Google announced today that it is open-sourcing Seesaw — a Linux-based load balancing system. The code for the project, which is written in Google’s Go language, is now available on GitHub under the Apache license. Read More
Apple’s VR ambitions continue: according to a new report from the Financial Times, Apple has acquired an augmented reality startup called Flyby Media, which developed technology that allows mobile phones to “see” the world around them. The company, notably, had worked with Google in the past, as it was the first consumer-facing application to use the image recognition… Read More
Ad-supported iTunes Radio stations have today gone off the air. As we reported earlier this month, Apple decided it would shutter its free streaming iTunes Radio offering, a competitor to Pandora, in an effort to boost subscriptions to its paid service, Apple Music. Going forward, the only free radio option is Apple’s Beats 1 radio – the DJ-hosted station, which Apple is now… Read More
Apple is reportedly developing technology that would allow iPhone and iPad users to charge their device without needing to plug it into the wall or place it on a charging mat. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg which claims the wireless charging tech could work over unspecified long distances. Read More
Apple has acquired education-technology startup LearnSprout, Bloomberg reported a bit ago and we have just confirmed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. LearnSprout is a three-year-old, San Francisco-based software startup whose online data insights help K-12 educators track students’ performances. The company had raised $4.7 million from investors across two rounds, including… Read More
Here’s a surprise: Facebook is closing its Parse developer platform. After acquiring the service, which at the time mostly focused on mobile developers, for a After acquiring the service, which at the time mostly focused on mobile developers, for a reported $85 million in 2013, Facebook turned Parse into one of its key developer services. Parse will still operate until January 28, 2017,… Read More
Both Bank Of America and Wells Fargo are working on integrating Apple Pay into their ATMs, according to a source familiar with the teams on the projects. Engineers at both companies have been placed on multi-month assignments to build the Apple Pay options. I’ve confirmed the identity of at least one engineer who publicly lists themselves as a Bank Of America employee. Wells… Read More
Wael Ghonim is an activist who helped spark the Egyptian Revolution, a wave of protests and demonstrations in Egypt that were part of the Arab Spring, and which helped overthrow the long-reigning Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Ghonim, who worked for Google at the time, used social media to unite Egyptians and create the movement in his country and was jailed for it. Thanks to social media… Read More
A rare Apple product recall — the company has announced a voluntary recall of AC wall plug adapters made for certain regions because of what it says is a “very rare” risk of the two-prong adapters breaking and potentially giving the user an electric shock. Read More
Facebook shares are spiking today, and were up as much as 13 percent after the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings. The culprit? Once again, the company completely crushed expectations for its operating quarter. Facebook brought in $5.841 billion in revenue and earnings of 79 cents per share, compared to earnings of 68 cents per share and $5.37 billion in revenue. Read More
By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That’s up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue… Read More
Get ready for the big Live streaming showdown. Finally we’ll see who’s approach wins: Twitter and Periscope with a separate app and replays that can only be watched for 24 hours, or Facebook Live with its feature integrated into the popular social network and allowing replays to live on permanently. After 5 months of tweaks and slow rollouts, today Facebook is opening its Live… Read More
The early January theft of more than 320,000 user emails and passwords from cable giant Time Warner Cable gave validation to the argument that simple password authentication is becoming less and less reliable. But the Time Warner Cable hack is far from being the worst case of identity theft. In fact, it’s quite insignificant compared to some of the more severe cases we’ve seen in… Read More
For the first time ever, a computer has beaten a professional Go player, Fan Hui. This is a major breakthrough when it comes to artificial intelligence and neural networks, as beating top Go players has been the last symbolical challenge. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo is much more sophisticated than IBMs Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer developed by IBM. Arguably, we’re now living… Read More
Everything at Facebook seems to be growing, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s Q4 earnings call comments. Facebook now sees 100 million hours of daily video watch time. There are 1 billion monthly users now users on Groups, up from 925 million at the close of Q3. 80 million people use Facebook’s stripped down app Facebook Lite for the developing world’s slow connections, up from… Read More
Normally, a 6 percent drop in a stock price is somewhat significant but probably wouldn’t be considered a huge deal. But it’s a different story for Apple, where a 6 percent drop erases tens of billions of dollars in value. That’s exactly what happened during trading today following the company’s earnings report last night, which signaled the company’s first… Read More
Google announced today a couple of updates to the commenting features in its Google Apps productivity suite. These include the launch of mobile commenting in the iOS and Android apps for Slides and Sheets. Thanks to this, the commenting experience in Google’s apps is now (almost) the same across all of its apps — whether on the web or on mobile. I’m not sure why Google… Read More
Normally, a 6 percent drop in a stock price is somewhat significant but probably wouldn’t be considered a huge deal. But it’s a different story for Apple, where a 6 percent drop erases tens of billions of dollars in value. That’s exactly what happened during trading today following the company’s earnings report last night, which signaled the company’s first… Read More
In a Google blog post today by Clay Bavor, Google’s new VP of VR, the company detailed a few quick stats on the company’s Cardboard program. This interestingly comes at a time when it’s clear Google is looking to further emphasize virtual reality and augmented reality from a hardware perspective through recent moves. Nevertheless, Google took some time today to pause and look… Read More
Announced today, Google will begin licensing the Myriad 2 family of VPU chips from Movidius. This tiny chip, complete with 12 cores, specializes in enabling low power, advanced computer vision processing, which will no doubt be a valuable component to “mobilizing” to Google’s growing list of products that utilize machine learning. Read More
Google is launching a new version of Chrome for iOS today that promises to be both faster and more stable than previous versions. According to Google, Chrome 48 for iOS now crashes seventy percent less often and the browser should feel more responsive. JavaScript execution is also now significantly faster. Until today, Google still used Apple’s UIWebKit framework. While that allowed… Read More
Former Twitter product head Kevin Weil, who departed Twitter this week, has already scored a job running product for Instagram, according to reports. This would mean that Weil has landed in enemy territory, because Facebook owns Instagram. Weil was one of a handful of executives who left Twitter on Sunday; others include engineering head Alex Roetter and also Katie Jacobs Stanton, who… Read More
Apple will likely unveil the iPhone 7 in September 2016, and a new rumor has surfaced about the camera. According to Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities, the iPhone 7 Plus will come with a dual-lens system option and leverage LinX’s technology. As a reminder, Apple acquired LinX in April 2015, a camera module maker working on multi-lens systems. Read More
Apple will likely unveil the iPhone 7 in September 2016, and a new rumor has surfaced about the camera. According to Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities, the iPhone 7 Plus will come with a dual-lens system option and leverage LinX’s technology. As a reminder, Apple acquired LinX in April 2015, a camera module maker working on multi-lens systems. Read More
Just a day after the website that crashes Safari made the rounds on social media, Apple has already issued a fix according to BuzzFeed News. I tried loading the page that crashes your browser (crashsafari.com), and it looks like the issue is fixed, at least on OS X. Read More
