Instagram to roll out anti-harassment tools

instagram icon 2016 iOS Online harassment is a big problem, with 40 percent of all people on the internet having reported experiencing some form of harassment online, according to Pew Research Center. In order to combat harassment on Instagram, the photo-sharing platform is gearing up to let people with “high volume content threads” filter their comment streams, or just turn them off entirely, The… Read More

Gilded as charged

reddit-paid1 The threat of advertising skulks outside the periphery of every free site or service, but the more terrifying thought is that, to paraphrase “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” the ads are coming from inside the house. That’s what Reddit may be facing with a new form of advertising announced by the social news site earlier this week. Read More

Soylent founder’s abandoned “eco-living experiment” could land him in jail

NEW DELHI, INDIA  NOVEMBER 21: Rob Rhinehart, CEO and founder of Soylent at Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2014 on November 21, 2014 in New Delhi, India. (Photograph by Pradeep Gaur/Mint Via Getty Images) Soylent’s Rob Rhinehart is facing criminal charges and fines up to $4,000 for allegedly refusing to remove a shipping container he placed on top of a hill behind his home in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The head of the meal replacement startup weirdly named after a movie where they ground up and served people in drink form was charged with unpermitted… Read More

Dunkers competes with one million downloads in its first week

dunkersgif Dunkers, a new game by Colin Lane (known for Wrassling and other fun sporty games), has racked up 1 million downloads since it was released last week. The success in large part is thanks to heavy featuring from Apple; it has been featured more than 150 times worldwide. Currently in iTunes, it sits at No. 1 sports app, No. 4 sports game, No. 8 free game and No. 34 free app overall. The game… Read More

Groupon reports better-than-expected revenue, still not profitable

Groupon Deal site Groupon saw its shares rising today in after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected second quarter earnings report.
Analysts expected the Chicago-based company to report negative earnings per share of $0.02 on revenue on a non-GAAP basis, and $713.8 million in revenue, according to Estimize data.
But Groupon beat Wall Street revenue expectations with second… Read More

Security experts have cloned all seven TSA master keys

tsa-master_keys-travelsentry_xmas-100673377-primary.idge_-906x603@2x Key escrow — the process of keeping a set of keys for yourself “just in case” — has always been the U.S. government’s modus operandi when it comes to security. From the disastrous Clipper chip to today, the government has always wanted a back door into encryption and security. That plan backfired for the TSA.
The TSA, as you’ll remember, offers a set of… Read More

Will Facebook be your next call center operator?

robot-customer-service How would you describe Facebook? Historically, it’s been the social hub of billions of users looking to stay connected with friends and family. Yet in recent years, it’s become more difficult to describe Facebook in a few words — it’s a place for businesses to share info with consumers, advertisers to market to target audiences, media to deliver news and a place to… Read More

LivBlends renames itself Replenish and gives us a first look at its futuristic smoothie machine

open_unblended_revised_e_deck Nearly two years ago LivBlends was a Y Combinator smoothie delivery startup. The company has evolved since then, raised $3.8 million in seed from various investors and switched its name to Replenish. It’s also moved away from delivery and into manufacturing a line of Keurig-like self-cleaning smoothie machines. Replenish is still in the testing phase of the product, but… Read More

Apple sold its billionth iPhone last week

billionth_iphone It would have been a nice piece of information to share during yesterday’s earnings report, but Tim Cook and Co. were clearly too preoccupied with service revenues and R&D. And hey, no better way to kick off a midweek meeting than a little positive news — particularly if you can carry some of yesterday’s expectation-beating positivity into the following day to help… Read More

Facebook sees 2 billion searches per day, but it’s attacking Twitter not Google

Facebook Search Facebook wants to be known as a place to search for mentions of current news in hopes of drawing more public chatter that normally ends up on Twitter. While Facebook stumbled with its natural language Graph Search, it refocused on keywords, and is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts. That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion… Read More

Hyperloop One unveils new manufacturing plant in Nevada

Screen Shot 2016-07-27 at 4.56.59 PM Hyperloop One is today announcing the opening of its first manufacturing plant.
Called Hyperloop One Metalworks, the 105,000 square-foot building in North Las Vegas will be the new professional home of many of the company’s 170 employees, including engineers, machinists and welders. These folks will build and test a number of components for the DevLoop, a full-system prototype of the… Read More

GoPro sales beat investor expectations but are still in steep decline

GoPro Omni Action-camera maker GoPro reported second quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Shares quickly rose 10 percent in after-hours trading, but then were down 3 percent as investors dug through the earnings release. And then they were back up about 3 percent. The company posted revenue of $220.7 million, above analyst forecasts of $194 million. Adjusted earnings per share was negative… Read More