Category: Tech news

AirPair, a startup that offers live, online consultation with programming experts, is announcing today that it has partnered with more than a dozen companies. Those partnerships are supposed to connect people having difficulty using a certain API with others who can help.

We first wrote about AirPair a year ago, and it’s also part of the current class of companies at incubator Y Combinator. Read More

San Francisco’s gentrification problem isn’t all tech’s fault, but the industry should still be helping communities impacted by the influx money and people its brought to the city. Today’s donation by Google is a great example of looking out for one’s neighbors. It’s given $6.8 million to fund two years of the Free MUNI For Low-Income Youth program that gives kids free bus passes. Read More

Quick! How’s your car’s tire pressure?

Don’t know? Better go check. Which, if you’re like most people, means going out, kicking the tire, saying “seems good” and forgetting about it until something is clearly wrong.

Here’s a damned clever alternative: tire caps that change color when the pressure gets too low. Read More

The machines. They are learning. The Plotclock is a small, 3D-printed clock that forgoes the traditional gears and springs for servos and an Arduino microcontroller. It writes the time. And then erases it. Then writes the time again, continuing forever even though the white board will quickly descend into a smudgy mess of partially erased ink. It’s a simple device: One servo lifts the pen… Read More

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Merus Capital’s Sean Dempsey joined us in the studio to give us an inside look at corporate development, and how that translates into investing. Dempsey was previously a Principal of Corporate Development at Google, where he helped lead the acquisitions of YouTube, Android and Postini. He also spent over six years at Microsoft in the Corporate… Read More

Here is a small but nifty update to Google Search: if you ask it to find a restaurant menu for you, it will now often just show you the menu right on the search results page. Try this for a search like “show me the menu for fogo de chao” and the menu will be right there. As far as I can see, this doesn’t work for every restaurant yet and it’s unclear where Google is getting… Read More

Israeli company Talo Games has been asked by Miley Cyrus’s legal team to remove “Flying Cyrus – Wrecking Ball,” currently the fifth most popular free iPhone application in the U.S., from the iTunes App Store, we’ve learned. According to Cyrus’s lawyers, “Flying Cyrus” infringes on their client’s rights, and represents an “unauthorized… Read More

Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. Chat found here http://friendfeed.com/realtime-network/c31ffbd8/gillmor-gang-recording-live-today-1pm-pt Read More

Reporters are drunkenly finding their way home from a long week in Barcelona, where the Mobile World Congress conference yielded a number of exciting new phones and tablets. Most notably, Samsung launched the Galaxy s5, Nokia launched a new Nokia X line of Android/Windows Phone hybrid devices, and we finally got up close and personal with the BlackPhone. We discuss all this and more on this… Read More

The collapse of Mt.Gox this week has sent shockwaves through the early-adopting tech community. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins have been lost, and account holders are justifiably angry about their missing balances. It is easy to heap blame on Mt.Gox’s founders and call this a once-in-a-lifetime calamity, but the context behind the company’s demise is far more pernicious and… Read More

Email is probably the bane of your life. There is too much of it, and there’s a special hate reserved for people who selfishly fill your inbox with balderdash. Read More

Skillshare launched its online classes to give those interested in continuing to learn outside the classroom a place to go for classes that took place both online, and in their local hoods. Since then, the New York-based startup has moved towards the massive, open online course approach, giving teachers and subject experts the opportunity to create courses and students the opportunity to take… Read More

Do you block the ads on sites you love? Would you be less likely to do that if you knew a chunk of ad revenues were going to a good cause? That’s (at least part of) the thinking behind a new idea that reddit — a site that’s so big at this point I honestly feel like explaining what it is on TechCrunch would be stupid — is playing with. At the end of 2014, they’ll be… Read More

There was once a rumor that Apple would actually use a ring device for input to an Apple television. Neither of those gadgets exist yet, of course, but Ring is a Kickstarter project trying to fund a finger-based wearable that could enable the kind of controls envisioned in that Apple flight of fancy. The Ring is a hardware device that resembles an ordinary (if slightly chunky) ring, filled with… Read More

We’re thrilled to announce today that the entire Lerer Ventures partnership will share a stage at Disrupt NY. Lerer Ventures is one of the most prolific venture capital firms in New York City, and its partnership is unique. Started by father and son Ken and Ben Lerer, the team also includes former HuffPo CEO-turned-Lerer Ventures managing director Eric Hippeau and Jordan Cooper, CEO of… Read More