Category: Tech news

 Adobe today announced that it plans to acquire Livefyre, the service that’s probably best known for its online commenting system. On top of this service, the company also offers a number of tools for brands to engage with their audiences as well, which is likely what Adobe was most interested in. Read More

 Bowers & Wilkins, an audio gear brand that has been familiar to millions for decades, is being bought out by EVA Automation, a two-year-old company that has never released a product. Yet the old company’s name and CEO will remain. You’re not going to hear about a weirder deal today. Read More

 The local transit app Moovit announced today that it will soon be integrated with the ride-sharing app Uber in 131 cities in 22 countries. This is kind of the chocolate and peanut butter of urban travel. Moovit uses official transit data plus crowdsourced data to give riders the best information about potential routes. Is the train running slow? Take the bus or find a bike sharing service. Is… Read More

 Prete is a new blowout startup launching today in San Francisco and Los Angeles that wants to hook you up with unlimited hair styling. No cuts, color or anything else, just as many blowouts as you want for $129 a month. Some of you may recall a story I wrote about a similar blowout service coming to SF called Treat that wanted to use established salon space for unlimited blowouts. Treat gained… Read More

 Google today made HTTPS connections the default for all of the sites on its Blogspot domain. Google first enabled HTTPS for Blogspot last September, but at the time, it was an opt-in feature. Starting today, encrypted connections are enabled by default. It’s worth noting that this only applies to Blogspot blogs that fall under the .blogspot.com domain. HTTPS is currently not available… Read More

 Spotify is one of the more popular music streaming apps, but it’s not necessarily the most beautifully designed (that was long-lost Rdio, unfortunately). Navigating through the various sections of its app took a lot of tapping, and often wasn’t very intuitive. Today, Spotify is attempting to improve its interface with a redesign, arriving first on iOS, that puts its key sections in… Read More

 Disrupt NY is right around the corner. The event starts on May 9th and we’re delighted to reveal the agenda. The lineup is stellar and for the first time, we will be hosting Disrupt NY in Red Hook, Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. We say this every year, but this is set to be our best Disrupt NY yet. The conference kicks off on May 9th and is a packed three days that… Read More

 Despite the headlines today, Uber says it does not have plans to nix surge pricing in the U.S. It did away with surge in Delhi, India, but has now reinstated the feature there as well. An earlier report from NPR claimed Uber would be doing away with surge, a feature on the Uber app that bumps prices up in a particular area when there’s high demand for rides. Surge pricing benefits drivers… Read More

 What’s more lucrative than a video ad? Multiple videos in a single ad. To help businesses show different sides of their products in vivid motion, today Instagram is launching video ad carousels. It’s a savvy way for the company to give advertisers more flexibility through horizontal space so as not to further clutter the vertical scrolling feed. Now the carousels Instagram introduced… Read More

 Designer Fund, a San Francisco outfit that looks to invest in seed-stage startups that feature designers on their founding teams, has raised $20 million in funding from unnamed individual investors, most of them successful designers looking to support the next generation. The four-year-old firm was founded by Enrique Allen and Ben Blumenfeld, who remain its only general partners.… Read More

 The makers of a virtual nutritionist app, PlateJoy, have partnered with Instacart to offer same-day delivery of the foods that they recommended to users through the PlateJoy app A subscription to PlateJoy costs $59 for six months. Users get food recommendations for themselves and family, cooking tips and recipes, and access to a personal nutritionist they can consult through PlateJoy. Founder… Read More

 A giant war room of diversity advocates in Silicon Valley has formed under the name Project Include. The effort consists of former Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou, Kapor Capital Partner Freada Kapor Klein, Slack engineer Erica Baker, ReadySet founder Y-Vonne Hutchinson, angel investor Susan Wu, Cathy Labs CEO bethanye McKinney Blount and Atipica CEO Laura I. Read More

 Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Solair, an Italy-based IoT service that was founded in 2011 (and not the U.S.-based company that makes retractable awnings). Solair already used Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to offer its services, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft plans to integrate its technology into the Azure IoT Suite. For now, though,… Read More

 Some startups raise a lot of money with much fanfare before they’ve ever shipped a product, but some grow under the radar, building something that clicks, and then slowly amassing users and revenues before most even realise they’ve arrived. Now, one of the latter — an education startup called Age of Learning — has moved into the billion dollar valuation club on… Read More

 While there are a number of mobile apps that serve as a panic button of sorts – alerting friends or family when you feel you’re in danger – last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon winner Witness resonated with the event’s audience because it also promised a way to discreetly record incidents of civil disobedience and police brutality at a time when… Read More