Category: Tech news

 Android rollouts always have fans vying to see who gets a taste first; generally speaking, the Nexus faithful are rewarded for sticking to devices Google has committed to updating swiftly. Nvidia, which has begun making a fair number of Android devices beyond the scope of the smartphone category, has also been quick to offer its users a path to the next generation, and with Android 5.0… Read More

 Last summer, an article on Fast Company asked an important question related to the increasingly popular picture-based character set called emoji, now found on the majority of modern smartphones: Are emoji racist? The problem, the post pointed out, is that the people characters in the emoji set based on the Unicode standard tended to be overwhelmingly white. Where was the diversity? Where… Read More

 Facebook continues to fight dragnets for private data by governments, but the combined number of requests from local law enforcement and federal spy agencies like the NSA went up 24 percent from the last half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, according to Facebook’s new government requests report. In the U.S., Facebook received 15,433 data requests about 23,667 accounts, and was forced… Read More

 London-based CheckoutSmart, a cashback app for UK supermarket shoppers — and similar to Groupon’s Canada and U.S.-only Snap — has raised a £1.5 million round of funding. Not only is the startup founded by Chris Howarth (who previously founded and exited retail analytics company Retail Insight) but the list of backers is also noteworthy, given their experience in the… Read More

 Amazon is truly committed to pushing Prime membership to stratospheric heights, and a new expansion that sees it bringing benefits to Prime customers from e-commerce websites beyond its own walls should prove its commitment to the program. Prime members can now get free, next-day shipping on purchases made at British retailer AllSaints’ online store (via Re/code). The arrangement also… Read More

 Customer loyalty program startup Thanx launched today with both a Visa and MasterCard partnership and $4.7 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital. An earlier seed round from SoftTech VC of $1.3 million brings the total funding raised to $6 million. Read More

 Google today announced a number of new features for its Cloud Platform at its Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco. True to form, the company also announced yet another round of price drops (and an unusual price increase) for many of its cloud computing services. Read More

 At its Cloud Platform Live event today, Google announced Google Cloud Interconnect, an interesting new service for businesses that want to make sure that they get the fastest possible connection to their customers. With Cloud Interconnect, Google Cloud Platform users can now choose among three new connectivity options: direct peering; carrier interconnect; and VPN connectivity. Google says… Read More

 Google today announced the alpha launch of Google Container Engine, a new managed service for building and running Docker container-based applications on its cloud platform. Docker is probably the hottest technology in developer circles these days — it’s almost impossible to have a discussion with a developer without it coming up — and Google’s Cloud Platform team… Read More

 What’s a 3D scanner for? More than just providing source material for 3D printers, reckons Fuel3D, an Oxford University spin-out that last year Kickstarted a consumer-grade, high-resolution handheld 3D scanner. Today it’s announcing a $6.4 million expansion round of funding, led by Chimera Partners, which it dubs a “pre-IPO round” — having previously penciled in… Read More

 Another change to a social networking site, another user-driven backlash: nearly 50,000 Tumblr users have now signed a petition asking the Yahoo-owned blogging platform to reverse its decision to increase the image size requirements, claiming the changes have affected older images hosted on Tumblr, which are now stretched and blurred. Some portion of these angry users also went on a… Read More

This $50 wireless gadget lets you use one keyboard to type input into multiple devices. It works with iOS, Mac, Windows and Android—switching between paired devices is done using the selection dial located just above the Escape key.

The post Key Combo appeared first on WIRED.

The $99 Nexus Player, the first set-top streamer to run Android TV, offers novel features for a big-screen platform. It’s a work in progress, but a very promising one.

The post Okay Player appeared first on WIRED.

 Investors and innovators have been trying to develop better tools for groups to communicate, collaborate, and make decisions for the better part of a decade. As businesses become increasingly global and engage more remote workers, the need for collaboration tools becomes more pronounced. Read More

 French robotics can boast of several innovative robotics startups, entrepreneurs and researchers. But robots aren’t ubiquitous in the French industry, which has experienced steady decline in the past decades. Couldn’t robotics help? Read More