Category: Tech news

 Silicon Valley has been heavily derided by the media these past few months, on everything from Google executives forcing senior citizens out of their homes and founders accused of sexually harassing women to startups stealing reservations and parking spots. Despite the shrill news around “JerkTech,” I believe that Silicon Valley on the whole is fundamentally a decent place, one… Read More

 New York is getting a new tech skills training academy. The twist it that the just launched academy is being created by a dev studio drawing on their existing expertise making apps for others to teach budding entrepreneurs the web development skills they’re going to need to turn their big idea into a big business. At a price, of course. Read More

 Germany has not been the biggest fan of tech giants that it believes overreach their influence. Now, a report claims that it is considering a new way to deal with them: regulating them like utilities. The Sunday Times writes that the country’s Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has prepared a 30-page proposal with suggestions of how to cope with the growing power of Google,… Read More

 There has been renewed excitement at Lockitron HQ in the last few weeks as we pass shipping to our 3,000th backer. Following an incredibly oversubscribed crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2012 — during which we raised over $2.3 million (and garnered 15,000 backers) — we had to adapt our manufacturing plans and shift to volume production from our originally planned run of 1,000 units. Read More

 If you’re building an enterprise-software company, mobile must be core to your product strategy; it can’t be an afterthought or add-on. And you must build an elegant, easy-to-use mobile app, because employees and consumers far prefer mobile apps to mobile websites. Read More

 Ever been intrigued in a hotel after looking at its brochure only to find it not so compelling when you set foot in it? Next time, try taking a look at Instagram posts taken at the hotel from travelers staying there. Read More

 Picture the scene. It’s 2020. You’re at the checkout in a convenience store with a carton of milk. But you’ve got no cash and you’ve left your cards at home. No problem. You scan your right index finger; the green light flashes. Purchase approved and you leave. Easy. Is this a realistic vision of the future, or are we only ever likely to see such scenes in science… Read More

 Curated food delivery startup Caviar is in talks to be acquired by Square in a deal that could be worth at least $100 million, according to several sources. While we’ve heard the deal is slated to take place over the next couple of weeks, these things could always fall apart. Read More

 Jon Evans’ post “Welcome To Extremistan! Check Your Career At The Door” on TechCrunch warns of mass penury for this generation and the next as the dual horseman of the techno-apocalypse, robots and software, strip humans of their ability to make a living. Don’t believe this dystopian vision of the future for a second. Read More

 Nest. GoPro. Beats. Jawbone. Oculus. All hardware companies and each of them accorded multi-billion dollar valuations either in private investment transactions or acquisitions by some of the largest technology companies on the planet. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor – examine the gathering storm that is the Uber social network. After years of positioning, acquisition, soaring value payouts, and a winner-take-all sensibility in the tech community, now something different. The data points: Digg Deeper, Soundcloud, Twitter user metrics, and more… Read More

 Amazon Web Services is known for many things, but all of those have to do with developer services like cloud computing instances, databases and storage. Lately, however, AWS is slowly getting more into productivity tools that are meant for end users. Amazon’s first attempt to get into this market was Amazon Cloud Drive. It launched back in 2011, but while there are no exact numbers about… Read More

 “Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture,” quoth Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, prompting some eyebrow-raising by Guardian and New York Times columnists. And here’s some more from TechCrunch…but my stance is a bit different. “The culture”? That’s an oxymoron. There is no such thing as majority… Read More

 In just a few months, the FCC is expected to enact new rules that would allow (or, perhaps more accurately, fail to disallow) ISPs to provide “fast lanes” for companies who could afford to cough up the dough. When ISPs are able to decide which site’s data moves the fastest, competition becomes a matter of who is willing/able to spend the most. Big companies like Netflix,… Read More

 The Conway painting was apparently a gift from Steve Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs and a YC applicant sent in the one of Paul Graham, according to Altman.
I would say auction them off for charity. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington once coveted the Conway painting, calling it “an epic painting of the man.” Read More