Category: Tech news

 Earlier this year, app store analytics firm App Annie predicted that China could overtake both the U.S. and Japan in terms of revenue generated from iOS applications as soon as this year. The year isn’t yet half over, but that prediction appears to be on its way to coming true: China has just moved past Japan to take the number two position for iOS revenue – up from third place… Read More

 Quartet Health, a company that wants to close the gap between physical and mental healthcare, has raised a $40 million Series B led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). Existing investors Oak HC/FT Partners, F-Prime Capital Partners, and Polaris Partners also returned for the round. Read More

 It was a futuristic week in tech as Facebook laid out its 10 year plan at F8, SpaceX landed a rocket on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean, and another $100M was pledged to send spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. These are tech’s biggest headlines of the week. Read More

 Microsoft is making Skype in the browser plugin-free, the company announced this morning. But before you get too excited, be aware that this new experience only works in Microsoft Edge for now. Other browsers, including IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, will continue to require plugins as before. Skype for Web, the browser-based version of the online communications software rolled out publicly… Read More

 On February 16, Apple CEO Tim Cook published an online letter to customers explaining the recent back-and-forth between the FBI and Apple and reiterating Apple’s very clear stance on the issue. Like many who depend on their mobile device to securely manage their data, Apple wants to remain a credible part of a person’s trust infrastructure and is adamantly opposed to any type of… Read More

 We’re excited to announce that Jessica Alba and Chris Thorne will be speaking this May for our first Disrupt in Brooklyn. Alba last appeared at Disrupt SF 2012 when The Honest Company was just starting up. At the time, she and CEO David Lee talked about the passion that drives founding a startup. This time around, there’s a bit more to talk about. Read More

Amazing image quality coupled with a small and lightweight design make the X70 an excellent travel and street-photography camera. The post Review: FujiFilm X70 appeared first on WIRED.

 We’ve written about a number of air purifiers before, but Sprimo is taking a different approach — instead of trying to clean all the air in the room, it creates a personalized stream of clean air for individual users. Now, a phrase like “personalized stream of clean air” might sound a little silly, but CEO Ray Combs and CTO Harold Han (who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from… Read More

 At Day 1 of Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out the company’s 10 year roadmap and made tons of new announcements. From the Live API to chatbots to a whole new VR camera, here’s everything you need to know. Read More

 As previously announced, Facebook today opened its Instant Articles format to all developers. Using Instant Articles, publishers can show Facebook mobile users a fast-loading and mostly distraction-free view of their posts while still also showing them a limited amount of their own ads (or use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize their content) and measure pageviews through tools… Read More

 No sooner had Facebook announced it was opening up Messenger for developers to build bots, when two players with an eye on sales and service in the enterprise — Salesforce and Zendesk — announced new products to manage Messenger traffic on their respective platforms.
Salesforce announced Salesforce Messenger, a way for customers to communicate directly with brands through the… Read More

 There’s an epidemic of stolen videos on Facebook. Business Pages rip videos from YouTube, TV or other Pages, and then post them on Facebook as their own to gain more engagement and fans. This is known as “freebooting.” Video makers were pissed off about it because they were losing video views to others who didn’t have permission to use their clips. Slate sounded the… Read More

 Habito, founded by Daniel Hegarty, pitches itself as the UK’s “first digital mortgage broker” — though Trussle may disagree — and offers an ‘fully automated’ brokering service to help you find the most suitable mortgage and make an application. Read More

 You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter. Big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s scary thought experiments around what AI might lead to could well sustain a new… Read More

 Facebook launched its Messenger chatbot platform today, but how will it make money on it? By charging businesses to send re-engagement messages to people who’ve already voluntarily started a conversation with them. These “Sponsored Messages” are currently in testing, with a small test of advertisers, and are being heavily monitored by Facebook to prevent them getting spammy.… Read More