Category: Tech news

In a scene from season one, Jim Holden shows exquisite command of high school physics as he maneuvers himself onto a spaceship gangway.

Microsoft’s new workstation has everything you ever wanted in a creative desktop, and costs more than you probably ever wanted to spend.

The feature, available in select cities, turns Tinder into a real-time dating experience.

Microsoft’s first wireless headphones look, feel, and sound as premium as their price tag.

The Golden State is burning for very good reasons, like climate change and population growth. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Before the Colorado-based plane maker can launch its airliner, it has to see its 1/3-scale “Baby Boom” take off.

The New York house artist creates a succulent, danceable space where tongues and nations intersect.

Smoke from wildfires in Northern California blanket the city of San Francisco. Is it safe for the workers outside breathing the air all day?

Published in Ms. magazine, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” observes that organizations built to avoid hierarchy develop leaders with pernicious power.

You may not be an erotic webcam model with legions of unsettling fans, but you’ll find Cam’s dark and risky world more relatable than you’d expect.

Strategy guides have been doomed for a while. But I’m going to miss them anyway.

Amazon’s year-long pursuit of new office space highlighted just how much billion-dollar companies can get from taxpayers.

New York City and Arlington, Virginia have reportedly won Amazon’s lengthy and highly-publicized pageant for the locations of its new headquarters, beating out 238 other contestants. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news, an official announcement may come as early as Tuesday.

The offices will be located in Long Island City, across the East River from Manhattan, and Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, which is a 15-20 minute drive from Washington D.C.

Last week, more than a year after the Seattle-based company began asking cities to submit proposals for its second headquarters, nicknamed HQ2, reports emerged that Amazon planned to open two new locations, instead of just one, catching candidates off guard. WSJ reported that the Amazon decided to split a total of 50,000 employees between two new offices because the company believes it can recruit better candidates that way, while also avoiding the traffic, housing, and other potential infrastructure headaches of adding tens of thousands of new employees to one area.

Nonetheless, when it became clear that New York City and Arlington, Virginia were among the top contenders, residents of both areas began to worry about Amazon’s impact on housing costs and commutes, with New Yorkers wondering if the beleaguered New York City subway can handle 25,000 potential new riders. Long Island City community groups have also called on Amazon to pay a “gentrification tax” to help keep local residents from being priced out of their neighborhood by its employees.

TechCrunch has contacted Amazon for comment.

Today, Google’s YouTube VR app arrives on the $199 Oculus Go, bringing the largest library of VR content on the web to Facebook’s entry-level VR device.

YouTube brings plenty of content in conventional and more immersive video types. It’s undoubtedly the biggest single hub of 360 content and native formats like VR180, though offering access to the library at large is probably far more important to the Oculus platform.

One of the interesting things about Oculus’s strategy with the Go headset is that gaming turned out to be the minority use case following media consumption. If you find it hard to believe that so many people are out there binging on 360 videos it’s because they probably aren’t. Users have kind of co-opted the device’s capabilities to make it a conventional movie and TV viewing device, there are apps from Netflix and Hulu while Facebook has also built Oculus TV, a feature that’s still in its infancy but basically offers an Apple TV-like environment for watching a lot of 2D content in a social environment.

At the company’s Oculus Connect conference this past year CTO John Carmack remarked how about 70 percent of time spent by users on the Go has been watching videos with about 30 percent of user time has gone to gaming. Oculus has positioned itself as a gaming company in a lot of ways via its investments so it will be interesting to see how it grows its mobile platform to make the video aspect of its VR business more attractive.

With YouTube, the company has pretty easy access to effortlessly bringing a bunch of content onboard, this would have been a great partner for Oculus TV, but a dedicated app brings a lot to users. It wasn’t super clear whether Google was going to play hardball with the YouTube app and keep standalone access confined to its Daydream platform, as the company’s homegrown VR ambitions seem to have grown more subdued, it looks like they’ve had some time to focus on external platforms.

You can download the YouTube VR app here.

Tinder is preparing to roll out more gender options in its app in India. The company will announce shortly that users will be able to edit their profiles in order to choose a different option for their gender identity, instead of just “Man” or “Woman,” as well as toggle a setting that will display their gender on their profile in the app.

These same options have been live in the U.S. since November 2016, when the dating app added options for transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The news was published earlier today to Tinder’s blog ahead of a planned announcement, a spokesperson said. It plans to share more information later tonight, they noted. (We’ll update if that’s the case).

In the post Tinder published, the company admits it hasn’t always “had the right tools” to serve its community in the past, and is now trying to learn to be a better ally to transgender and gender non-conforming people using its app. On this front, Tinder says it’s expanding its support team and educating its staff about the issues that these communities face in India. 

Additionally, the company is opening up its support channels and inviting back users who were banned after being unfairly reported by others due to their gender. Tinder users will be able to email the company with a link to their Facebook profile in order to have their request reviewed by Tinder’s team, in order to be let back in. To what extent banned users will want to return, of course, is less clear at this point.

Tinder has not fared well with the trans community in particular, as some users in the past have been banned from the app even when using the identifiers for trans people and displaying this on their profile.

For the U.S. launch of the expanded gender options, Tinder had worked with organizations like GLAAD, activists and others.

In India, it worked with users and consultants, including an LGBTQ organization working for the health and human rights of the LGBTQ community since 1994, The Humsafar Trust, as well as LGBTQ author and inclusion advocate, Parmesh Shahani.

The post also pointed users to Umang, a Mumbai-based support group run by The Humsafar Trust, which offers mental health counseling, legal support, community support and events. And it linked to the clinical and counseling unit of The Humsafar Trust.

The group also runs a helpline Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 8:30 PM at +91 9930095856, and is available on WhatsApp.

“Every new person in your life expands your horizons in some way. Inclusion and acceptance drive this expansion, and we want Tinder to reflect the world that surrounds us every day. No one will ever be banned from Tinder because of their gender,” said Tinder.

The move is notable not just because of the arrival of these important and inclusive features, but because of how critical the Indian market is for dating apps. So far, it seems straight Indian men have been flocking to Tinder and other apps in large numbers, but they’ve had trouble diversifying their user base. To address this problem, Tinder and others have focused efforts on recruiting the millions of young, educated India-based users who have left home to go live and work in cities.

Tinder – like all major tech companies – sees India as a key market, because of the rapid smartphone adoption and the population size. It even launched its Bumble-inspired “My Move” feature there first, back in September.

Bumble, meanwhile, has its sights on India as well, having said it plans to be in the market in full force by year-end.