Category: Tech news

 A year after Thumbtack raised $100 million to expand its marketplace for home services and other professional freelance jobs, the startup is making its first acquisition to beef up its engineering and product teams. It has acqui-hired talent from HeartThis, an app with 2 million users that lets consumers shop across multiples stores from a single portal. You might think that this is a… Read More

 Google says one in 20 searches on Google Search are for health-related information and since February of this year, it’s been using its Knowledge Graph to quickly bring up medical facts when it spots a query about common health conditions. At the time, it was showing these improved results for about 400 conditions, but starting today, it’s rolling out an update that will bring… Read More

 Dear friends: there is now a robot that can kill starfish underwater by hunting them down and injecting them with poison. The starfish in question is the Crown of Throns Sea Star, a destructive seadweller that has been hurting coral reefs for a while. They are so pervasive that they create massive populations – 100,000 per kilometer – in a few years. So now there’s a robot… Read More

 United States District Judge Lucy Koh today approved a $415 million settlement in the Silicon Valley no-poaching case. The dollar figure comes after a previous $324 million settlement was rejected as being too low. More than 64,000 workers are part of the case. The suit stems from a secret agreement among large tech firms like Google, Apple and Intel to not poach employees from one another. Read More

 Round watch lovers rejoice! Samsung has finally lifted the covers off its new smartwatch, the Samsung Gear S2, and we got to take a look at it. Samsung product manager David Ng ran us through some of the features and I came away impressed by the new bezel, the unique watch faces, and the general build quality. Read More

 As we enter the next Information Age, we must take only a few things with us. For example, this ashtray. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all you need. And this remote control. And also this teeny tiny Apple computer. Read More

 There are a number of apps that let smartphone users make video calls today, including Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts and more, as well as built-in apps like Apple’s FaceTime, for example. But this morning, mobile carrier T-Mobile announced plans to make video calls a native feature on select T-Mobile smartphones. Read More

 Microsoft today announced that it has acquired VoloMetrix, a service that specializes in analyzing organizational performance using anonymized data it gathers from across a company’s corporate communications systems. Organization analytics is something Microsoft itself has been looking at, too, and its Delve organizational analytics service is currently in preview and scheduled for… Read More

 The dream of indoor location sensing has always been just that – a dream. The difficulty of Wi-Fi tracking and other technologies has made it hard for anyone – from businesses to regular users – to figure out where they were in a venue. But the folks at Estimote, a Polish beacon company, may have just cracked the code.
Using something they’re calling… Read More

 Facebook is working to give public school students an education that’s more tailored to their needs.
In a blog post today from Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, the company announced that over the past school year it has partnered with Summit Public Schools, an innovative school system in the Bay Area to improve and test their new learning technologies. Read More

Motorola’s been making smart, adaptive phones for years. Now it’s making good ones.

The post Review: Moto X Pure Edition appeared first on WIRED.

 Flying drones are all the rage right now. The latest DJI Phantom is smoking hot. But sitting in your very own one and flying it? That’s uncharted territory…until now. Check out this dude in the UK hovering above the earth in a contraption with “54 counter-rotation propellers and six grouped control channels with Hobbyking stabilization.” It’s hard to tell just… Read More

 If you felt bad for the folks who work at “discreet encounter” site Ashley Madison, don’t. They’re just fine, apparently. According to this lovely press release, the company behind Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media, has had “hundreds of thousands of morons who want their info stolen people sign up for the service” since the hack heard round the world. Tons… Read More

 Despite the attention over the past year, the lack of diversity in tech — both in race and gender — has not markedly changed. Only 3 percent of tech CEOs are women, and just 15 percent of startups have at least one female founder. Most agree that something needs to be done, but much of the attention is misplaced into a caricature. What’s missing? The role of women as angel… Read More

 Samsung has just announced their new smartwatch, the Samsung Gear S2. The watch is unique in that it has a round rotating bezel – the thing on the edge of the crystal – in addition to two buttons on the side for home and back. It runs Samsung’s Tizen OS, a system used by Samsung in their original Gear models. Samsung, however, isn’t announcing compatibility today… Read More