Category: Tech news

The smart sprinkler system is an Internet of Things product you can totally forget about. And that’s the way it should be.

The post Review: Blossom appeared first on WIRED.

 The Light Phone is the opposite of every other phone in existence. It is thin, light, lasts 20 days on a charge, and literally does nothing but make and answer calls. It’s as if the makers of the Sports Illustrated Football Phone had studied the timeless teachings of William Walker Atkinson and created a telephone that was the platonic ideal of the ultimate telecommunication device. The… Read More

 Enterprise IT automation service Ansible today announced that it’s partnering with HP, RackSpace, CSC, Cisco and the open source community to help make deploying and managing OpenStack clouds easier. While the open source cloud computing platform is now extremely powerful, few of its users would argue that it is very easy to stand up an OpenStack cloud. Read More

 Sixteen years ago, I thought that owning a bar and running a tech startup simultaneously would be a great match for my ADD. Ultimately, what made the late nights and shenanigans worthwhile was discovering the “Lime Equation,” a formula that revealed which employees were stealing from the bar. Today, I would argue that every CEO needs a secret Lime Equation that he or she can use… Read More

 Spotify and Starbucks just announced a clever deal to promote Spotify Premium while giving Starbuck customers and employees the opportunity to influence the music played at their local Starbucks. This is the latest in a line of high-profile deals Spotify bagged that puts its brand in front of an important consumer demographic. Read More

 Microsoft will host a Solitaire tournament, pitting the public against the best of its employees. The news comes on the heels of the release of the card game for Windows 10, the company’s next operating system. The tourney is centered around the 25th anniversary of the game’s release on Windows. Read More

 Canonical may still be mostly known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, but the company now also offers a number of (paid) services for enterprises, often with a focus on the OpenStack platform. At the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth today introduced his company’s latest offering: Ubuntu Advantage Storage. Read More

 It reads like the plot of an awful but inevitable romantic comedy: two strangers share a Lyft Line. Sparks fly; love blooms. Just as passenger No. 2 is working up the guts to ask passenger No. 1 on a date, passenger No. 1 arrives at their destination — in a rush, of course — and disappears into the night. LOVE LOST. Or is it? Lyft is experimenting with allowing Line passengers… Read More

 As part of a larger story about Pinterest’s Jumpstart program — a new experiment in its international expansion — I sat down with Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp to talk about the company and its current goals. We spoke at length about how Pinterest is structured internally, what they’re looking for and how they are thinking about the Apple Watch Read More

 Price monitoring as a standalone service doesn’t seem to be resonating with consumers. The latest example? PoachIt, a smart shopping tool that helped consumers track price changes and find discounts via both web and mobile, announced today that it’s shutting down. The company had raised $2.8 million in outside funding, according to CrunchBase, and had grown its shopping community… Read More

 They’ve got the money, but he’s got the microphone. This weekend,  Jay Z threw some punches at the big tech companies who compete with his upstart music streaming service Tidal. The freestyle came as part of Jay Z’s “B-Sides” concert, a performance of some of his rarest songs that was supposed to “exclusively” be available for live stream on… Read More

 Microsoft has no immediate plans to let its new browser out of Windows 10.
The software giant indicated today that it has no current intention of shipping Edge, formerly known as ‘Project Spartan,’ on other platforms. I confirmed the strategy with Microsoft after the announcement. Read More

 Videopixie, a Y Combinator alumnus that handles video creation and production (like filming and post-production editing), has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The startup connects clients — like retailers and brands — with video production professionals. Clients post in Videopixie what they are looking for, and the creators bid on the project. Videopixie largely sees… Read More

Doom. The game that introduced an entire generation to the idea of using computers for more than spreadsheets, the game that set the bar in 1993… has had a rough couple of years. The latest Doom game (the fourth in the series, though the publishers aren’t calling it “Doom 4″) has had one helluva ride. First announced in 2008, it’s spent the last seven years… Read More

 Building a workforce that can scale with demand is no easy task for on-demand startups (or the traditional companies than now compete with them for labor), so OnboardIQ has raised $1.65 million in seed funding to help smooth out the process. Read More