Category: Tech news

 How did it feel getting cut off by Twitter with just 2 hours notice? “It sucked” says Meerkat founder Ben Rubin. That’s why it’s determined to treat developers with more respect. In the nine weeks since Meerkat launched, 37 developers have built companion experiences to the livestreaming apps on its unofficial, private API, including stream discovery, automatic uploads… Read More

 This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Walker & Co. founder Tristan Walker spoke about bringing more diversity to Silicon Valley and his plan to reach 5,000 black and Latina/o students this next year through his Code2040 program. The former Foursquare exec and co-founder of Code2040 also runs the aforementioned Walker & Co., a health and beauty startup with a focus on people of color.… Read More

 MLB Advanced Media started streaming baseball games in 2002 — way back before live streaming had become as prevalent as it is today — and that’s part of the reason MLB’s Bob Bowman said at TechCrunch NY that MLB’s streaming service is as successful as it is today. Read More

 What sort of metrics should mobile app developers be paying attention to these days? That question kicked off a discussion about the changing nature of the mobile app ecosystem at TechCrunch Disrupt NY this afternoon between former IDC analyst and now App Annie’s new head of research, Danielle Levitas and Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin. Read More

 Voxon, chosen out of the Hardware Alley to do the ‘wildcard’ pitch during TechCrunch Disrupt NY, demonstrated a truly amazing technology today. Imagine the scene from Star Wars where Princess Leia is projected in 3 dimensions recording a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, Voxon’s VoxieBox product does just that. Read More

 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alumni and former Disrupt winner Layer, a company which is offering developers tools to build their own communications platform where they control the experience and the data, announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that it’s expanding beyond mobile to now include support for web applications, as well. In addition, the company also announced the launch of… Read More

 Meerkat founder Ben Rubin has criticized Twitter for only giving the live streaming startup two hours’ notice before pulling the plug on access to its social graph. Speaking onstage with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine here at Disrupt NY, Rubin said: “Big platforms should take leadership coming from courage and not fear.” He added that getting a call from Twitter with just… Read More

 The twin Harvard graduates of Facebook fame Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss just took the stage at Disrupt NY to update everyone on their recent bitcoin projects. As a reminder, the twins have recently launched an exchange traded fund (ETF) under the symbol ‘COIN’ so that old-school traders can trade bitcoins on the NASDAQ OMX. The two brothers also recently announced a new… Read More

 That meant if you wanted to add a service like taking a credit card, you needed to code it all manually. Today with a few lines of code, you can tap into some remarkable resources whether it’s a payment network like MasterCard, a mapping service like ESRI or the machine learning engine that powers IBM’s Watson. When you look at the hacks that came out of the past… Read More

 Google is shutting down PageSpeed Service, its hosted solution for optimizing websites for faster delivery, on August 3. Developers have until then to change their DNS settings or their sites won’t be available anymore. New sign-ups have already been disabled. Read More

 ChartBeat today said it raised $15.5 million in its latest round of funding — and that money is going toward helping publishers improve their advertising businesses. Recently the Interactive Advertising Bureau called for ads to be considered “viewable” if 50% of the ad is shown for at least one second — a new standard that has caused many sites to lose inventory,… Read More

 Atlassian, the company behind developer services like JIRA and Confluence, as well as the group chat tool HipChat, today announced that it has acquired Hall, a group chat service for businesses. The company will shut down Hall on June 30th, but current Hall users can now migrate their users, messages and files to HipChat. Even though Atlassian has historically been focused on developers,… Read More

 Jetbay wants to save travelers to China from boring tour packages. Launched by the founders of Wowo (also known as 55Tuan), one of the country’s largest group deals sites, Jetbay offers private itineraries that cover popular destinations, like the Great Wall of China, as well as more obscure places. The Beijing-based startup just grabbed $1.6 million in seed funding led by ChinaRock… Read More

 When Sam Harrell arrived at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon this weekend in New York City, he had an idea for creating something to do with Internet of Things — an ambitious project to complete in fewer than 24 hours. He succeeded in creating CloudSense, an IoT solution that combined hardware, the cloud using a service provided by sponsor Atlantic.net, and an iPhone and Apple Watch app. Read More

 It’s been a long night at the Manhattan Center. Yesterday, we welcomed hundreds of hackers for my favorite spring tradition — the Disrupt NY Hackathon. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up with a neat, funny and smart hack in just 24 hours. Read More