Category: Tech news

How students are fighting lies, half-truths, and hypocrisy in the wake of the Florida school shooting

Google released the former senior software engineer last August after he wrote a ten-page memo arguing that biological differences between men and women accounted for the gender disparity in software engineering.

 If you need to make a 3D model of an object, there are plenty of ways to do so, but most are only automated to the extent that they know how to spin in circles around that object and put together a mesh. This new system from Fraunhofer does it more intelligently, getting a basic idea of the object to be scanned and planning out what motions will let it do so efficiently and comprehensively. Read More

 Google announced today that it intends to buy Xively from LogMeIn, giving Google Cloud an established IoT platform to add to their product portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Google indicated it wants to use this purchase as a springboard into the growing IoT market, which it believes will reach 20 billion connected things by 2020. Read More

 Instagram has taken down content posted by Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny under pressure from a government agency, while YouTube has yet to do so. Navalny and others have criticized Instagram for complying to what they call a politically motivated move to silence him. Read More

 Black Panther doesn’t look like any movie I’ve seen. I mean, I don’t want to downplay America’s long history of black cinema (a history that already includes a handful of black superheroes). Nor am I ignoring the fact that Black Panther is the latest installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — so yes, it conforms in a number of ways to the dictates of… Read More

 Founders’ Co-op, a Seattle-based seed-stage venture firm, is looking to close its fourth and newest fund with $25 million, according to an SEC filing that shows the outfit has raised at least $10.7 million toward that end. The firm — now a fixture on Seattle’s venture scene — was created 10 years ago and closed its last fund in 2015 with $20 million. Read More

 When I first heard of Blinkist, a service that breaks down recent nonfiction books to easily digestible snippets, I was afraid it would turn out to be some machine-learning-driven auto-summary thing. But in talking to co-founder Niklas Jansen, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the company is still very much people-powered — and in fact, that may be the root of its continuing success. Read More

 Game streaming site Twitch today is debuting an always-on chat room feature it’s simply calling “Rooms.” The addition was first announced at its developer event TwitchCon back in October, and was expected to launch before year-end. That timing shifted a bit, but the feature is going live today across both web and mobile for Twitch users worldwide. Rooms are custom chat… Read More

 Failure doesn’t usually happen “to” startups. It happens when founders rationalize problems until it’s too late. Attack problems early and the startup will advance. Rationalize that the problems don’t exist and you’ll just be another depressing startup post-mortem. Read More

 Roche, the global pharmaceutical company from Switzerland, today announced it will scoop up Flatiron Health, a startup analyzing real-time oncology data to help cancer patients and doctors, in a $1.9 billion deal. Flatiron has also confirmed the deal to TechCrunch. Read More

 Sure, yesterday’s big wood staining HomePod news was a bit of a black eye for Apple’s smart speaker, but it’s going to be a boon for one very specific, extremely narrow product category. I’m sure I’m going to get 50 similar pitches the minute this story publishes, but Pad & Quill owner Brian Holmes beat everyone to the punch by alerting us to a $20 leather… Read More

 Despite a lot of backlash over a big redesign for the Snapchat app — which to be sure is a very big deal for a product-centric company like Snap — Snap CEO Evan Spiegel vigorously defended the redesign and basically said people need to get used to it.
Spiegel said at the Goldman Sachs Internet & Technology Conference that even people complaining about the app was a sort of… Read More

 Bike-sharing has become the hot new mode of transportation for startups. Today, Lyft is announcing a partnership with the Baltimore Bike Share program to support new transportation hubs for bikes, and designated pick-up and drop-off spots for Lyft, the Baltimore Business Journal reports. Read More

 It’s no secret that the cryptocurrency market cap has grown faster than the broader crypto industry. This means that the options for tools to help hold, track and manage your cryptocurrency are still pretty slim. CoinTracker is one of the recently launched startups trying to help. Part of YC’s Winter ’18 class, it’s a platform to track your crypto across all… Read More