Category: Tech news

 As a former patent examiner, I recognize that the patent system, in its purest form, should protect and incentivize innovation through a limited-term contract, offering exclusive monopoly rights covering a technology, product or design element. In practice, it’s much uglier, and by no means did the Founding Fathers intend for patents to be utilized toward incremental monopolization ploys. Read More

 “Fresh air” is a concept most often associated with the “great outdoors”. Dyson is looking to make your home nature fresh by ridding it of indoor pollutants with the Pure Cool Link purifier fan. Hopefully, the engineering that went into James Dyson’s new gadget is better than the branding. The company’s proposed ingenuity is that the Pure Cool Link is a… Read More

 We’ve been at Microsoft’s Build conference all day, getting up close and personal with the latest and greatest from Microsoft. With announcements about Xbox, Cortana, Windows 10, new developer tools, the introduction of a Bash shell to Windows (!), cool new API tools for developers to use and much more, it has been a big day for Microsoft fans. The event wasn’t quite… Read More

 When a new category of gadget appears, it’s understandable when the vanguard devices aren’t the most well designed, or are resistant to disassembly and repair. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the first headset from Oculus, iFixit has found. Read More

 Most mapping companies are pretty good at getting you from point A to point B. They usually optimize for the quickest or shortest route, but rarely take into account the risks of navigating the shady end of town. RedZone, an iOS app launched today, adds a soupçon of street smarts to your navigatory efforts. Read More

 “Nature’s ready-made robot platforms.” That’s how a new paper from researchers at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University describe insects — it’s excellent shorthand for the level of “playing god” we have attained, whether you find it fascinating or abhorrent. Read More

 Want to know if you have the “athlete gene” or if you’re actually related to the weirdos who claim you as a family member? Get your collection tubes ready, citizen scientists, Bento Lab’s DIY DNA analysis kit is here and ready for the in-home lab.
Normally you’d order a kit somewhere like 23andMe, spit in a tube and mail it off for results in six to eight weeks. Read More

 San Francisco-based Branch International, or Branch.co, raised $9.2 million to bring digital financial services to mobile phone users in Sub-Saharan Africa. Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A round.
Branch’s free-to-download Android app is a kind of “branchless bank for the next generation,” says founder and CEO Matt Flannery. Read More

 “Ex-con” isn’t normally something you find on a founder’s resume. But Google employee Wael Ghonim went to jail for sparking the Egyptian Revolution. Now he might be wearing some golden handcuffs instead, as his startup Parlio just became Quora‘s first acquisition.
Parlio’s goal was to spread knowledge — a similar objective to Quora. But rather than… Read More

This week on Bullish, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the queen of Imgur, a.k.a. Sarah Schaaf, head of community at Imgur. We talked about IRL communities versus digital communities, what it takes to build and sustain virtual communities and the role these places have in our society.
“At this point, people are finding their people and finding their homes online,” Schaaf said. Read More

 In an article in The Information, Fadell said that he didn’t think Dropcom cofounder and CEO Greg Duffy had “earned” the right to report to him directly. Fadell also explained away an exodus of Dropcam staffers by suggesting they were subpar. “A lot of the employees were not as good as we hoped,” he told The Information. It was “a very small team… Read More

 It’s easy to get caught up in the new, cool thing aspect of transportation tech and apps, but there’s some real social benefit and freedom to be found here. Take, for instance, Moovit’s latest upgrade. The public transportation app recently added features to make it easier for blind users to take transit using VoiceOver (iOS) and TalkBack (Android) integration. The app… Read More

 Microsoft’s recently launched, A.I.-powered bot Tay may have embarrassed the company when Twitter users taught the machine how to be racist, but Microsoft hasn’t given up on the future of bot development. It’s just getting started. At Microsoft’s annual Build conference in San Francisco today, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company’s plans to bring the world of… Read More

 In case you thought the recently and abruptly terminated fracas in San Bernardino was an isolated incident, the ACLU has put together a handy map of cases around the country where the All Writs Act has been used to justify an order to unlock a smartphone. Read More

 Scentbird, the subscription-based service for perfumes and colognes, has added another $2.8 million in venture funding to its $1 million seed round as it launches a new service that expands beyond the subscription model. Read More