Category: Tech news

 Twitter announced this morning it will begin beta testing a new feature called “Promoted Video,” which is aimed at brands looking to upload and distribute their videos to the Twitter network. The feature, which expands upon the Twitter Amplify program, was previously revealed during Twitter’s recent earnings announcement, when new CFO Anthony Noto teased the forthcoming… Read More

[HTML1] WIRED WIRED: Piles of high-tech features, a powerful V8 engine, and a swanky interior in a car that looks great and is priced well below its competition. TIRED TIRED: None of those many features are unique to Kia, and the good acceleration time doesn’t make up for the fact that you feel like you’re […]

 The good news: T-Mobile is playing with the idea of letting you unlock your phone (so that it can run on other carriers) with a single click. Hurray! No more convincing customer service to help you, or digging through endless forums for a tutorial that may turn your phone into a fancy paper weight. The not-so-good news: they’re only … Read More

 The conversation about women in tech is shifting as technology companies begin to hold themselves accountable. Recent moves, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo releasing their employee diversity numbers, show an intensified commitment to making real change for women technologists, but the sentiment is not industry-wide. We often hear from tech leadership that they would like to hire… Read More

 One of the great challenges for startups is figuring out where to start. Entrepreneurs believe that unless they build something now, their idea will become outdated or stolen by their competitor. However, that thought process is akin to running a marathon with one month of training. Yes, it can be done, but you run the risk of burning out and failing more quickly. What is needed is a… Read More

 It’s been exactly ten years since the launch of OpenStreetMap, the largest crowd-sourced mapping project on the Internet. The project was founded by Steve Coast when he was still a student. It took a few years for the idea of OpenStreetMap to catch on, but today, it’s among the most heavily used sources for mapping data and the project is still going strong, with new and improved… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — split down the middle on the latest app trend known as unbundling. Foursquare begat Swarm, Facebook produced Messenger, and Yo popped out a beta with non-disclosed super powers.
Tying it altogether was the seamless fabric of notifications, about to crescendo with iOS8’s app-to-app… Read More

 When we humans communicate, we rely on a vast background of unspoken assumptions. Everyone knows that “water is wet,” and “people want to be happy” and we assume everyone we meet shares this knowledge. It forms the basis of how we interact and allows us to communicate quickly, efficiently, and with deep meaning. Read More

 I was ready to come to Amazon’s defense (and I will, eventually). In their long letter to the writing community, they made some excellent points. They inflamed our passions, gave us historical context for our discontent, and then quoted none other than George Orwell on the disruptive nature of paperbacks and the need for evil publishers to crack down on upstart, low-priced alternatives. Read More

 Timista is an event-planning app that uses AI to power recommendations for things to do in London that can be realistically chained together, based on their proximity, timings and availability. Read More

 Hollywood is in love with YouTube. Last year, DreamWorks Animation paid $33 million for YouTube channel AwesomenessTV, Warner Bros. invested $18 million in the YouTube channel Machinima and most recently, Disney purchased Maker Studios for $500 million. At this point, many other studios are probably negotiating acquisitions of these multi-channel networks. The explanation for so much love… Read More

 “The press has portrayed me alternately as a mad genius or a mad psychotic genius,” began the infamous John McAfee, speaking at Def Con–and why break that streak now? I must admit: when he’s crazy, he’s crazy like a fox. Ultimately, though, as insane and riveting as his tale is, what’s most interesting to me is the way he has weirdly come to symbolize his… Read More

 Here’s a recap of some of our top stories from 8/2 to 8/8. The public has scrutinized the success of standalone apps like Facebook Slingshot, Twitter Music, and Instagram Bolt, but most people don’t realize that these apps are supposed to fail most of the time. Josh Constine argues that, “when there’s massive upside, and little downside, standalone apps can be a… Read More

 Have you ever been sitting around bored and found yourself trying to get some random household object — a battery, a pen, whatever — to spin around like a top? Disney has taken that idea to a pretty grand extreme. Combining the power of 3D printing and some damned clever physics work, they’ve worked out a way to make just about any shape spin for ages. The idea: if you… Read More

 Looking around their engineering classes at the University of Illinois, Supriya Hobbs and Janna Eaves noticed something was missing — other girls.
And so like good engineers, they set out to solve that problem. The recent graduate and college senior invented Miss Possible, a doll and accompanying app aiming to spark an interest in math and science among young girls. Read More