Category: Tech news

 Less than a month after WhatsApp introduced free voice calls to users of its Android app, so the Facebook-owned company has begun rolling the feature out to its iOS customers. Read More

 Twitter has today announced some product and policy changes aimed at better tackling violent threats and abuse on its platform. The problem of the mainstream social network being misappropriated as an amplification medium for minority hate groups to — for instance — spread jihadist terrorist sentiments and propaganda, or harass and threaten women with messages of violent misogyny,… Read More

 No one likes brands more than their friends, and there are plenty of ways to get their marketing updates. Facebook’s unique value is keeping you up to date on your real-life friends. So to “get this balance right” Facebook today announced it’s reconfiguring News Feed to show content from close friends higher up, which may push posts from business Pages further down. A… Read More

 Apple is sending out emails to developers, offering them a chance to purchase an Apple Watch Sport for delivery by April 28th. It’s doing this to encourage them to test and develop for the Watch, according to the text of an email sent to developers and shared with us. The email, pictured below, says that Apple wants to give developers the opportunity to test WatchKit apps on Apple Watch… Read More

 “I don’t know anyone who likes calling businesses. It’s not fast or convenient, and it definitely doesn’t feel like the future.” Mark Zuckerberg may as well have been explaining the need for MyTime when he said that last month about Messenger’s upcoming business chat feature. But while Facebook’s just getting started, MyTime’s been working on its… Read More

 Climate change is real, and it is getting uglier. Global temperatures are continuing to rise, placing enormous strain on water and food supplies throughout the world. Many areas have been hit hard by the climate disruption, but none more prominently than California, where the state has entered its fourth year of drought with massively diminishing water supplies and hectares of fallow land.… Read More

 Amazon last night rolled out a new travel site it’s calling Amazon Destinations, which focuses on helping customers find “getaway destinations” within driving distance of their homes. Currently, Amazon Destinations features hotel selections in three U.S. metro areas: L.A., New York and Seattle, the company says. This is not the first time that Amazon has dabbled in the… Read More

 Clever today said it has hired Ben Adida, previously a director of engineering at Square, to be the company’s VP of engineering. The company, which creates a third-party development platform that centers around applications for teachers and students, has around 50 employees, but plans to expand to 150 in the coming year. More than half of that will be engineering, which is why Adida… Read More

 Have you ever seen a home security video of what dogs do when their owners go to work? I like to imagine that they chill out and celebrate like teenagers whose parents are away, but that’s not usually the case. They typically either mope in the same spot for hours, or anxiously stare at the door waiting for their owner to come home (on special days, this all might be punctuated by… Read More

 After securing backing from Betaworks, and more quietly Zynga founder Mark Pincus, ChatGrape, the enterprise and team messaging app that pitches itself as a more ‘intelligent’ Slack or HipChat, is launching publicly today. Read More

 Though Casper prides itself on making sure you catch some Zzz’s, Casper CEO Phillip Krim won’t be inducing any snoring come Disrupt NY in May. His company is company is targeting an industry that most consumers consider a night terror. Maybe we’ll even get him to do the interview lying in a Casper mattress. Anything could happen. It’s Disrupt! Casper is flipping over… Read More

We round up eight alternative sleep aids—five supplements and three “cocktails”—and swallowed them over the course of six weeks.

The post I Used Myself as a Guinea Pig for 8 Alternative Sleep Aids appeared first on WIRED.

 A lot has been written on how algorithms are manipulating this and that in today’s Internet. However, there hasn’t been so many concrete proposals on how could we create more human-centered algorithmic solutions. For example, do we need algorithms that are on our side? Read More

 What is the Apple Watch? The simple answer is Apple’s first smartwatch. In fact Apple calls it its “most personal device ever”. But early reviewers have wrestled with the raison d’être of the Apple Watch. Read More

 Conventional wisdom is that startups are bought, not sold. The logic follows that no matter how much an entrepreneur wants to sell a company, there needs to be an eager buyer and no amount of seller desire can manufacture one. Some people interpret this wisdom to mean that they should spend no time getting to know buyers and when a large company is ready to buy their startup, they’ll… Read More