Category: Tech news

 Tinder is launching a new partnership with Zedd to offer his upcoming album, True Colors, for an exclusive price of $3.99. Not unlike past partnerships with artists like Jason Derulo, Tinder and Zedd are working together to create a special profile for Zedd that is pushed across Tinder’s network of U.S. users. In this case, however, folks that swipe right on Zedd will be sent a link… Read More

 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Thursday morning that the chamber would hold a rare Saturday vote on two pieces of legislation related to NSA surveillance. The vote comes as key NSA programs are set to expire on June 1 without action from Congress. Read More

 Is that a message from some rando, a spammer, or the nice guy you met yesterday? Facebook Messenger wants to give you some clues before you consider responding. The app will now surface publicly shared biographical info like current city and job title at the top of message threads from people you haven’t chatted with before. The update starts rolling out today on iOS Android in U.S., U.K. Read More

 What if you could avoid pre-roll advertisements for irrelevant products? That’s the dream that Game.it is trying to turn into a reality. The app is an ecommerce platform that only shows you an advertisement on a product that you’re interested in buying. The advertisements are recycled from the brand’s existing commercials, and then users are sent into a quick trivia game… Read More

 It’s pretty odd hearing a not-for-profit organization like Mozilla talk about how it wants to help advertisers strengthen the conversation between brands and its users — especially given that I’ve never met anybody who wanted to have a conversation with a brand. But that’s the world we live in. Mozilla today launched its ‘Suggested Tiles’ program, which… Read More

 Storehouse, the iOS-centric app for sharing stories from your photos and videos, now lets you tag friends in stories using the familiar ‘@-mention.’ In a world (read this in the trailer guy’s voice) where daily average users has become a better indicator of traction for social apps than everybody’s favorite metric, monthly actives, Storehouse’s focus on taking time… Read More

 Back in September, Gobble unveiled a new kind of food delivery. It doesn’t offer a fully prepared meal or a box of ingredients and recipes — instead, it delivers “dinner kits” where much of the prep work is already done, and the cooking can be finished in just 10 minutes. But is that what people are really looking for? Well, it’s still fairly early (and Gobble… Read More

 Oculus is hosting its second annual primary developer conference between September 23 and 25, the company announced today. The big show, called ‘Connect 2′ in keeping with the original event last September, will feature keynote presentations from Oculus execs Michael Abrash, John Carmack and Brendan Iribe, and will also provide “everything developers need to know to launch on… Read More

 All of a sudden, it seems like Facebook, Google and Apple are climbing all over each other to own the voice interaction, and specifically, the phone conversation. They’re in a race to compete in the most valuable part of “social” — as if they’ve forgotten, until now, just how much humans ultimately value one-on-one conversation. Read More

 Mode Media is announcing that it has raised $30 million in new funding.
Previously known as Glam Media, the company ran the fashion site of the same name, as well as other online properties including Brash and Foodie. Last month, it brought all those sites together as Mode.com (although the individual brands still exist under the broader Mode umbrella) and launched a mobile app called Mode… Read More

 Mozilla’s Firefox browser for iOS is nearing public release, as the organization is now actively recruiting beta testers willing to try the app ahead of its App Store debut. A recent survey sent to potential testers is asking for details about which devices they own, and instructs them that the beta will require a version of iOS 8 or higher in order to work. It also reminds… Read More

 If you happen to be staying in San Francisco during the long Memorial Day weekend, one of the things you can do is see the art in the F.A.T. Gold Retrospective at Gray Area in the Mission District. F.A.T. Gold is a collective of hackers, engineers, musicians, and graffiti artists who have created punk projects that have unleashed fake Google Streetview cars onto the roads of Berlin to a… Read More

 Apple is said to be planning to bring built-in transit directions to its native Maps app in iOS 9. Transit directions were left out when Apple replaced Google Maps with its own offering as the default navigation app in iOS 6 back in 2012. The native transit directions offering is actually a feature that was held over from an intended release last year with iOS 8, according to 9to5Mac, which… Read More

 Sling TV, Dish Network’s Internet TV service designed for cord cutters, is now available on the Android TV platform, the company is announcing this morning, including Google’s Nexus Player. This addition expands the service’s already fairly extensive lineup of devices it supports, which today includes Roku and Roku TV, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Xbox One, as well as… Read More

 What is your favorite food? What was your first teacher’s name? What’s the name of your first pet? Do those questions sound familiar to you? If they do, it’s probably because you either have really boring and repetitive conversations or you’ve answered them as security questions when you signed up for a new account somewhere. They’re meant to provide an extra layer… Read More