Category: Tech news

 The FTC is taking T-Mobile to court. Their claim? T-Mobile is allowing shady text messaging scams to sneak onto your bill, and making “hundreds of millions of dollars” by not doing enough to stop it. Updated with a response from T-Mobile’s CEO Read More

 Google Capital led the latest round of $110 million in financing for Bangalore San Jose based MapR Technologies. MapR, which helps companies around the world deploy Hadoop, raised $80 million in private equity from Google Capital, Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA… Read More

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) got an earful from concerned online education startups today. General Assembly, Codecademy, CodeCombat, and OpenCurriculum cautioned the FCC in their filings today that an Internet fast lane would, “…impede [American’s] access to an affordable education and to job skills for the 21st century economy.” All four companies argue that… Read More

 App Links, Facebook’s initiative to make it easier for developers to link to specific content within an app, is about to become a lot more useful for developers who rely on Facebook to direct users to their apps. Read More

 Last night a sizable number of Facebook advertisers received receipts listing other people’s ads, including company names, campaign names, and amount spent. Sources tipped us off to the bug, and Facebook confirms to me it occurred and was fixed in about two hours. The company also confirms that no one was charged for other people’s ads, despite one victim claiming otherwise, and… Read More

 When the Supreme Court ruled Aereo was illegal last week, many thought it was the final nail in the coffin for the nascent cloud-based antenna service.
But it seems even though CEO Chet Kenojia said he didn’t have a Plan B, he came up with one. On Tuesday he sent a letter to subscribers, calling them to demand action from their representatives in Congress. Read More

 Software service 72Lux today announced the launch of Shoppable, a new website and ecommerce platform that allows consumers to manage their shopping wish lists over a variety of retailers and publishers in one place. Read More

 Marc Benioff, the outspoken founder and CEO of Salesforce, will take the Disrupt stage with Michael Arrington again this year at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Since last year, his company has seen solid growth, and it announced that it will be moving into what will be the tallest building in San Francisco, which will also bear the company’s name. Benioff himself has continued to be one of… Read More

 American children spend five to seven hours per day staring at screens, TV and otherwise, according to data published by the National Institutes of Health. This leads to increased risks of weight gain and obesity, anxiety, depression, and inability to sleep, studies have found. But parental controls – and really, a better understanding of how to manage children’s screen time… Read More

 Three recently public technology companies are surging today, potentially indicating fresh analyst and investor enthusiasm for tech shares. GoPro is up more than 21% at the time of writing, continuing a massive bull run since its recent debut. Its shares are nearing the $50 mark. The company IPO’d at $24 per share, meaning that it has more than doubled its value since going public.… Read More

And you thought digital picture frames were dead!

 The something-like-a-phenomenon app of the moment, Yo, held a hackathon today in San Francisco in an attempt to prove that there can be more to Yo than just the Yo, yo. One hack that’s already climbed the charts to the number one spot on Product Hunt is YoServerIsDown — created by programmers Jarryd Lee and Hayden Lee. The app, which will send a yo to notify a subscriber when a… Read More

 Looks like IAC is adding Brooklyn-based HowAboutWe as another notch in its dating site acquisition belt. It already owns Match.com, OkCupid and a majority stake in Tinder. According to a letter obtained by Business Insider, founder Brian Schechter addressed employees about the acquisition, confirming that many HowAboutWe employees would be losing their jobs: Indeed, we are still finalizing… Read More

 Back in the mid-2000s, many espoused a theory that there would emerge social networks for different types of people. It sounds a little preposterous now in the age of Facebook dominance, but at the time you had smart people like Marc Andreessen founding companies like Ning that followed this thesis. I was the co-founder of a now-defunct social network called Zaadz that you could think of as… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Benedict Evans, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor — finally have a full picture of the two major mobile platforms. Google I/O certainly lived up to expectations as a checkoff of the major food groups: wearables, carables, set top boxables, and so on. Android L and iOS8 conspire to reflect the convergence around the notification bus,… Read More