Category: Tech news

 For long months now, Facebook Comments have been riddled by some of the most transparent, eye-roll-inducing “I make a good salary working from home” spam you’ve ever seen. Every mail service can filter it out; but Facebook? Home to cutting-edge AI research, massively scalable services, some of the smartest software people in the world? Nope, spam appears to be beyond their… Read More

 Siri is good for a lot of things, but she generally doesn’t care much whether you sound your usual perky self. Launching today is EmoWatch, a new app for your Apple Watch that will help you track your emotional state. EmoWatch is a technical demo for Smartmedical Corp’s Empath API, and it does what it needs to: Showing a read-out (in the form of a graph) of your moods throughout… Read More

 As a Berlin-based VC firm focused on SaaS, we often get questions about the current state of the European cloud software landscape. To be able to answer these questions more precisely we decided to analyze each major European ecosystem, starting with France. Our goal was to find all the relevant players in the French cloud ecosystem — from early-stage startups to large public companies. Read More

 The annual White House Science Fair is always a heartening occasion. Watching President Obama ramble around and shoot the breeze (and sometimes marshmallows) with a bunch of smart, nerdy kids is entertaining, and the projects are often pretty impressive. This year’s fair is, of course, the last in the president’s term, and it promises to be a good one, if the list of exhibits… Read More

 At 4:43 pm EST, SpaceX successfully launched their next resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). In addition to a seamless launch, SpaceX landed the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket on an autonomous drone ship for the very first time. Landing from the chase plane pic.twitter.com/2Q5qCaPq9P — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 8, 2016 This was SpaceX’s fifth landing… Read More

 There’s a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as Nao, as creepy as Spot and BigDog, or as anthropomorphic as Atlas, it might be more practical than all of them. It walks on two legs, but not like a man, or even a bear. This one, designed by Alphabet-owned Schaft Inc, has its own uniquely robotic form of locomotion. Read More

 As more and more online content ends up hosted on Facebook, it becomes more important for Facebook to provide ways for publishers and creators to make money. That’s why some changes announced today to the social network’s branded content and ads policies could be a big deal.
Under the new rules, verified Facebook Pages can now share branded content (i.e., “any post &#8212… Read More

 BMW just launched a new car-sharing service called ReachNow that will enable Seattle residents to access 400 cars that they can pick up and drop off pretty much wherever they like, as long as that’s not on the outskirts of town. Eventually, the idea is to expand into cities nationwide. BMW’s isn’t a revolutionary concept at this point. Daimler has a similar service… Read More

 Phil Libin has made his first investment since joining General Catalyst in a bot company called Begin that’s co-founded by GDGT co-founder Ryan Block, who left AOL Alpha in September last year to pursue the new venture.
This is Libin’s first investment in bots, but it certainly wont be his last, as he will be primarily focusing on bots for the next few years. Begin will be… Read More

 Uber driver Michael Pelletz is launching a new ridesharing service with a twist: All the drivers and passengers will be women. Chariot for Women will be active in the Boston area on April 19. But does the world need another ridesharing service? Especially one so specific? It turns out maybe it does. “The premise is the same as all the other ridesharing services,” Pelletz said in… Read More

 This one’s for you, procrastinators. We are giving you one extra week to get tickets to Disrupt NY at the early-bird price point of $1,995 per ticket, a full $1,000 off the full retail price of $2,995. You now have until next Friday, April 15, to get in on this incredible discount, so you’d better stop putting it off and get on over to our ticketing page and get your Disrupt… Read More

 A draft version of a bill on encryption sponsored by Senators Burr and Feinstein has made its way to the internet, and it’s exactly as bad a proposed law as everyone worried it would be. The suspiciously (but mercifully) brief Compliance with Court Orders Act, as it stands in draft form, is the technological equivalent of requiring all pigs to fly. Read More

 WordPress.com is adding HTTPS support for all its blogs. If you have a custom domain or have a blog under the wordpress.com domain name (like bestcrabrestaurantsinportland.wordpress.com), you’re good to go.
While many social services like Facebook and Twitter have supported HTTPS for a while now, WordPress.com was still lagging behind for custom domain names.
Since 2014, WordPress.co Read More

 This week, Tesla revealed its newest model; the HTC Vive VR headset dropped; the internet saw the largest leak of private documents ever; and Facebook’s chatbot plans were revealed. Here are the top tech stories from this week. Read More

 I’ve spent most of my life in and around schools. First as a student, then as a teacher and lately as an innovator building tools and launching programs. As Nelson Mandela said, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Despite its importance, education seems to have been missed by the Internet revolution. When I walk down the hall of a… Read More