Category: Tech news

 Sure, there are still plenty of hurdles left when it comes to pulling off the Olympics in Rio this summer, but paying for stuff apparently won’t be among them. Visa is announcing its third wearable payment option set to coincide with the games, joining the aforementioned ring and a band co-branded with Brazilian bank, Bradesco.
The Swatch Bellamy, a partnership between the credit card… Read More

 Worldpay, the third-party payments processor for Etsy, has come forward after six days of silence, acknowledging that it is experiencing a service disruption. A significant number of Etsy transactions have been disrupted by ongoing payment processing outages. Over 7000 posts have been made by frustrated merchants in an Etsy forum dedicated to the problem. This is almost twice the volume… Read More

 The developing world can’t join the age of social video since streaming sucks up too much costly data and is sluggish on slow connections. But Facebook wants to change that with a new video download option it will start testing on July 11th with a small percentage of users in India. While on WiFi, people can sync videos to their device for offline viewing within Facebook’s… Read More

 At $80, the Jabra Halo Smart is in a bit of a gray area. It’s hardly what the majority of users would call “cheap,” but it still comes in well below other wireless offerings from companies like Jaybird. They’re not fitness buds, nor are they focused on sound or comfort. Jabra, much to its credit, went a different route entirely, eschewing the focuses of most… Read More

 With Dalian Wanda Group’s $3.5 billion acquisition of Legendary Entertainment in January, this year’s media and entertainment M&A activity kicked off with a bang that hasn’t slowed down. Comcast’s $3.8 billion acquisition of DreamWorks Animation just three months later continued the trend of content consolidation and IP aggregation. The common denominator is access… Read More

 Last Wednesday, Google Capital ventured into the world of investing in publicly traded companies, announcing it has backed Care.com, a nine-year-old platform that connects people with caregivers and which went public in early 2014.
With Google Capital investing $46.35 million, it became Care.com’s single largest shareholder, according to the New York Times. The deal also sent… Read More

 With the incessant talk about unicorns, it’s easy to lose sight of the opposite end of the investment funnel. What feeds the industry is not unicorns, but first venture round companies. Yet raising investments from institutional venture capitalists is becoming increasingly difficult for early-stage entrepreneurs — and it likely won’t ease up through the remainder of 2016. Read More

 Welcome to the bot-centric future, which is set to make smartphone users navigate the internet in a chit-chat fashion with a virtual assistant. But “assistant” will soon become too impersonal… Alexa, Siri and others will cross the line from impersonal robots to entities that know our habits, routines, hobbies and interests just as well as, if not better than, our closest… Read More

 New-market disruption is a rare phenomenon and usually comes in waves in conjunction with some form of dramatic technological advance. Many disruptive companies (both new and existing) created new markets in periods following the introduction of PCs (Apple, Microsoft), mobile phones (Apple, Samsung) and cloud computing (Facebook, Airbnb). And this is what we are seeing in the enterprise… Read More

 The British public recently voted to leave the European Union. Only history will tell whether it was a good decision or not. The immediate issue is… what happens now? Those in financial services and technology firms will have to grapple with the unraveling of treaties that will have a direct impact on their business. But first… what happens next? Read More

 Let’s pause on the robots-are-taking-over-our-jobs panic for a minute and take a look at how some robots — telepresence robots, specifically — could be used to give access not only to jobs but to meaningful and rewarding careers for a historically overlooked and excluded population — people with disabilities. Read More

 Governor Jerry Brown has recently proposed legislation that would streamline the path for large scale development across California. It could have a huge impact on growing housing supply in San Francisco specifically, which suffers from NIMBYism and a lengthy, local review process for building developers. Read More

 The imagination is a powerful thing, and what it creates may in fact be powerful beyond our imagining. That was certainly the case with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, the creation of which is documented in a new short film, “Foreveryone.net,” which was directed by Jessica Yu and is currently showing at the Seattle International Film Festival. Read More

 The Pro Football Hall of Fame is a hallowed enough place, being surrounded by bronze busts of the most legendary players that the sport has ever had. But walking through the historic grounds in Canton, Ohio later this month may give you goosebumps for another reason.
That’s because, the Hall of Fame is set to debut its A Game For Life exhibit with 4D holographic representations of… Read More

 There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago, Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it’s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion run rate. In fact, according to data from Synergy Research, in… Read More