Category: Tech news

 Look: you and I both know what’s going on here. This is either a viral ad for Milka or a riff on Üter Zörker at the Springfield Chocolate Factory but let’s retract our marketing antennae for a moment and just revel in the idea: this is video of a quadcopter made of chocolate. The body is made of chocolate. The motors, obviously, are metal and the propellers plastic, but the rest… Read More

 When MakerBot announced the Z18 printer last January at CES, there wasn’t much of a shipping date. Now, however, the company has begun shipping the massive 3D printer to customers who have pre-ordered thus far and expect to ship from their Brooklyn factory in six to eight weeks for new orders. Read More

 No more “I love my wife” or “I love my husband” posts from Montana for those of us using Secret on iOS. iPhone users can finally separate the hum-drum secrets of Midwestern life from their freaky friends involved in the Silicon Valley tech scene. Read More

 Dropbox has been acquiring companies to help it expand the services that it can offer to consumers and enterprises beyond cloud storage. But the company — which has raised $1.1 billion and is among the larger tech startups tipped for an IPO — is also making strategic acquisitions to help keep its own house in order. We have found out that Dropbox has quietly acquired a company… Read More

 Yahoo’s stock, behaving as a proxy to Alibaba’s valuation, is down 5 percent today in midday regular trading, after the Alibaba’s updated F-1 filing indicated that its operating margins are declining. According to the company, for its most recently ended fiscal quarter, its operating margin “declined from 51.3% to 45.3%,” when compared to the comparable… Read More

 Facebook Paper is pretty, but sluggish when it comes to news. Its human-curated sections take a while to ingest the latest world events and gossip. But today’s 1.2 update adds a “Trending” section that highlights news stories and photos that capture the essence of the most mentioned topics on Facebook. Those aren’t always hard-hitting news, but are things people care… Read More

 The bitcoin community was rattled recently when it became known that GHash, a mining pool, had crossed the 51 percent mark, indicating that it was powering more than half of the computing heft that undergirds the cryptocurrency’s foundation. At issue is the general consensus that any party that controls 51 percent or more of that computational power can do unkind things with bitcoin at… Read More

 Social marketing startup Earshot is announcing that it has raised $1.7 million in new funding.
Founder and CEO David Rush told me that unlike most social listening and marketing tools, Earshot is less focused on helping businesses interact with people who are already fans and customers, and more on helping them find new customers, even if “they’re not using the right handle or… Read More

 Guesty (formerly SuperHost) wants to take the hassle out of vacation rentals, and now it has $1.5 million in seed funding to help it with that goal. The Y Combinator-backed startup is a software-based property management service that helps individuals renting out rooms, apartments, or other listings on Airbnb (and soon, elsewhere), by screening guests, handling key drops, cleaning, guest… Read More

 For a long time, there’s been a philosophical split in the Bitcoin community about how to store crypto-currency on behalf of users.
Do you do it on the web, with something that resembles an e-mail or Paypal-like interface? Or should consumers held more responsible for storing their own Bitcoin offline? Do you make them handle their own public and private keys? Or do you take that… Read More

 This morning Box, a cloud-based file-management service, announced that it has acquired Streem, a Y Combinator-backed company that allows customers to “stream” files to their desktop environments. Box declined to share terms of the agreement, but did note in an email that it bought the company using a blend of cash and stock. The four members of Streem will join Box.… Read More

June’s wearable sensor measures your exposure to UVA and UVB radiation every day, but it looks more like a regular piece of jewelry than a technology device.

 Teaching people in the third world how to code seems to be a growing trend that may just help to break the world-wide poverty cycle. Danish-based microfinancing operation CodersTrust is starting to do just that with a test group of 100 Bangladeshis. “Nine out of 10 coders on sites like oDesk suck,” says CodersTrust co-founder Ferdinand Kjaerulff. It’s a problem he and… Read More

 The video game industry, like the tech industry at large, has a poor history of welcoming women into its culture. That’s not exactly an original sentiment, but it’s something that can’t be said too often. Read More

 As a result of a new partnership between GoPro and BMW, it’s never been easier to record your hoonage antics. Select late-model BMW cars will soon be able to control GoPro cameras directly from the dash. Just click record on the dash of the car and the connected GoPro cameras click to life. Starting in July, the owner of a 2012 or later properly equipped BMW or Mini will be able to… Read More