Category: Tech news

 Pinterest said it has hired Li Fan, the former head of image search at Google, as the company’s new head of engineering. Much of Pinterest’s most promising technology involves searching for objects within photos and then using that technology to rank and display the most relevant content to users, whether that’s through search or the traditional feed. Users searching for… Read More

 President Barack Obama told reporters at the G-20 summit in China that he has been in discussions with other world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, about creating a set of standards for cyber warfare. The debate over how and when to hack another nation has also reached the presidential race, with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton calling last week for increased cyber… Read More

 Facebook and Apple recently declared that there’s no wage gap between men and women at their respective companies. That’s cool, I guess, but that type of men-versus-women analysis is far too simplistic. There’s still a major wage gap that affects transgender and gender non-conforming people in the tech industry. Read More

 We’re hearing from sources that Postmates, which is among a few companies that are seen as operating in the difficult on-demand space, is raising at least $100 million in a round led by Founders Fund. Sources stressed that the round has not closed, and that things may change over time. Despite the challenges of working in an on-demand economy — which can sometimes lead to… Read More

 WebRTC, a relatively new web standard that allows you to make audio and video calls from your browser without plugins, is becoming increasingly popular. But as more companies and products adopt it, the need for getting better insights into how these calls perform (or when they drop and why) also increases. Callstats.io specializes in monitoring WebRTC connections and helps its customers use… Read More

 With the sale of marijuana either for recreational or medicinal purposes becoming legal in more and more states, new and existing retailers are struggling to find ways to keep track of inventory while remaining compliant with various state and federal laws.
Former Outright co-founders, a cloud-based financial management application, are tackling this problem with their next venture, Green Bits. Read More

 This is the ultimate guide to how Facebook chooses what to show in your News Feed, and how you can get your content seen by more people.
Understanding how the News Feed works is tough because the algorithm is always changing. So TechCrunch launched this research project for today’s 10th anniversary of News Feed, interviewing Facebook’s team members, compiling the company’s… Read More

 Sony is having a PlayStation event tomorrow in New York, where it plans to provide an update on its PlayStation business and PS4. Most people agree that means it’s going to show us a couple of PlayStation hardware updates, including a previously announced more powerful PlayStation 4 (supposedly codenamed “Neo”) with support for 4K and more robust virtual reality, and a… Read More

 The European on-demand delivery fall out continues. This time it’s the turn of France’s Tok Tok Tok, a Postmates-styled same-hour delivery company, which sent an email to customers earlier today announcing that it was shutting down and that the startup’s tech platform has been acquired by an unnamed “leading player” in the industry. Read More

 Amazon announced an update to Fire TV and its smaller companion, the Fire TV Stick, which will bring expanded Alexa-powered voice search to both devices, as well as a way to receive personalized recommendations from top streaming sites, like Netflix and HBO. The company notes that its voice search feature will now work across over 75 apps and channels, which is more than any rival… Read More

 Earlier this year, Trainline acquired Captain Train for quite a bit of money. Now, Trainline is trying to unify its train ticket booking system. First, Captain Train is now called Trainline, just like its parent company.
The logo, the app and the website are now all called Trainline. If you go on thetrainline.com, you can book tickets for the U.K. On trainline.eu, you can get tickets for Europe. Read More

 The battle over noncompetes is a modern-day rendition of an age-old trope: the big corporation versus the little employee; Goliath versus David. The only difference? In the fable, Goliath was brutish and slow, and everyone knew he was the bad guy. Today, Goliath is smart and backed by an All-Star team of lobbyists, and he’s doing his best to convince us it’s David we should be… Read More

 The cloud has become the default for practically every industry, from storage to transportation to communication to retail. But there’s one fundamental space out of which it has yet to take a bite. Ironically, software development — the process of editing, building, debugging and analyzing code that makes everything in the cloud possible — is still primarily done offline. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 2, 2016. Waiting for latency can be a lonely thing, but the media march toward live streaming reaches new urgency. Plus G3 with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, Lisa D’Apolito, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor @jtaschek @fradice… Read More

 I was linked to Revel Systems CTO Chris Ciabarra’s recent TechCrunch piece “IoT’s Killer App is Home Security” by a friend and found myself a bit taken aback by what I was reading. I’m sure he’s a very nice man, but the assertions made about being able to rely on IoT in a home security context are, to put it mildly, misguided and troubling. As you may… Read More