Category: Tech news

 Disrupt San Francisco 2015 is still a few months away, but if you’re a startup looking to get your product in front of some of the best entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists around, it’s never too soon to start planning to attend the show. This year’s conference runs from September 21 – 23 at San Francisco’s historic Pier 70, and we can’t wait to see… Read More

 In a brief blog post released today, Google said that it will soon introduce a formal process that will allow web users to request removal of “revenge porn” images from Google’s search engine. “Revenge porn” is a term that’s used to refer to images that someone uses to publicly humiliate another person – for example, an ex-partner who decides to… Read More

 When we randomly got an invite to a Bay Area preview event for McLaren’s new $3 million hypercar a few weeks ago, we had to attend. Who could be there? Would we run into some familiar startup faces? Some venture capitalists who’ve managed to beat the S&P 500 and felt like rewarding themselves? Read More

 Former Facebook and Apple engineer Scott Goodson is joining Pinterest to run the company’s mobile platform and web teams, focusing on improving the app’s performance across various devices. Read More

 Another day, another robotic bartender that can make your favorite drinks using a pod-based system of flavors and booze. This time the robot is called Bartesian and it uses little K-Cup-like pods to squirt out Margaritas, Cosmopolitans, and Uptown Rocks. What of the booze, you ask? The Bartesian uses little glass bottles full of various liquors to add a little kick to your drink. You can fill… Read More

 Some bad news broke for Uber today — the California Labor Commission ruled that one of the company’s drivers was an employee.
Uber has long insisted that those drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that’s a key part of the business model. However, Uber’s situation isn’t nearly as dire as it first seemed. Read More

 Today LeadPages announced it has raised a $27 million Series B round, led by Drive Capital with participation from Foundry Group and Arthur Ventures. LeadPages allows a user to create a custom landing page, all backed by a suite of digital marketing tools designed to drive conversion rates on the page. Since the company launched in January 2013 they have worked with over 35,000 customers… Read More

 Remember Ello? The social network that promises to be ad-free will drop an iPhone app starting tomorrow, June 18. The announcement about the app is already on the homepage of the Ello website in big flashing words that read “Coming June 18th.”
The company also sent me a very cryptic box of thingamajigs today. Something that looks like a piece of bread made out of wood, some… Read More

 With big initiatives under way from Google, Apple, Daimler and more, the autonomous car is driving into view as the future of transportation. Whenever we imagine this technology, the reality always seems distant. Indeed, the dominant narrative of Silicon Valley companies’ development efforts is one of stealth, with eventual glitzy launches far in the future, following lengthy secret testing. Read More

 The US Office of Personnel Management is beginning to reach out to victims of last week’s extensive and unprecedented hack of its records. According to documents seen by TechCrunch, the OPM is partnering with the Department of Homeland Security’s US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to identify the extent of the damage done by the hackers. The government is also… Read More

 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Wednesday that it plans to fine AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless carrier by subscribers, $100 million for misleading consumers about its unlimited mobile data plans. The FCC charges that AT&T throttled data plans for subscribers grandfathered into its unlimited data plans and “failed to adequately… Read More

 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page on Tuesday asking the company to detail how it selects content for the YouTube Kids application, and what steps Google is taking to ensure children are not being exposed to unsuitable content. The letter comes a couple of months after a number of consumer advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)… Read More

 Microsoft fired a number of executives today, including Stephen Elop, an executive that returned to the company following a tenure as Nokia’s CEO. Elop made his way back to Redmond after Microsoft bought the majority of Nokia’s hardware assets. And thus did Microsoft’s phone chickens come home to roost, and temporarily impair the company’s earnings per share. Read More

 Japanese mobile messaging app Line has turned to keyboard apps as it looks to grow its service in the U.S. and other parts of the world outside of Asia. Read More

 Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and some of the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. Read More