Category: Tech news

 Get sushi on a boat, a tiger at your door, or make your parking ticket vanish into thin air. An ambitious new startup says it will let you text for anything you want (and they do mean anything) as long as it’s legal, and it will magically come to you.
Just text 408-596-5017 and Magic, a texting service that seems to have blown up over the weekend, promises to deliver. Read More

 Robots. They’re eating our jobs one occupation at a time, some say.
They’ll pour your drinks without expecting tips. They’ll write up the news without demands for exclusives or the penchant for whisky.
And now… they’ll sit on your shoulders and feed you tomatoes while you run. Shoulder-sitting-tomato-feeders of the world, beware: you’re now obsolete. Read More

 The IPO window is open, which means that companies of all sorts are hitting go and launching their firms into the arms of the public. Among the most interesting companies likely to go public inside the next two years is Egnyte, which I have been covering for a few years now. Egnyte has been willing to share more of its plans and financial performance than most companies, making it something… Read More

 Over the last few days, a number of venture capital and startup folk have come forward with complaints ranging from mild frustration to furious anger regarding an autocomplete bug in Gmail’s recipient field. Read More

 Classic cars are great. The look, the feel, the repair bills. But they often lack the modern safety and convenience features found on modern cars. Porsche has a solution with a radio and navigation system that blends today’s technology with the style found in its classic cars. Unless, of course, you’re driving a classic Porsche to escape modern society. The radio unit can be… Read More

 Facebook is facing fresh criticism in Europe over data protection and the myriad smoke-and-mirrors methods it uses to obfuscate its gathering and processing of user data.
A report commissioned by Belgium’s data protection authority has found Facebook’s revised privacy policy, last updated in January, violates European consumer protection law in a number of ways. Read More

 With all the excitement around wearables and fitness trackers, it seems inevitable that something like this would occur: there are now two separate companies running Kickstarter campaigns aimed at improving the classic jump rope by adding smart technology to the product. The “smart ropes,” as they’re being called, are designed more for those who use a jump rope during their… Read More

 Have an iPhone, but want to use an Android Wear watch? Too bad! Google and Apple are focusing their smartwatch efforts on their own platforms for now, with all signs pointing to them avoiding cross-platform friendliness for as long as possible. Fortunately, the world has talented modders who can make things right. Here’s a video of the world’s first iPhone-to-Android-Wear… Read More

 Apple is adding more diverse emoji options to both iOS and OS X, new developer preview builds reveal. These includes various skin color options for emojis featuring people, faces, hands and other exposed skin, as well as new country flags that add to the rather limited original set. The new skin tone options are available as alternates when a user clicks (or taps) and holds on any of the… Read More

 IBM has been setting its sights on helping customers manage the hybrid cloud world, and today it announced a series of initiatives it hopes will make it simpler to manage a broad range of resources by treating them as a single entity. The hybrid cloud is a term used to describe a mixed computing environment that can include any combination of public cloud resources, private clouds and… Read More

 Nearly six months after scoring an attention-grabbing funding round of $100 million, service marketplace Thumbtack has attracted two new big name executives to help oversee its ambitious growth plans for the months ahead. Thumbtack is announcing today it’s brought on former Google executive Mark Schaaf to serve as its first VP of engineering, and former Apple design director Vander… Read More

 Microsoft is updating the Band fitness wearable today, building out its on-device feature set, launching a web portal so that users can better interact with their collected data, and releasing an SDK to allow developers to build apps for the gadget. Application updates are rolling out for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Read More

 Target today announced a change to its e-commerce site designed to undercut competitors like Amazon and Walmart: It dropped the minimum requirements for free shipping from $50 previously down to just $25. This means that the free shipping minimum requirement from Target is now actually $10 less than it is on Amazon, and half of Walmart’s minimum. Read More

 Last summer, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International in which it directed lower courts to scrutinize computer-implemented abstract methods very closely. Alice’s impact was unclear at the time the decision issued, but lower courts have since relied on the Supreme Court’s opinion to invalidate a number of software patents in… Read More

 There’s no shortage of lunch delivery options in San Francisco these days, but there’s always room for another one. While most of the options out there are focused on serving individual consumers, Chewse is going after the lucrative office catering field. A few years ago, first-time entrepreneur Tracy Lawrence launched Chewse in Los Angeles after dealing with a dearth of great… Read More