Snap Map is Snapchat’s plan to tie together its online content with ways to augment your offline reality, and it’s got the patent to back it up. Augmented reality location startup Drop tells TechCrunch that Snap Inc. acquired its intellectual property in 2015, including its “Location-based messaging” patent. In 2013, Drop developed an app that would let
Month: June 2017
Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about literally everything in the world. And hidden in that unending torrent are an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances that would be better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report
Enterprise cloud company Tintri was supposed to debut on the public markets yesterday with an IPO price between $10.50 to $12.50, but then pushed things back a day and lowered its price to $7. Shares were up about 3.5 percent midday Friday, trading at roughly $7.25 per share. In what seems to be a tough
Technically, Facebook can’t suspend people’s accounts just for sharing 50-plus false, sensational or clickbaity news articles per day. It doesn’t want to trample anyone’s right to share. But there’s nothing stopping it from burying those links low in the News Feed so few people ever see them. Today Facebook announced an algorithm change that does
Blue Apron is now down from its IPO price during trading today, falling around 4 percent to around $9.60 — a bit south of its original price. Early in the planning process, Blue Apron was shooting for a price range of between $15 and $17, which would have helped it raise even more money and
Facebook is expanding one of its newer features designed to help mobile users find accessible Wi-Fi networks. The company had begun testing a “Find Wi-Fi” option last year on mobile, which highlighted free, public Wi-Fi networks nearby. At the time, the option was only available on iOS in select countries, as something of a test.
Twitter is continuing to grow its live streaming business, with a series of new deals announced over the past week or so, including a partnership that will bring live streams from the floor of the San Diego Comic-Con in July, as well as behind-the-scenes action and news from Wimbledon, among several other efforts. You may recall
Playground Ventures — the VC fund co-founded by Android inventor and former Google exec Andy Rubin that sits alongside an eponymous incubator/startup studio and is making some big bets in areas like artificial intelligence and new generations of hardware– is raising more money. A Form D filed with the SEC notes that Playground Ventures is
iPhone 4 (2010): Eye candy The iPhone 4 focused on looks — and how! It’s a shame our first encounter with it was the infamous lost-in-a-bar unit, because the 4 really was an incredible jump in both quality of design and technology. It would have been exciting to have it revealed with Jobs’s showmanship. At any
Facebook recently came under fire for allegedly targeting at-risk youth in Australia. A 23-page leaked document details the power of the company’s algorithms to approximate the emotional state of users as young as 14 years old by monitoring their interactions and uploaded content. Advertisers can then learn when users feel “worthless,” “silly,” “overwhelmed,” “nervous,” “defeated,”
It’s still hard to say if the voice-controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way, brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new set of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands take advantage of conversational data to improve targeting and, ideally, conversions. Adobe says
Facebook says it’s introducing a number of new measurements for businesses that buy ads and own Facebook Pages. Last year, the company admitted that it had been misreporting some metrics — individually, none of the mistakes seemed particularly serious, but cumulatively, they created the impression that the company needs to work harder on transparency for
Instagram is flipping the switch on a system that will automatically detect mean, offensive and harassing comments and make sure that people never see them. The new system is based on work that Facebook and Instagram have done with DeepText, a text classification engine meant to help machines interpret words as used in context to
AppDynamics released an update today with a nod toward the growing trend of containerization. The company, which was purchased by Cisco earlier this year for $3.7 billion, wants to help customers using Docker containers pinpoint performance issues. The problem with containers is that there are just so many of them. Containers enable developers to break
Kinetica’s roots as a company go back to a 2009 consulting project for U.S. intelligence services. When they couldn’t find a solution on the market to meet the strict demands of the army and NSA to track terrorists in real time, they decided to build one. Today, it’s an in-memory database solution that relies on
Nutanix was born in 2009 as a storage company, but always had a broader view of the computing world. As company president Sudeesh Nair told me, they started with storage because they believed legacy storage was holding back data center transformation. Today the company made another step beyond that initial vision, introducing two new products
When you hear about companies raising tons of money for “smart glass,” the first thing that hits your mind might be something augmented reality-related like the HoloLens. But View, which just closed a $200 million funding round after securing $70 million from BlackRock alongside an earlier investment from TIAA, is using smart glass to make
Volvo tuner Polestar, which the carmaker acquired in 2015 to build its own race-ready Volve cars, is now being set up as its own separate company within the Volvo group, with a new focus on performance electric vehicles. The new Polestar will have its own branding, distinct from Volvo’s – though it’ll still produce performance
London could be a lot more green by 2050 – Mayor Sadiq Khan has outlined a plan for transportation service (via Engadget) in the city that would make the whole system, including taxis, cars and buses, totally emission free by that year. Even though that’s over 30 years away, it’s still an incredibly ambitious plan
Tesla’s next Gigafactory could be in China, according to a report from Bloomberg. The electric car maker is in talks to build its vehicles in the country for the first time, and it’s nearing an agreement with the city of Shanghai to construct the manufacturing facility in a nearby industrial development zone. The final details
Lyft has set itself some concrete goals for its renewed commitment to the Paris climate agreement, in spite of Trump’s announcement that the U.S. as a nation would be pulling out of the accord. Those goals focus primarily on Lyft’s autonomous ambitions, and so are contingent on the ride hailing company accomplishing its self-driving vision
London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a clean tech incubator aimed at sparking a new startup cluster in the UK capital focused on helping to foster the development of low-carbon and clean-tech products which are aimed at tackling the causes and effects of climate change. Among the issues the mayor wants London-based businesses to contribute ideas
Elon Musk couldn’t help but include some teasers in his Tesla shareholder meeting address on Tuesday, reiterating that the company would be holding a special event to reveal its Semi Truck at the end of September, but noting also that he would “really recommend showing up” for the event because “maybe there’s a little more
Henrik Fisker, who’s been teasing his new electric vehicle company after a stutter step first attempt with the original Fisker co. and the Karma, is back with the EMotion, the first car from Fisker Inc. The EMotion gets its first official eyes-on today via photos, not renders, that show us the vehicle in the aluminum and
WWDC is right around the corner, but let’s talk about last year’s WWDC for a minute. You may remember that Bozoma Saint John blew everyone away with her insanely good presentation skills. According to a new report from Axios, the Apple executive could be planning to leave the company really soon. Saint John was the
In this week’s wrap-up, Google announces Chrome will protect users against the most annoying ads. Meanwhile, a new company called Essential unveils a …
Apple is almost as famous for its ads as its products. We gathered our favorite campaigns, from the Mac to the iPhone. Subscribe to CNET: …
Blue Apron wasn’t the only venture-backed business to announce its IPO this week. Tintri, an enterprise cloud platform company, unveiled its filing. The stock market is doing well and there’s been a strong appetite for tech offerings, so it’s a good time to go public. But Tintri’s mounting losses could prove to be problematic. Tintri
The revelation behind Google Cardboard was that if you put your phone close enough to your eyes, it’s basically a VR headset — but it’s not quite that simple for mixed reality setups like Microsoft’s HoloLens. Or is it? HoloKit is an extremely clever DIY solution for a quick and dirty augmented reality experience with
IMSI catchers, devices used to spoof cell towers and intercept communications, are one of the most resented open secrets of law enforcement. Strict non-disclosure agreements prevent them from being acknowledged as existing, let alone being used — but researchers think they’ve found a way to spot the shady signal-snatchers. The devices, colloquially called Stingrays after