Category: Tech news

 The flagship game from Los Angeles-based mobile game developer Jam City, Panda Pop, has reached over 9.3 million monthly active users and climbed above its 100 millionth download. The tentpole game for Myspace founder Chris DeWolfe’s latest LA-based juggernaut of a company has certainly had its moment. Read More

 Early Uber investor and former board member Shervin Pishevar is speaking out against Benchmark again. This time, he penned a letter to Uber’s board, demanding that Benchmark Capital drop its lawsuit against former CEO Travis Kalanick. He also filed a legal motion, asking for the case to be dismissed, saying in his letter to the board that he had “no choice.” The letter… Read More

 Elon Musk’s The Boring Company, which he dreamed up while sitting in traffic because he wanted to go under said traffic, has permission to dig a two-mile test tunnel in Hawthorne, California. The approval for the test dig comes from the Hawthorne City Council, which voted four to one in favor of the move. It’s not a cross-country Hyperloop network, but it’s a start. Read More

 It seems that even scientific endeavors fall victim to feature creep — or in the case of an effort to scan all fishes that has expanded to include all vertebrates, creature creep. More than a dozen learning institutions are pooling their resources to create detailed 3D scans, inside and out, of more than 20,000 animals. Read More

 Staying on the cutting edge has always been pricey, but it’s starting to get a little wild. A report today in the New York Times suggest that Apple’s new high-end bezel-less iPhone is going to have quite the price bump, starting at $999. The price hike would undoubtedly be a rather significant one over past models. Unlocked models of the company’s current generation iPhone… Read More

 There are more than 1 billion cellphone users in India, which abruptly went cashless last November. These two developments play nicely into the vision of Ezetap, a six-year-old, Bangalore-based startup whose software as a service is used by more than 200,000 merchants. Read More

 The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website that has become a sort of football to be kicked around in the current controversy around hate speech, was briefly reinstated on DreamHost earlier today. Very briefly. Read More

 On Thursday, a D.C. court ordered DreamHost to comply with the Department of Justice’s request for data related to the anti-Trump protest website disruptj20.org — with some meaningful stipulations. Following the hearing DreamHost published a blog post hailing the court proceedings as a win, though acknowledging that it still viewed the DOJ’s modified request as… Read More

 Tesla’s already announced plans to reveal at an event in September an all-electric semi truck designed for cargo hauling, but we don’t know much about it beyond that yet. Now, Reuters reports that the vehicle will get between 200 and 300 miles of range per charge, which means it can manage medium-length routes without much issue. As the report notes, this doesn’t put the… Read More

 Oculus’s Head of Video Eugene Wei has left Facebook, according to an update on his personal blog. Wei joined the virtual reality company in late 2015 to lead video efforts after previously holding product exec roles at Flipboard and Hulu.
Wei detailed that he left the role in mid-July. The exit would have come just a few weeks after Facebook suddenly shut down Oculus’s in-house… Read More

 As a fan of wine and guides, WineryGuide got my attention. Created by Aga and Mariusz Andryszewski, the service offers detailed guides to wineries in Napa Valley in a compact and smart way. “The WineryGuide app puts all of the expertise of a professional wine concierge or tour guide with years of experience in Napa Valley at users’ fingertips. We use latest technology to answer… Read More

 Netflix’s subscriber count is soaring and the company is investing billions into original content, but according to a new report published by Marketing Charts today, live TV is still the first place around half of TV viewers go first when they want to watch a show. However, for roughly one in five viewers, or 19 percent, their “default” source for TV programming is now Netflix. Read More

 San Francisco-based Blend is simplifying the process of mortgage applications for both borrowers and lenders, but is looking to expand into other lending products. To do that the company has raised $100 million in new funding led by Greylock, with participation from a bunch of existing investors. Read More

 SpaceX has succeeded with a launch of one of its Falcon 9 rockets today, for client Taiwan National Space Organization (NSPO). The rocket took off from SpaceX’s launch facility 4E at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base as planned, carrying the NSPO’s FORMOSAT-5 satellite to orbit, where it was deployed successfully. This marks an even dozen launches for SpaceX for the… Read More

 Adding real-world diversity to emoji is a work in progress, but with platforms spanning the entire glove, it’s clearly important to big companies like Facebook. The social network just rolled out a set of new “family” emoji that, while they don’t yet capture the full spectrum, at least let your partner and kids have something other than yellow skin. Read More