Category: Tech news

 When Etsy bought Grand St. last April, the plan was to let Grand St. continue to operate its maker marketplace for tech hardware. But that’s about to change. At the end of this month, Grand St. will stop processing orders and on October 1, listings on the site will become inactive. At that point, Grand St.’s site will just be a gallery of content and photos. That’s… Read More

 So much for that IPO, I suppose.
Good Technology, a long-time IPO candidate with reams of public financial data, was snapped up by BlackBerry this morning for $425 million. You might think that the number isn’t too bad. It is: The company raised $291 million from investors. So its sale is nearly certainly a down-exit, compared to its late private valuations. Read More

 The concept Galaxy Note 5 is at once a thing of genius and a nod to a benighted world before the modern touchscreen. Born in the swamps of the resistive LCD, the stylus lurched onto dry land and lives on as a reminder of our history. It is, to be sure, useful but on the Galaxy Note 5 it is a vestigial tool useful in parts of the world where handwriting is easier than tapping. But what does… Read More

 Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Michael Arrington, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session 1pmPT/4pmET.
Live chatroom during broadcast
Gillmor Gang on Facebook HERE
Our other show, G3, archived HERE on Ustream
…and G3 on Facebook. Show us some love! Read More

 “Bug fixes.”
“Jam packed full of Super Amazing Things.”
“Every 3 weeks, we polish up the Pinterest app to make it faster and better than ever.”
“To make our app better for you, we bring updates to the App Store every 2 weeks…Every update of our Facebook app includes improvements for speed and reliability. As other new features become available… Read More

 Mozilla is beginning to preview its iOS Firefox browser, rolling it out today for testing in New Zealand, according to a company blog post. The goal is for the company to gather data so that they are able to bring Firefox for iOS to the App Store for the rest of the globe “later this year.” Firefox specified the goal of the preview in a blog post: Our goal is to create a… Read More

 Kano‘s crazy cool educational PC is about to get a bit more visual. Kano CEO Alex Klein tweeted out that the company has launched a pre-order for an HD display kit. Kano, which raised a $15M Series A in May, has been aiming to create an invaluable educational experience for kids by helping them get acquainted with how computers work through putting the kit together. The Raspberry… Read More

 Not so long ago, the financial products maker Intuit said it wanted to be “the operating system for small businesses.” Today, seemingly, it wants to be cloud-based accounting and tax services provider for all small businesses. Indeed, two weeks ago, Intuit announced the sale of three well-regarded businesses — Quicken, Quickbase, and Demandforce — that it no… Read More

 Facebook is unveiling an improved version of its Conversion Lift measurement tool, which first launched in January. Previously, Facebook allowed you to measure whether your ad campaign was actually improving online and offline sales. Now, you can also test different ads to find the best approach. Read More

 Amazon announced this afternoon that it’s acquiring Elemental Technologies, a backend mobile video service.
It’s paying around $500 million in cash for the company, according to a new report from The Information. (Subscription required.)
Amazon didn’t immediately return a phone call or email request for comment about that figure.
The deal was orchestrated by… Read More

 If you casually follow tech industry headlines, you might be convinced that the app store model is the bright future of software distribution. So when I say, “I have clear evidence that the app store model is dying,” you may look at me as skeptically as you’d view any wild-eyed street-corner prophet. Read More

 Chrome started out as one of the least memory hungry browsers on the market, but over time, it developed a bit more of an appetite for RAM. Now, however, Google is starting to get back to basics and the latest Chrome release (version 45) focuses on making the browser faster and more efficient. As the company announced in a blog post today, Chrome 45 includes a number of updates that focus… Read More

 The future lies with Californian politicians. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee are examples of politicians who are no longer stuck in the mindset of the past, perhaps because they are all very familiar with models of Silicon Valley innovation and entrepreneurship. Read More

 More and more Americans are buying into the Apple smartphone ecosystem, largely at the expense of Samsung.
A new report from the digital media analytics company comScore suggests that Apple’s iPhone is continuing to further its lead in the U.S. smartphone market, now accounting for 44.2 percen Read More

 Can a mobile classified app topple the behemoth that is Craigslist? A company called letgo aims to find out. Its app, which lets users buy and sell items locally, has quietly grown to over 2 million downloads since its launch earlier this year. And today, the company is announcing having raised $100 million in Series A funding from South African media company and tech investor Naspers… Read More