Category: Tech news

 Experts could debate all day long the ingredients for a killer entrepreneurial climate and the virtues of one city over another. But if I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that every region in this country is different. While each might aspire to be the next Austin or Menlo Park, you can’t start with what you don’t have. Read More

 Facebook is testing a new feature called “Saved Replies,” which will allow business Page owners the ability to write, save and then re-use canned messages when communicating with their customers over Facebook. The addition will save businesses time when handling incoming customer service inquires and responding to other customer feedback via the site. The feature, which is… Read More

 Pinterest unveiled what it’s calling “buyable pins” at an event at its headquarters in San Francisco today. Here’s how it works: Rich Pins — pins which have much more information than a normal link, such as the ingredients for a recipe — will get a new button that allows users to purchase things directly from partners that it’s working for. Users will… Read More

 Disney is expanding its foray into the connected toys (or toys-to-life) category with a new offering called Playmation, which combines figurines and wearable devices from popular franchises including Star Wars and the Avengers with each other to create interactive adventures for kids to explore, all without requiring any kind of data connection or dedicated console. The first Playmation… Read More

 Mozilla’s Firefox now features a full integration with the Pocket read-it-later service for saving text and video. In addition, Reader View now offers users a distraction-free reading mode that’s similar to Apple’s Reader mode in Safari and the functionality of the popular Readability add-ons and bookmarklets. Read More

 Brazil is one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets, with 90 million smartphones in circulation among a population of about 200 million, and today a fin-tech company that has focused on catering to that growing group of users has raised a significant round of funding. Nubank, which has developed a platinum Master Card credit service that you apply for and manage using only… Read More

 Instagram continues to expand its ad program, today announcing three broad changes — new ad formats, new ad targeting and new ad-buying tools. For Instagram users, the most obvious change will be the new formats. They’re called “action-oriented” formats, and they’ll appear as buttons below an image. As you can see in the mock-ups above, they’ll give you… Read More

 Email clients are like noses: everyone’s got one and they’re absolutely essential to your survival. There’s Mailbox and Outlook and Gmail and all the rest and now there’s Spark. Created by the folks who brought you Readdle, Spark splits your emails up into three sections – important notes, “pins” or starred emails, and all the rest. It is also Apple… Read More

 The U.K. government is lining up a new piece of legislation to expand the state’s digital data capture powers. The incoming bill, the Investigatory Powers Bill, was announced in the Queen’s speech this week. It has not yet been published in draft form so specific details of what is being planned remains unclear, but in recent times the Conservative party has been banging the drum… Read More

 Millennials are rejecting home ownership across the land. Millennials aren’t buying crap anymore, destroying businesses that, well, sell crap. Millennials are changing the workplace to be, I kid you not, more friendly to “millennial values.” Millennials this, millennials that, and those are just some of the stories published this week on this critical, hot-button issue.… Read More

 “Germany is the fourth-largest GDP in the world and only an hour timezone away from Israel, and yet most Israeli entrepreneurs strive to collaborate with San Francisco, with 10 hours difference, and 20 hours flight. This is silly,” Eden Shochat recently said to me during a coffee in Herzliya, the “Palo Alto of Israeli Silicon Valley.” Read More

 When Yhat, the company that has developed solutions to help organize data scientist teams, graduated from the Y Combinator, winter 2015 class, the founders had a goal to raise a million dollars to keep growing the company when they returned to New York. They may have aimed too low.  The team actually was able to raise $1.5 million in their oversubscribed round, thanks to the interest in… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, May 29, 2015. Google I/O, cross-platform Web/App mashup, and more media meltdown. Situation Normal. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Kristie Wells, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Gillmor.
@stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks / @tinagillmor Read More

Silicon Valley is full of big, disruptive ideas. Now a certain mall in downtown San Francisco would like to capitalize on some of that innovative gold in the hopes that it will bring online shopping into the physical realm. So it built a tech space for startups. Bespoke is 35,000 square feet of co-working and event space with an open floor plan, comfy couches, startup offices, Rubik’s… Read More

 I’m a serial entrepreneur with an inferiority complex. I was diagnosed by an overly-cheerful psychiatrist about a year ago as I was getting help for anxiety and depression, which were a result of this underlying disorder. This is how I’ve overcome it. Read More