Category: Tech news

 Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends. Read More

 Well, okay, I didn’t actually try to interview a dog, because that would be silly. But while attending a pet adoption event at South by Southwest event, I did talk to Courtney Dasher, owner of Instagram star Tuna Melts My Heart. And yes, he’s a dog with an intense overbite. What I wanted to know was: What’s like to own a social media celebrity? (Seriously, Tuna’s got… Read More

 In the venture capital world, we’re about to experience an explosion of hiring around one very specific function. These people won’t invest in startups, nor will they analyze companies. They won’t help operate the management company, nor will they focus on LPs. They won’t be EIRs or in-house recruiters or PR consultants or pretty much anything you’re accustomed… Read More

 Greatfire, a service that monitors blocked websites in China, is suffering from a DDOS attack that is sending 2.6 billion requests per hour to its servers – a 2500% increase in traffic – with the aim of destroying the business. The company is currently seeing $30,000 in bandwidth fees per day and but is hoping for amnesty from Amazon who hosts its data. NGO’s use the service… Read More

 As the ranks of super unicorns continue to grow, such as with Pinterest’s shiny new $11 billion valuation, analysts are increasingly scrutinizing these prices and whether they signal a new tech bubble. Bill Gurley, the Uber investor and partner at Benchmark, argued at SXSW this week that there will be “dead unicorns” among some of these high-priced companies. Another angle… Read More

 The FAA just released a statement indicated that Amazon now has limited permission to test and develop drones in the United States. It’s not a blank check, though. The FAA gave Amazon strict rules and regulations. Read More

 On-demand alcohol startup Thirstie has raised a $1.1 million seed round.
At this point, there are a bunch of startups that want to help bring booze to your doorstep. Just in the past few months, we’ve written about Minibar and Swill. Read More

 Many hospitals in America have made the switch to electronic health records (EHR) systems to manage patient medical information in the last couple of decades. This is supposed to make record-keeping easier and more efficient, but the systems are different for each hospital and often can’t communicate with each other. This makes it hard for health app developers to design apps that run… Read More

 Swifty is an app that provides an interactive set of tutorials that gradually guide you through the basics of Swift on your iPhone or iPad, from the very basics of variables and data types to the essentials of object-oriented programming. Read More

 Graphic India, a Bangalore-based digital media company, has landed $2.8 million in its continued quest to develop a comic book and animation business that represents India and Indian culture. Read More

 Magic Leap is showing what it might look like to use its hardware for augmented reality gaming in the future, with a new demo of what the team is apparently “playing in the office” right now. The interface, which includes non-game interaction and then a short demo of an in-office virtual shooter experience, was created in tandem with Weta Workshop, a concept art studio responsible… Read More

 Launched in U.C. Berkeley’s AMPLab in 2009, Apache Spark has begun to catch on like wildfire during the last year and a half. Spark had more than 465 contributors in 2014, making it the most active project in the Apache Software Foundation and among big data open source projects globally. Read More

 In the past year, we saw a string of companies release diversity reports that exposed the numbers behind the underrepresentation of women and minorities in tech roles. Along with those reports came commitments to do better. Entelo thinks its algorithm can help tech companies follow through on those promises. Entelo is a platform that businesses can use to search for job candidates that has… Read More

 The Pebble Time Kickstarter for Pebble’s second-generation smartwatch has exceeded all expectations, but the company is still revealing more about the upcoming device: Today, it’s announcing a $1 million fund to support the development of smartstraps, the add-on accessories that are open to hardware makers and that will add functionality to Pebble Time via add-on sensors, batteries… Read More

 Remember the early days of web surfing? You’d be happily browsing through your favorite sites, clicking links – then, boom! – your screen was littered with pop-up advertisements! The problem became so prevalent, people began installing pop-up blocking software on their PCs as a solution to the ongoing annoyance. Today, as users make the transition to mobile, a new irritation… Read More