Category: Tech news

 The hardware wearable business is a tough gig, and today brings another reminder: Fitness and activity tracking startup Misfit has announced a new partnership with Beddit, a hardware maker that builds a smart sleep-monitoring system. The Beddit deal brings a co-branded device to Misfit’s lineup of offering, allowing the Misfit app to now also track advanced sleep information. Read More

 It’s not often that you see this combination of backers, but today, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Docker, Mesosphere, CoreOS and SaltStack all banded together to support Google’s open-source Kubernetes project for managing Docker containers. Docker containers are quickly becoming the go-to technology for building and running distributed applications. Every major cloud vendor has… Read More

 Cover wants to facilitate the process of paying your check at the end of the meal, removing friction and encouraging more restaurants to accept mobile payments. To get more restaurants — and users — signed up, the company just raised a $5.5 million Series A round of financing led by Spark Capital. Read More

 Are we in a bubble? We’re in a bubble.
CYNK Technology, a ‘company’ with a grand total of $39 in assets, has seen its share price rise dramatically, spiking to a valuation of more than $6 billion in a matter of days. The company’s 52-week low valued the firm at less than $18 million. Read More

 Happy birthday, iTunes App Store. Apple’s App Store turns six today, and now offers consumers over 1.2 million apps, which have been downloaded 75 billion times, according to the most recent official data shared by the company.
But the business can sometimes be tough for app developers, and new numbers out this morning from two different analytics companies help prove this point. Read More

 Oussama Khatib and Shu-Yun Chung have brought us the SupraPed. Khatib and Chung, researchers at Stanford, are working on a system to allow bipedal robots extra stability by giving them a pair of walking sticks. Unlike us weak humans, however, the robots will bend and twist in all sorts of ways to get across chasms or over large obstacles. Read More

 Tablo.io, a publishing platform built by 21-year-old Ash Davies, has raised $400,000 from Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale and Paul Reining. The company offers a Wattpad-like self-publishing experience – albeit with a superior design aesthetic – and a friction-free way to publish to Amazon and iBooks from your finished book. Read More

For years now, smart watches like Samsung’s Gear Live have been “coming soon.” Well, here they are. And it’s worth thinking about what they do, and how well they do it.

Rather than free you from your smartphone dependence, LG’s new G Watch ends up being even more of a distraction.

Toshiba’s FlashAir II incorporates a mini Wi-Fi access point into a standard SD card, letting you access photos on the card from up to seven other devices.

 General Harmonics is a small startup from Canada that’s looking to revolutionize the way we stream media. Rather than risk sounding like I’m writing some kind of self-parody, I’ll be blunt about it: they’re basically Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley, only with a few decades more experience and technology that’s way farther along. Read More

 It looks like Airbnb is going to get a reprieve on facing a huge regulatory showdown on November’s ballot in San Francisco. A former planning commissioner and affordable housing activists had paired up to put new regulation on the ballot that would have clarified rules on short-term rentals throughout the city. It would have been far stricter than a set of rules supervisor David Chiu… Read More

 When TubeMogul first filed to go public, it indicated that it would offer up to $75 million of its shares for sale. That figure was soft. Today, TubeMogul decided on a price range for its shares — $11 to $13 per unit — meaning that it could sell up to $93.4 million of its stock in the flotation.
The company’s revenue has grown quickly, as had its losses until recently. It… Read More

 As the local governments across the U.S. begin taking the first steps to embrace Bitcoin and bitcoin, startups like itBit are working feverishly to stake their claims. The company, which raised $3.25 million last November to launch a bitcoin exchange for institutional investors, is relocating from its current base in Singapore to New York in a move to get in on the ground floor of one of… Read More

 BlackBerry previously gave us a sneak peek at a device that’s as category-busting as the revolutionary Padfone, called the Passport. I expressed my …uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the design decisions made in creating this 4.5-inch square thing with a hardware keyboard then. But now it’s BlackBerry’s turn to articulate some of its reasoning behind the Passport, with… Read More