At the State of the Union, Trump touts tax cuts and immigration deal

 With a president as mercurial as Trump, it was anyone’s guess what would happen during his first State of the Union address. The appearance is the president’s most high profile public speaking moment of the year and Trump was expected to touch on some of the issues of the moment, including funding for a border wall, infrastructure and an immigration deal. While less likely if… Read More

Chat app Line announces plan for cryptocurrency services, loans and insurance

 Line, the messaging app with around 200 million monthly users, is embracing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fend off increased competition from Facebook and others. The Japanese company today announced the creation of a new financial services division which will spearhead a move into cryptocurrencies and other services including loans and insurance. Line already operates a payment… Read More

DroneGun Tactical is a portable (but still illegal) drone scrambler

 The only thing growing faster than the global drone population is the population of people thinking “how can I knock these annoying things out of the sky?” DroneShield offers a way to do just that, and now in a much more portable package, with the DroneGun Tactical — that is, if you’re an authorized government agent, which I doubt. Read More

Appeals court rules that Tinder’s pricing violates age discrimination laws

 A California appeals court has sided with Allan Candelore, a man suing Tinder over the pricing for its premium service, Tinder Plus. Specifically, Candelore and his lawyers argued that by charging $9.99 per month if a user is under 30, versus $19.99 per month if you’re 30 or older, Tinder is discriminating based on age. Read More

Fools and their crypto

 I believe that the token sale economy will drive the next startup revolution. Just as sites like TechCrunch, organizations like Y Combinator and the men in Dockers and fleece sweaters who populate Sand Hill Road defined (and still define) the last startup revolution, crypto will define the next one. But, as it stands, we cannot trust the participants, nor can we trust the products. Read More

Red Hat acquires CoreOS for $250 million in Kubernetes expansion

 Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million. Read More

TimeFlip is a time-tracking gadget simple enough that I might actually use it

 If you’re like me, and I’m going to assume you are for the purposes of this post, you like the idea of time tracking, but generally it’s a bit too fiddly or complicated. TimeFlip is a super-simple gadget that lets you easily track how much time you spend on different activities just by flipping it around. Read More

Amazon is experimenting with its own QR code style ‘SmileCodes’

 QR code style markers — those lil’ barcode-looking boxes you’ll see on ads from time to time, meant to be scanned with your phone to launch some website or app — have yet to really find their footing in the U.S. But that’s not going to keep Amazon from taking a stab at it. Amazon is rolling out its own take on the concept and calling them “SmileCodes.” Read More

Imverse’s groundbreaking mixed reality renders you inside VR

 What if you could look down and see your actual arms and legs inside VR, or look at other real-world people or objects as if you weren’t wearing a headset? Imverse’s team spent five years building this incredible technology at universities in Switzerland and Spain. Now its real-time mixed reality engine is ready for public demos, debuting this month at Sundance Film Festival. Read More