents for gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled today that the technology belongs to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, not the University of California Berkeley, STAT News first reported. This is a big blow to UC Berkeley,… Read More

 There are many toys on the market today that promise to teach kids programming skills, and a good percentage require the use of a connected tablet or smartphone. At a time when parents are already struggling to keep kids’ screen time to a minimum, father and entrepreneur Nader Hamda wanted to build something different. He also observed a lot of expensive educational toys on the market,… Read More

 If you’re freaking out about Facebook starting to autoplay videos with sound by default, at least it won’t pause or play on top of music you’re already listening to through apps like Spotify. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch today that sound will not autoplay on Facebook videos if you’re already listening to something on your device. You’ll have to tap the sound… Read More

 The college textbook industry has no shortage of startups, from ebook company RedShelf to big players like rental service Chegg all the way to Amazon itself. But a SF-based company called Verba, which has flown mostly under the radar since 2008, has weathered the slow change of the textbook industry.
VitalSource, the ed-tech arm of book distribution company Ingram is today announcing their… Read More

 Security researchers have wanted a peek at Wickr’s code since the secure messaging app launched in 2012, and now they’re finally getting that chance. Wickr is publishing its code for Wickr Professional, the subscription-based enterprise version of its free messaging app, today for public review. The public review builds on private third party code reviews by security experts like… Read More

 This year’s E3 promises to be a big show – if only thanks to the fact that the gaming convention’s organizers are opening it up to the masses. As expected, Microsoft is going to add considerable fuel to that fire as well, making the mysterious Xbox Project Scorpio a centerpiece to its own big event. Carve out some time on Sunday, June 11th, because that’s when the… Read More