Category: Tech news

 The U.S. House of Representatives has passed H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, sending it on to the Senate and from there, hopefully anyhow, to the President. The yeas were swift and unanimous. Read More

 Pan-European train travel booking website Loco2 has launched its first app, letting iOS users book and pay for trips via their phone. Launching an Android app is also on its roadmap for this year. Read More

 So you wanna buy a startup? But how do you get the deal signed and roll their team into yours? Consulting behemoth Ernst & Young wants to have the answers and rule M&A advisory services in Silicon Valley. So today it acqui-hired Tasman Consulting, Bay Area specialists in integrating acqui-hires and acquisitions into their new parent companies. Read More

 Get ready for lots of virtual cubes in virtual reality! Minecraft: Gear VR Edition is now available on the Oculus Store for $6.99. The blocky blockbuster was met with major fanfare when it was revealed last month that it was landing on the Gear VR.  I had a chance to try it out and wasn’t overtly impressed, but it is undoubtedly a major development to have such a triple-A title landing… Read More

 I’ve officially been at TechCrunch for a week and a half now, which I’ve been informed is the hot sauce anniversary. You know, the one where Thrillist sends you a bottle of scientifically-engineered hot sauce made from peppers with names like the Trinidad moruga scorpion, Carolina reaper and the only slightly less ominously named ghost pepper. And I’ve been assured that the… Read More

 Samsung unveiled the Gear 360 virtual reality camera last month at Mobile World Conference. People were generally impressed, but without a price tag most withheld judgment. Well today onstage at the Samsung Developer’s Conference, the company revealed that the 4K 360-degree cameras will be going on sale April 29 in select countries and….. we still don’t know the price. We… Read More

 Somewhere, Elon Musk is bored; you can tell because he starts tweeting like crazy about colonizing the solar system. “Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018,” SpaceX tweeted this morning, apropos of nothing. More details followed, in typical Musk style. Read More

 In an entirely unsurprising ruling, a federal judge has sided with the FTC in the agency’s lawsuit against Amazon, which had said that the company did not do enough to safeguard customers against unauthorized in-app purchases made by children. According to the FTC’s original complaint, Amazon billed its customers millions of dollars in these charges. The problem came about… Read More

 A body was found in a conference room at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino this morning, according to several news reports. The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department is currently investigating the incident. A public information officer for the department did not return a request for comment. Dispatchers received an emergency call at 8:35 a.m., according to a San Jose Mercury… Read More

 Menlo Ventures, the 40-year-old, Sand Hill Road venture firm, has raised a new, $250 million “special opportunities fund,” says a spokeswoman. (The SEC filing is here.) The idea: to address a comparative dearth of capital for startups that are looking for Series B and C funding, now that non-traditional players like Fidelity and BlackRock are investing less actively in privately… Read More

 After months of anticipating what the hell Nic Cage was going to be doing in the new Snowden movie, we finally get to see him in the first official trailer! Sadly, Cage’s role is only that of a random NSA guy urging Snowden to “find the terrorist in the Internet haystack.” This is the first we’ve seen of the new movie chronicling the plight of Edward Snowden since… Read More

It might not be the laptop the world is ready for, but it’s the laptop the world needs. And you can get it in pink now. The post Review: Apple MacBook appeared first on WIRED.

The new Roku Streaming Stick is basically a $100 Roku 3 box for $50. How can you lose? The post Review: Roku Streaming Stick (2016) appeared first on WIRED.

 A new high-end smartphone manufacturer Sirin Labs has raised a $72 million seed round from Singulariteam founder Moshe Hogeg, Kazakh businessman Kenges Rakishev, and the Chinese social networking service Renren to launch a secure smartphone to the consumer market. Read More

 As the Tribeca Film Festival winds down in New York City, we’re highlighting one of the most tech-driven parts of the event — Storyscapes, which showcased 10 works of virtual reality and interactive storytelling. At Storyscapes, I talked to the creators of Notes on Blindness (which won the juried Storyscapes award), 6×9, The Argus Project and Network Effect, among others.… Read More