Category: Tech news

The acquisition signals that Uber wants to be more than just taxi substitute.

The Somnox is a fuzzy, bean-shaped robot that mimics human breathing to help the human holding it fall asleep.

The cast of the new anthology film might be headed to a diner near you.

In every game, the experience only holds up as far as you can see it. In ‘Far Cry 5,’ the experience doesn’t even hold up that far.

It works sort of like noise-cancelling headphones, eliminating bumps with movement in the opposite direction.

WIRED Columnist Robert Wright on what Steven Pinker’s new bestseller ‘Enlightment Now’ gets wrong about our polarized politics.

In complaint to the FTC, child-health, privacy, and consumer groups say YouTube is targeting kids improperly.

I was a passenger onboard a companion flight on March 11. Locked to the downed craft, the victims didn’t stand a chance.

Last week social media spent an awful lot of time talking about old media. Twist!

Opinion: The Cambridge Analytica scandal makes it clear: The US needs to pass a privacy law that gives consumers the protections they deserve.

A technique based on genetic bar codes can easily map the connections of individual brain cells in unprecedented numbers. Unexpected complexity in the visual system is only the first secret it has revealed.

The vehicles will need updates—forever.

Behind every great woman, there is often another great woman who has encouraged her and listened to her and advised her, rather than tried to compete with her. That’s the way that it should be, according to Shine Theory, a concept that was crystalized by journalist Ann Friedman in 2013 and embraced by women in the last presidential administration at the urging of Barack Obama himself.

As Obama’s former senior advisor Valerie Jarrett recalls its genesis in the White House, numerous women who’d been hired into the largely male administration began voicing their opinions less and less over time. “You had to really push your idea in, and [it was] totally exhausting,” Jarrett recalls in a new interview with the founder of TaskRabbit, Leah Busque .

Jarrett — who’d recruited many of the female senior officials and knew they were the “best and the brightest” — felt responsible for their happiness, so she voiced her concern. “I said to President Obama, ‘Watch and see. These women aren’t talking as much as they did at the beginning; they’re shying away.’”

In response, he proposed an idea. “He said, ‘I want them to come over and have dinner with me at my home and we’re going to talk about it,’” says Jarrett. They did, and it was a “frank and open dinner, and everyone explained to him their perspective, and he said, ‘I have your back. And when I’m not there, Valerie has your back.’”

Obama then asked the women to commit to having dinner regularly with Jarrett and to come back if they felt they needed to speak with him again. They didn’t, says Jarrett. Over the dinners, she tells Busque, “We’d built our own community.” Attendees aired grievances about the male colleagues. They discussed their children. They found “safety in numbers,” says Jarrett. Most importantly, she says, they found strength that they carried into their work.

Little wonder that Busque, whose company sold to Ikea last year and who today works as a venture capitalist, now wants to help women across a broad range of industries more easily come together to learn, to laugh, and to amplify each other’s power.

Toward that end, Busque has formed a new initiative called Shine Together with Task Rabbit’s former VP of marketing, Jamie Viggiano, that plans to organize dinners with women, feature content at its site like Busque’s sit-down with Jarrett, and to help up-and-coming businesswomen connect with needed mentors.

The organization, which quietly announced itself on Medium a few weeks ago, has already launched with a series of stories focused on notable women, including Jarrett; five-time Olympic medalist Nastia Liukin; and Ann Miura-Ko, the cofounding partner of the venture firm Floodgate.

Shine Together doesn’t merely feature women discussing their own paths, notably. It asks them to “shine a light on women who are behind the scenes but doing incredible stuff,” says Busque. Liukin, for example, talks in her interview about her mother. Miura-Ko talks about a sales executive, Stephanie Schatz, and their relationship.

For now, such video interviews will be published weekly and featured at Shine Together’s dedicated site. Over time, Viggiano — who is running the organization’s day-to-day operations — intends to work with distribution partners that are interested in making the content a part of their platforms, too.

As for the dinners, the idea is for powerful women to come and to bring a plus one — “someone who wouldn’t have access to this type of group,” Busque says. “We want to cast a wider net and give more women who deserve it [entrée] into these networking groups.”

It’s still early days, but you can learn more about the initiative here. Meanwhile, to learn more about Jarrett’s path in particular, you might check out Busque’s recent interview with her, below.

After a bit of a hubbub among developers this morning who were pissed that in a few months their third-party Twitter apps could lose essential functionality, Twitter announced that they would be delaying the sunset of certain APIs in an effort to make sure developers have enough time to make changes.

The current date the APIs were set to retire was June 19, and developers of apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot and Tweetings were getting understandably antsy because third-party devs hadn’t been granted access to the new Account Activity API that Twitter announced last year.

No details on how long this delay will last, though a Twitter spokesperson tells TechCrunch that today’s announcement was meant to ensure devs have enough time to migrate to the new API.

Third party Twitter services have always been in a weird position with the company, because as Twitter has grown they’ve surprisingly continued to be pretty generous with what devs can do with their APIs. Instead of cutting these apps out, they’ve just proceeded to rein things in slowly, so when something like an API shutdown is coming along, these developers might feel like this is the time where they have to gear up to fight the good fight against Big Twitter.

Today’s news is good for these third-party developers but it’s only useful if they get more of the questions answered by Twitter in terms of what functionality they can expect to maintain and how much the new pricing for Enterprise service to the company’s accounts will be.

In the run-up to Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden issued a warning to the company about what it can expect from lawmakers if it doesn’t radically alter course.

“Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have a couple of very unpleasant days before Congress next week and that’s the place to start,” Wyden said at the TechFestNW conference in his home state of Oregon on Friday.

“There are going to be people who are going to say Facebook ought to be broken up. There have been a number of proposals and ideas for doing it and I think unless [Zuckerberg] finds a way to honor the promise he made several years ago, he’s gonna have a law on his hands.”

The Senator added that he would support such a law.

For Wyden, concealing the truth about data sharing in the fine print is a deceptive practice that’s gone on too long.

“I think we got to establish a principle once and for all that you own your data, period,” Wyden said.

“What does that mean in the real world? It’s not enough for a company to bury some technical lingo in their [terms of service]… It’s not enough to have some convoluted process for opting out.”

While that might have been wishful thinking two weeks ago, the Oregon lawmaker believes that Facebook’s most recent scandal has creating the perfect opportunity for privacy reform.

“If there is a grassroots uprising about the issue of who owns user data, we can get it passed,” Wyden said, citing other pieces of bipartisan legislation that once seemed like a long-shot.

Wyden, one of the loudest digital privacy champions in Congress, wants the public to use Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle to demand that social networks obtain “explicit consent” from users before sharing their personal data with anyone — including advertisers.

“It’s real basic. You have to give the okay for them to do anything with your data,” Wyden said.

Zuckerberg is slated to appear before the Senate’s commerce and judiciary committees on Tuesday and the House energy and commerce committee the following day.

To date, Facebook has always successfully squirmed out of seeing its chief executive with his right hand raised. This time, as pressure mounted from legislators, investors, advertisers and the public alike, the company conceded. The set of hearings is widely expected to be a milestone event in big tech’s reluctant shuffle toward getting its wings clipped in Congress.

Unfortunately for Facebook, its corporate willful ignorance around protecting user data echoes other recent privacy catastrophes — a context that won’t do it any favors.

“The reason that Facebook is in hot water is essentially the same reason that Equifax is in hot water,” Wyden said. “These companies have not gotten their heads around the idea that the data they collect is more than just their property.”