Category: Tech news

 Power is readily available for most people in North America these days, which can make it hard to grasp how annoying it can be when it isn’t – especially if you’re trying to run a business. TechCrunch Battlefield NY 2014 competitor Simply Grid aims to offer power from the established electrical grid in situations where people would otherwise have to use gas-powered generators or… Read More

 With all the handwringing about the future of local business, a startup called Alignable aims to connect those businesses and help them work together. The company was co-founded by Eric Groves (formerly a senior vice president at Constant Contact) and Venkat Krishnamurphy. Groves, who’s the company’s CEO, said that most local businesses don’t have a way to work with each other or even know… Read More

 Fetch, a mobile app that connects users with personal shopping assistants, launched today onstage at Disrupt New York.

Users can simply open Fetch and type what you want, record yourself saying what you want, or take a picture. Fetch has trained assistants on the other end who will look at your request, find the best price for the product you want, and order it for you. Read More

 Five years ago, Michigan had seven early-stage companies raise money from venture capital investors in the first quarter. This year that number climbed to 31.

The story behind this growth was more than a decade in the making, as state and local leaders crafted a policy to make early-stage investments more robust and lay the foundation for a startup ecosystem that is finally coming to fruition. Read More

So, the NSA tweeted this earlier: tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news— NSA (@NSACareers) May 05, 2014 What does it mean? Well, intrepid Business Insider readers realized quickly it was a substitution cypher, something that is pretty simple to solve. In this case, c in the cypher is t, and… Read More

 Smartphones are more powerful than they’ve ever been, but PCs are still able to do more, and do some things better, too. Size advantage has generally meant sacrifices when it comes to computing, but Tango PC wants to change that with its modular dock and computer design that moves space-heavy heat diffusion components out of the main body using technology tricks borrowed from space ships.… Read More

 VICE Media seems to be getting more journalistically legit, particularly with its international coverage, but CEO Shane Smith said today that he doesn’t consider himself a journalist, and doesn’t want to be a journalist. “I think if you look at the failure of journalism in the modern age, then I don’t want to be called a journalist,” Smith said today while on-stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt New… Read More

 This afternoon on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in New York, Kurbo Health debuted its mobile subscription service designed to teach children — and their families — how to eat healthy. The overall idea is to combat the growing issue of childhood obesity, the company says, noting that over 30 percent of U.S. kids today are overweight. That’s more than 25 million children between the ages of 10 and… Read More

 Oculus VR was recently all over the news because it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. But Oculus VR is still operating independently and trying to figure out the future of virtual reality. Co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe took the stage at Disrupt NY today to talk about a new research initiative to turn virtual reality into the next major tech platform. “We just started a research… Read More

 Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, S’moretgage kicked off its service that aims to get more real estate data to real estate investors more quickly.

The more you know, the better choices you can make, and because it can be difficult to obtain certain mortgage data by hand, S’moretgage wants to make that information far easier to access. Read More

 It may surprise you but print media isn’t dead yet. Hell — some people even like reading ink off of pulped tree. And that curious fact is something U.K. startup Peekster is intending to cash in on — with an app (yes, it’s still an app) that links offline reading habits with online socializing and sharing habits to please old school readers and publishers alike.… Read More

 Cosmic Cart wants to make shopping on sites easier both for the publisher and for the reader. It does this by giving publishers a drop-dead simple tool for adding items that can be purchased online. And for readers, it embeds the shopping cart and purchasing flow directly on the publisher site, so there’s no clicking through to other websites to actually make a purchase. Read More

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The Krypton from Digital Storm is a solid—if largely nondescript—choice for a high-test gaming laptop.

Topics this week include Facebook F8, Snapchat’s user experience, Twitter’s user problem, CyanogenMod smartphones, and how not to act in a mosh pit.