Category: Tech news

 Microsoft has been making notable improvements to the experiences on its Twitch competitor, Beam, since it purchased the startup this past August.
A major update was just launched globally for the service which highlights a new faster video player, Xbox Live sign-ins, and a redesigned home page that makes the service’s various communities more visible to users. These features had… Read More

 Mozilla is setting itself up for a big year ahead. The organization’s flagship Firefox browser, for example, is about to get a brand-new rendering engine. After a few years of missteps and misplaced priorities (remember Firefox OS and Hello?), it looks like Mozilla, which is more important to the open web ecosystem than most people realize, is back on track. To get 2017 started,… Read More

 There’s a small glimmer of sunshine for what has been an extremely gloomy year for Samsung. A court in Seoul’s Central District has rejected an arrested warrant for Samsung vice-chairman/heir-apparent Jay Y. Lee that was issued by prosecutors earlier this week. The warrant was a result of bribery and embezzlement charges that also landed South Korea’s recently impeached… Read More

 As we approach the coming apocalypse we need bread, circuses and odors to keep us entertained. That’s why CamSoda, a NSFW webcam site, has announced the OhRoma, a VR-compatible scent mask that injects the smells of roses, perfume and private parts into your VR webcamming experience. Yeah. You read that right.
Why do you want to do such a thing? Well, here’s what the CEO… Read More

 This is the Leica M10, but it’s not your father’s (or grandfather’s) familiar M series camera. Its release date is already pegged for tomorrow, January 19th, so a new interchangeable lens Leica is a surprise: the M10 with a new sensor, body and 30% larger field of vision. It’s the second M series camera to be digital; the first was the Leica M8 which launched nearly… Read More

 Holy cow, we have quite the beat for Netflix.
Netflix added nearly 2 million new subscribers domestically and around 5 million subscribers internationally in the fourth quarter this year, the company said today. Wall Streets expectations for the fourth quarter fell far below that, coming in at 1.38 million and 3.78 million respectively. We’ll address the financial parts of the company… Read More

 Salesforce announced today that it plans to open an engineering and innovation hub in the Seattle area, greatly expanding its presence there. Company co-founder Parker Harris says the office, which is located in the Nine Two Nine Office Tower in Bellevue, will be dedicated mostly to supporting the company’s artificial intelligence initiative, introduced last Fall, which… Read More

 Mirai, the botnet that subverted thousands of poorly secured internet of things devices and set them to work on denial of service attacks, has been revealed to be the creation of a young developer who found that the black hat fit better than the white. Read More

 All the top streaming services will now offer offline access to selected content, it seems. Following Netflix and Amazon, Hulu’s CEO Mike Hopkins has confirmed that it will offer users the ability to download content to their devices in a matter of months. The company is currently working on the technology and the rights to make the feature possible, Hopkins said. The tease about… Read More

 Applications for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt NY are now open. We’re searching for new, up-and-coming startups to launch and compete on the  TechCrunch Disrupt NY stage. Why Apply? Your team will get to pitch for six minutes and then face Q&A from an all-star list of judges. Past Battlefield judges have included Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Fred Wilson (Union Square… Read More

 If you’re enrolled in the beta version of the Cortana app for Android, you’ve already got access to one of its more interesting updates in recent memory. As spotted by MSPoweruser, Microsoft has introduced a feature that brings its AI assistant front and center on Google’s mobile OS. Enabling “Add Cortana to my lock screen” will add a shortcut to the app directly… Read More

Atlassian buys Trello for $425 million, Uber debuts Movements to monitor traffic data, Netflix and Amazon get a couple of Golden Globes, Amazon buys harvest.ai and the CES Hardware Battlefield winner is Siren Care. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Civil liberties group Liberty has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund a U.K. High Court challenge to the bulk powers contained within a new domestic surveillance law. Read More

 Despite hiccups, Yahoo’s planned sale to Verizon appears to be moving forward — but some portions of the company will be left behind and renamed Altaba Inc.
Yahoo is hanging on to its 15 percent stake in Alibaba and its 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, and those assets will survive as an investment company under the new name Altaba Inc., as the rest of Yahoo integrates with Verizon. Read More

 Bumble will soon release BumbleVID, which will allow users from across the dating platform to create a story with unlimited 10-second videos, which will each delete after 24 hours. Here’s how it will work. Users record 10-second videos from directly within Bumble. These videos then post to their profile, and can be viewed by anyone who comes across their profile while swiping. You can… Read More