Category: Tech news

 We have heard that Twitter is making another acquisition, with international growth and mobile marketing in mind. Sources tell us that Twitter is in negotiations to buy ZipDial, a startup founded in India that has honed in on a mobile use case that is unique to its home market and others like it. People who call numbers but hang up before the call is answered, using the action as a… Read More

 Like game consoles before them, smartphones can now help swing the karmic balance in your favor while you sleep or charge your device thanks to Folding@home. The project, which uses the processing powers of your mobile device to contribute to important protein folding projects, including cancer research and beyond, is based on open source code from Stanford that has been optimized for… Read More

 Most cars’ built-in navigation systems tend to be a bit clunky compared to modern smartphone apps like of Google Maps. It looks like Ford is among the first car manufacturers to acknowledge this. The next version of AppLink, its system for connecting smartphone apps to its SYNC infotainment system, will allow third-party navigation apps to project their maps from the phone onto the… Read More

 Apple has a new beta for iOS 8.2 out today, and the software contains a hint that suggests it could launch publicly alongside the Apple Watch. The mention of the Apple Watch is found in the Bluetooth menu, according to 9to5Mac, where a message at the bottom of the devices list directs users to head to a dedicated Apple Watch app in order to pair their new wearable with their smartphone. The… Read More

 In part infinity in our continuing series of heart-warming 3D-printing events, we present Liam and his amazing 3D-printed Clone Trooper arm. A cool dude named John Peterson printed the arm for Liam after learning about E-Nable, a group of volunteers who print arms and hands for kids. Liam’s arm, for example, is a RIT model that works with kids with an elbow but no forearm. Peterson built… Read More

 The Cyber Caliphate, a hacker group claiming association with terrorist group ISIS, today seized control of the @CENTCOM Twitter and YouTube accounts that represents U.S. central military command. The hackers tweeted a Pastebin message titled “Pentagon networks hacked. AMERICAN SOLDIERS WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK. ISIS. #CyberCaliphate”. The message includes links to… Read More

 Game publishing isn’t the most obvious move for a community sharing website, but it is a new experiment that 9GAG, the popular online forum run out of Hong Kong, is embarking on. Read More

 Late last year, at its re:Invent developer conference, Amazon announced that it would soon launch its fastest EC2 instances yet. Starting today, developers on AWS can spin up these new C4 instances to power their highly compute-intensive applications in Amazon’s cloud.

As Amazon notes, these new instances are designed for applications where CPU performance is critical. These include… Read More

 If people are looking to Apple and its new smartwatch to kickstart wider consumer interest in wearable computing gadgets, the maker of the iPhone will have a lot of work ahead of it. New research out from the GlobalWebIndex indicates that in a survey of 170,000 adult internet users across 32 markets, only 9% report having a smartwatch, and 7% said they owned smart wristbands. In… Read More

 Zomato, the restaurant discovery site backed by Sequoia, has bought Urbanspoon from IAC, the latest in a string of acquisitions around the world. Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but sources tell TechCrunch it was between $50 million to $60 million. This marks the entrance of Zomato into the U.S. market, and is also notable because it is one of the few instances of an Indian tech company… Read More

 During a 40 minute trawl through the CES floors with TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois, we ran into Xi3, a company that makes small, modular computers. It turns out you can fit a full PC into pretty much any size, or shape box. Meet the X7A! We forgot to ask about the decor, but the company seems to be building some pretty cool stuff. Spoiler: I have to assemble a computer on camera.… Read More

 “Anonymous from around the world have decided to declare war against you, terrorists” a purported member of the hacktivist group said in a video uploaded to YouTube, referring to the killers responsible for the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Speaking in French on Anonymous’s Belgian channel, the cybervigilante warned terrorists, “We will track all… Read More

 Security expert Brian Krebs has analyzed the Lizard Stresser, an attack tool created by the so-called Lizard Squad hacker collective and touted as a test for webmins who needed to see what happens to their services under duress. His discovery? The network of attack computers actually consists of insecure and compromised home routers. This is the network used to take down the Playstation… Read More

 Time to get nostalgic! Remember when The Internet Archive brought hundreds upon hundreds of classic console games online and made them playable in the browser? And when they did it again with hundreds of arcade games? They’ve done it again — this time with over 2,000 MS-DOS games. Lemmings! Wolfenstein 3D! Furthering the Internet Archive’s quest to catalog humanity’s… Read More

 For the last week, I’ve been away from France, covering CES in Las Vegas. When I woke up on Wednesday morning and looked at my phone, my lock screen was filled with an avalanche of notifications — French news apps, Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, Taptalk and Skype were all here to alert me about the massacre against Charlie Hebdo’s team… In many ways, the impact of the attack… Read More