Category: Tech news

Don’t want to install an underground irrigation system that talks to your phone? Try these low-cost connected gadgets. The post Review: Iris Smart Home Watering System appeared first on WIRED.

 India has successfully completed their first small step toward joining the other players in the market of reusable spacecraft. On Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization (India’s version of NASA) launched a 22-foot winged spacecraft to an altitude of 65 kilometers (about 40 miles) and navigated the vehicle back down into the Bay of Bengal, east of India. The entire mission… Read More

 E Ink, maker of the ePaper displays found in many e-readers (maddening to have three different e prefixes in one sentence, but it’s unavoidable), announced a brand new type of reflective display that can show a huge range of colors — but the tech is only going to be deployed as signage for now. Read More

 On Dynamic Signal’s early pivot and lessons learned from 25 rounds of venture funding. Read More

 Apple is preparing an SDK that would allow developers much greater access to Siri — and the improved assistant will power a stationary hub device like Amazon’s Echo. A report from The Information tallies with what we’ve heard over the last few weeks; expect an announcement, if not the device itself, at WWDC in June. Read More

 Chilling news regarding climate change continues to arrive on a regular basis, even as Antarctica warms dangerously and further troubling global symptoms emerge. It’s a shame global governments seem unable to mobilize to the degree necessary to keep Antarctica safely frigid and other climate-change-related catastrophes at bay. It’s also a shame those same governments don’t… Read More

 Every successful new application built today will be an intelligent application. Read More

 Rideshare wars just got even more interesting. Uber has confirmed a strategic investment and auto leasing deal from Toyota.
“Toyota is a global leader in the automotive industry and Toyota vehicles are among the most popular cars on the Uber platform worldwide,” Uber said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We are proud to partner with Toyota in a variety of ways, including the… Read More

 ChargePoint announced this month that it had raised $50 million in its latest round of funding, thanks in large part to Linse Capital. That makes a total of $164 million raised from investors like BMW iVentures and Siemens, among others. ChargePoint already has the largest EV charging network in North America, with 28,000 stations installed since 2007. According to the U.S. Department of… Read More

 Like everyone else these days, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, the company has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” which lives inside the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing-powered personalized news reading app, News Pro. Rowe is an experiment with helping you keep up with the news that matches your current interests. You can ask the bot to show you news… Read More

 Uber sent an email to LA riders yesterday announcing they are doing a temporary promotion that looks very much like a loyalty program. Each UberBLACK ride taken will give riders 200 points, and when they amass 3,000 total points they will be rewarded with a free $25 Uber ride. Essentially, the program is buy 15 get 1 free. While the company has tested “VIP” loyalty programs in… Read More

 About nine months after taking on the role of head of community management at Reddit, Kristine Fasnacht (u/krispykrackers) has left the company. In a post titled, “Admin released from captivity, reintroduced to Reddit community,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote: I am sad to share that u/krispykrackers is leaving Reddit. Over the past five years, she has done an incredible amount… Read More

 Funky physics and controls make mobile games fun. You tap against gravity in Flappy Bird, fling on a trajectory in Angry Birds and press to maintain momentum in Tiny Wings. So when two of Facebook’s top designers left to build their own apps, they wanted to bring a new gesture to gaming… and let worms, not birds, be the stars. Pinchworm sounds simple, but its the mapping of the controls… Read More

 Placemeter helps businesses and municipalities measure what’s happening in front of their stores, on their streets and in their parks.
In its first iteration, the service, which relies on real-time video feeds, was able to quantify the overall number of objects that it saw and distinguish between pedestrians and vehicles.
Now, the service is getting significantly smarter. By default… Read More

 Through the power of smart sensors and the magic of the cloud, parched children is on its way to become a thing of the past — at least, if the Gulülu team have anything to say in the matter. The company’s bottle, launching on Kickstarter today, is the newest, most high-tech weapon in the battle to get their kids to imbibe enough liquids throughout the day. Read More