Category: Tech news

 Finnish made BiiSafe Buddy, which was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, offers item tracking via Bluetooth and a location-sharing alerts feature geared towards families by turning the gizmo into a physical button to quickly share your location on a map with a chosen circle of loved ones. I gave it a road test for a few days to see whether the concept lives up to the promise. Read More

 Soon you’ll be able to buy something straight from a Tweet, if the rumours come true. Tech site Re/code says sources have told it that Twitter is working with payments startup Stripe on the launch of its ‘in-tweet’ commerce project. Twitter is reportedly planning to add buttons within tweets that say “Buy”, or similar, allowing users to enter payment… Read More

 Y Combinator-backed startup San Francisco Open Exchange (SFOX) is an online trading platform that helps people find the best bitcoin prices at various exchanges. In other words, it would like to help you buy, sell and invest in bitcoin exchanges kinda like and investor buys and sells stock on E-Trade. Co-founder Akbar Thobhani left his job at Airbnb to create this platform. However, he soon… Read More

This week had our writers investigating new engineering, aerospace and NASA hires for Amazon Prime Air, self-reflecting on social media involvement and getting drunk with robots. 1.  Tom Hanks launched the Hanx Writer typewriter app for iPad, and it soared to the top of the iTunes App Store charts ranking first in the Productivity section, and Overall. 2. Former Microsoft CEO Steve… Read More

 HBO’s “Silicon Valley” is more than your average breakout series that had audiences praying for a second season even as the credits on the pilot began to roll. The show has clearly hit a cultural nerve, both inside and outside the tech community. I talk with series co-executive producer and writer Clay Tarver on how — and why — the new hit show gets it right. Read More

 Why are there so embarrassingly few women in the tech industry? Repeat after me, robotically, defensively: “It’s a pipeline problem!” So says David Cohen of TechStars, echoing many others, e.g. Paul Graham and CNN. But come on, folks. We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend that’s the only obstacle here. The pipeline problem is very real; but so is the trapdoor problem. Read More

 You’re acquired! L.A.-based Zao, the social recruitment platform that lets employees and a company’s wider network get rewarded for making job referrals, has been bought by legacy UK e-recruitment company Amris (owned by The Internet Corporation Limited). Read More

 German regulators will not pursue a complaint brought against Google by a group of publishers for giving users access to their news articles.
A number of German publishers, including Axel Springer and Burda, brought the action under a group called VG Media to demand Google pay them for making their articles available to the public on the search engine without paying them.
But Andreas Mundt… Read More

With both the 8.4-inch and 10.5-inch Galaxy Tab S, Samsung has managed to stand out in a sea of lookalike tablets. Even more impressive, they’ve managed to do it without resorting to ridiculous gimmicks.

 You may soon be doing more twisting, turning, and jumping around when you go to the movies, if startup Audience Entertainment succeeds in launching a new type of in-theater interactivity. The company’s technology basically allows audiences to play together, usually as part of an ad campaign. Imagine standing up with everyone else in the room, then waving your arms left and right in unison… Read More

 Throughout the history of the power industry, the answer to all of our problems has been to “get bigger”. Due to economies of scale, utilities have concentrated on building larger and larger power plants to increase efficiency and improve profitability. That’s why we still receive the vast majority of our power the way we have for decades — from massive plants based… Read More

 Neil Young’s startup PonoMusic became the fourth-most funded project on Kickstarter back in April, when it raised $6.2 million on a goal of $800,000.
The project now has raked in an additional $6 million in equity funding from a Crowdfunder campaign. Read More

 The merry TechCrunch band took a trip to Cupertino this week to kick it with a small robot called Botlr made by robotics startup Savioke.
The little android, outfitted with a fancy collar and racing stripes, brings small items from the front desk of the Aloft hotel, to the rooms of customers. The cute R2 can handle elevators on its own, and scoots along at around one to two miles per hour. Read More

 After the bell, Salesforce reported its fiscal second quarter financial results, including revenue of $1.32 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.13. The company beat estimates in the fiscal 2015 quarter, as investors had expected it to earn $0.12 per share — excluding certain costs — on revenue of $1.29 billion. In its sequentially preceding quarter, Salesforce’s… Read More

 Product Hunt, the YC-backed social network for sharing links to interesting new startups and apps via a Reddit-like interface, has been banned from Reddit. We first got wind that links to Product Hunt could no longer be submitted to Reddit from a comment on a video published to YouTube by Google Ventures announcing that the search giant’s investment wing invested in Product… Read More