Category: Tech news

 We knew this was only a matter of time, but Google today confirmed that Google Lens as part of the Google Assistant is now rolling out to all Pixel phone owners. That’s something Google already announced at its hardware event, but until now, the timing was unclear. If you don’t see it when you call up the Google Assistant, though, don’t worry. The company says that this… Read More

 Uber faced a data breach in 2016 that affected some 57 million customers, including both riders and drivers, revealing their names, email address and phone numbers. That affected group included 50 million riders and 7 million drivers; around 600,000 driver license numbers for U.S. drivers were also included in the breach, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Read More

 Salesforce has named Bret Taylor, the former chief technology officer at Facebook and founder of Quip, as president and chief product officer. Taylor first joined Salesforce in 2016, when Salesforce acquired word processing app Quip for $750 million. As chief product officer, Taylor will be tasked with leading Salesforce’s product vision, design, development and launches. Read More

 After putting our favorite battery packs in various gift guides over the years, we decided to go all out this year and do a gift guide JUST for battery packs. I consider myself something of a battery pack aficionado, so I decided to step up to the plate and lay out some of my favorites. Read More

 John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, is the latest media executive to face allegations of inappropriate behavior. In a memo to employees, Lasseter acknowledged “missteps” and said he will be taking a six-month sabbatical. Read More

 Six years after taking the helm as head of HP, Meg Whitman will step down from her role as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in February 2018. Whitman’s spot will be filled by the company’s current president, Antonio Neri. Read More

 While it didn’t dampen enthusiasm for everyone’s favorite dragon-oriented political drama, HBO certainly wasn’t happy when the major twists from the seventh season of its hottest show popped up online before they aired. According to a newly released indictment, an Iranian man named Behzad Mesri faces charges for the hack. Read More

 Do you like hats? If you do, maybe you already contributed to The Boring Company’s ability to dig a network of underground tunnels. Since Elon Musk started selling The Boring Co. hats, featuring the logo on the front (which he once claimed was designed by director J.J. Abrams), the company has apparently sold $300,000 worth of the merch. Read More

 As VR takes its trip through the hype cycle of technology adoption, I keep returning to the early days of film as a corollary for the medium’s progress and a good benchmark for its evolution. When they first arrived on the scene, movies must have had the same thrilling and disorienting visual jolt. And just as film developed, so too will VR evolve. Read More

 Boku, a U.S.-based carrier billing company, listed on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market recently, selling £45 million in stock. Only about one-third of those shares were from the company, however, with the rest sourced from extant shareholders. Let’s peek into the Boku offering to see what happened and what we might learn from it. Read More

 Physicists at MIT have developed and released a $100 muon detector that you can build at home, allowing you to sense deep space bombardment on something that looks like a TV remote. The CosmicWatch is basically a little box that can detect high-energy cosmic rays as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere and decay into muons.
Muons hit the Earth in a “light drizzle” say the… Read More

 ADAY, a fresh entrant in the highly competitive world of direct-to-consumer fashion, has raised $2 million in new funding for its mission to simplify wardrobes with a line of durable, technical and chic womenswear. The company is the latest in an ever-expanding movement of startups that offer direct-to-consumer products for the fashion-conscious consumer. Read More

 In recent years, the SEC has had greater success policing wrongdoing due in large part to the implementation of its whistleblower program. But the whistleblowers’ crosshairs are not limited to Wall Street. Individuals are beginning to come forward in a new sphere of the business world, one with its own reputation of a problematic, win-at-all-cost culture: Silicon Valley. Read More

 There are very few black and Latinx investors, with only 2 percent of investment team members at VC firms identifying as black and just 1 percent identifying as Latinx, according to the National Venture Capital Association. This is where HBCU.vc comes in. HBCU.vc, a pivot from HBCU to Startup, aims to diversify the white, male-dominated world of venture capital. HBCU.vc’s program works… Read More

 We are now walking through a media desert. While access to content is astronomically high, the content that we read is dead, lifeless, and derivative. Yes, I see the irony in posting my criticism of the state of online media on, well, online media, but I want to explore how we got here and what we can do about it. We begin in about 1983. The education necessary to interact with media of that… Read More