Category: Tech news

 There’s a lot to love about being a venture capitalist. You meet with smart people every day. You make money regardless of whether your investments work. People assume you have smart opinions about things. Strange as it may seem, however, a growing number of illuminati are passing up the chance to work with established firms to do their own thing. Read More

 Livestreaming app Meerkat has launched an embeddable player so that content being broadcast to the app can be embedded into and viewed on other digital services. The first implementation of the player is with the Discovery Channel, for its annual Shark Week multi-platform event — which begins July 5. Read More

 French startup Snips just raised $6.3 million (€5.6 million) in a seed round led by The Hive, with participation from Eniac Ventures, 500 startups, Brent Hoberman, Xavier Niel and Bpifrance. The company wants to add some sort of artificial intelligence layer on top of your smartphone so that you can use your phone more efficiently. In pragmatical terms, Snips will release in the near future… Read More

 Disney has now somewhat belatedly joined the ranks of the numerous app publishers offering their own custom keyboards for iOS 8 users with the launch of an iOS application called Disney Gif. The new app is a mobile keyboard extension that lets you share Disney and Pixar-themed GIFs via text messaging as well as email and social networks. At launch, the app includes over 200 GIFs, the… Read More

 The Apple Watch is expanding beyond the launch group of countries today, shortly after the device first became available for in-store purchase at Apple Retail with a reservation. The international sales expansion includes Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan as of today, and the next group includes the Netherlands, Sweden and Thailand starting July 17.… Read More

 Kindle e-book reader owners will now have a new way to socialize with their friends about their favorite books or book quotes by way of mobile messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, texting, and more. The change is indicative of the trend toward private sharing as the preferred means of connecting with friends, versus larger, more public social media platforms like Facebook… Read More

 One in five Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental health or substance disorder, but 70 percent are undiagnosed. This fact prompted David Ebersman, former CFO of Facebook and Genentech, to launch Lyra Health earlier this year. Read More

 Some of you may know that I hail from Canada, the country to the north of most of you that only occasionally enters your consciousness when someone mentions Drake or Bieber. Our nation’s symbolic birthday is July 1, next week, and so some #brands are looking to capitalize. Molson, maker of ‘Canadian’ beer, is one such #brand, but its project involved some real technical… Read More

This French Wi-Fi speaker’s design is wild–its sides expand and contract as the bass booms and the treble twitters.

The post Review: Devialet Phantom appeared first on WIRED.

 It turns out Angela Merkel wasn’t the only state figure from an American ally whose phone calls were being monitored by the NSA. Today, WikiLeaks dropped another bombshell collection of secret government documents, “Espionnage Élysée,” detailing the extent to which the NSA has spied on French officials over the past several administrations. Read More

 There’s been some debate about how many consumers are actually cutting ties with their pay TV providers and replacing them with over-the-top streaming media services – a trend generally referred to as “cord cutting.” But a recent study  indicates that the number of cord cutters in North America is, in fact growing – in 2014, 8.2 percent of former pay TV… Read More

 Uber made an important m?o??ve last March, a move that reinforced my vision of where the Internet is headed. For the first time, users are able to summon an Uber ride from other applications without ever opening the Uber app itself. Some of you have already encountered this new capability firsthand. This “programmable Web” was a key enabler of Siri and is a decades-long… Read More

 Immersive headsets continue to lift off company drawing boards, in the hopes of powering a new wave of virtual reality in the consumer space — whether it’s the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, Sony’s Project Morpheus, Microsoft’s Hololens or HTC-Valve’s Vive, to name a few VR devices in the works (some others: FOVE, Razer… the list goes on). Dutch startup… Read More

 Reddit had its 10th birthday today and to commemorate the major milestone, they released a ton of interesting data on the site’s subreddits, users and content. Amusingly, they also released info on their most popular comments and posts of all time, several of which were about dicks, go figure. In terms of the site’s most viewed posts, Reddit’s extremely popular AMA with… Read More

 Your speaker is in my lightbulb! No, your lightbulb is in my speaker! Thanks to the new LightFreq Square2, we’re both right. The Square2 is a lightbulb with built-in speaker and intercom. To use it you simply unscrew your current lightbulbs and screw in the Square2. Then, via the app, you can stream music to each lightbulb separately or all of them simultaneously and even talk to other… Read More