Kiran Upadhyay

In Mark Zuckerberg’s second public Q&A currently being livestreamed, Zuckerberg discussed how Facebook won’t add a dislike button but wants to give more nuance to how people share emotions and reactions other than approval, and explained how he doesn’t think connecting with friends is a waste of time. The 30-year old CEO, clad in his gray t-shirt uniform, said Facebook changes its privacy policy as infrequently as possible while keeping up with its new technologies. The company is working on oversight of experimentation and user testing around emotion and sensitive communities. And while Facebook gets flack for making us less connected in real-life, Zuckerberg said the product’s goal it to let us blow past Dunbar’s Number and maintain relationships with more people. Zuck’s first public Q&A last month saw him tackle some of Facebook’s toughest questions and criticisms head on. The CEO explained that Facebook split off Messenger from its main app and forced people to downl...

Your house is cold, but your thermostat is way over there. You could walk over to your thermostat and crank the heat, but pfft, walking. If you have a Nest, you could open up the app and control it that way, but, pfft, opening apps by hand. What is this, 2007?! As of this morning, you can now control a Nest with your voice. Making use of that $3.2 billion acquisition it made earlier this year, Google is integrating Nest functionality into Google Now. Want to make it warmer? Just say “Ok Google, change temperature to 75 degrees.” to your phone. Meanwhile, Google Now will also throw up a card whenever Nest’s automated control settings kick in. If it decides to bump the temperature up on its own to prep for your arrival from work, for example, it’ll show up as a Now card. A few things to note: Because it relies on Google Now, the voice functionality will only work system-wide on Android for now. You can still use the voice commands on iOS, but it’ll only work through the G...

 Yet the news cruised by with analysis focused simply on what Facebook’s new keyword post search does today. Yes, any post by you or any of your friends can now be dug up with a quick search from mobile. But I don’t think people realize how big a deal it is for tomorrow. Facebook just went from data rich to Scrooge-McDuck-swimming-in-a-tower-full-of data rich. The ramifications for advertising, developers, and Facebook itself are tough to fathom. Our most vivid doppelgänger, our digital echoes can now be tracked. They don’t just say who we were, but where we’re headed, and what we’ll want next. First, the trillion post index gives us group memory.Each person can only search stories from their friends and surrounding network, but Mark Zuckerberg recently said those all add up to over 1 trillion posts. If your friends put their lives on Facebook, you can now remember them too. You could say these are just faded snapshots, nowhere near the real thing, but how much of our own l...

Remember when Chrome  was fast? Microsoft might, if ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley’s recent report that the software company is building a lightweight browser, codenamed “Spartan,” bears out. According to Foley, Spartan is “new” and “isn’t [Internet Explorer].” Her post notes that it could be set free inside of the Windows 10 release schedule. In short, Microsoft may be building a speedy, simpler browser that maintains use of Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. Internet Explorer has had a ribald history, growing from zero market share, to market-dominating heights, to slow decline in the face of Firefox, to faster decline in the face of Chrome, to a recent re-acceleration under a new, standards-based approach. Its life has been bitcoin’s late 2013 to date, but stretched out over several decades. Whether the company’s recent moves have been enough to salvage Internet Explorer’s tarnished brand, however, is open to interpretation. Microsoft certainly wants its browser to gain market...

Sliders suck. “Little too far to the left. Ugh. Little too far to the right. ARRHGH!!!” The mouse can be a frustrating controller for Photoshop, Final Cut, AutoCAD or even Spotify. But a new input device called Flow lets you play your computer like an instrument, with infinite dexterity through feeling rather than sight. The Y Combinator startup Senic’s ~$100 wireless Flow puck offers four types of control: motion by waving over its infrared sensor, a programmable touch-sensitive pad on top, haptic response for pushing Flow like a button, and a physical cylinder around the sides that you can twist for ultimate precision. It already works with 30 apps like some of the Adobe Creative Suite, and cunning developers can build custom Flow interfaces for anything they want. Co-founder Tobias Eichenwald thinks there are better ways to work than squinting at a screen. He wants Flow to let you control your computer “blindly, unconsciously, naturally” — like a guitar. Normally, designers h...

Most startup founders don’t think of themselves as master negotiators and struggle to come up with the right things to say in crucial moments. These moments are the perfect time to exercise one of sales’ most valuable tricks: silence. It’s hard to embrace silence during negotiations due to the level of fearlessness and discipline required. However, it’s an incredible tool and saved our company $225,000. So why does silence work in negotiations? Being silent in a negotiation creates social awkwardness for the other person, resulting in the urge for them to continue talking. In those moments, the other party will slip up and give away their negotiation high ground to their unstructured thoughts. Bingo. All you have to do once someone keeps talking is remain silent and let them negotiate with themselves until the right moment appears. That’s exactly how I saved $225,000 in a 10 minute phone call. Here’s what happened: The founding team of Close.io was doing something complete...

Next year will be big for healthcare. We felt small tremors in 2014 of the seismic changes underway. In 2015, I predict five changes to the core of the U.S. healthcare system: insurance, pharmaceuticals, supplies, medical services and payments. Let’s take a look at each of these trends, what they mean for the healthcare sector, and what they mean for you. Walmart becomes your healthcare insurer This October, Walmart tipped its hand by launching a healthcare insurance exchange online. However, the insurance products currently sold on its exchange do not have Walmart as the carrier, which will change in 2015. Walmart’s public announcements thus far provide a clear preview of the insurance plan’s future design. Primary care through retail clinics and $4 generic drugs at the pharmacy will drive traffic into stores. For specialty care, the plan will leverage the Centers of Excellence program that Walmart already offers to its 1.2 million insured employees. In this program, consumer...

As we’re coming up on the next Consumer Electronics Show, I got an update from one of the companies that participated in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at the last CES — Russian startup Livemap. The Livemap team is working to create motorcycle helmets with voice control and GPS navigation directly in your field of vision — so while you’re riding, you can see directions in your helmet display without having to fiddle with another device or look away from the road. (Back in January, the Livemap team demonstrated an early version of their display, which was transparent enough to show a map without obscuring the road ahead.) CEO Andrew Artishchev told me via email that most of the past year has been spent building the pre-production prototype of Livemap’s optics. Those optics will be built entirely of aspheric lenses, allowing the helmet to, in his words, be “smaller and lighter and sometimes cheaper than the multi-lens design.” He added that the other big focus has been creating...

Sony has revealed that The Interview has earned $15 million in consumer spending via rentals and purchases across online platforms in its first four days of online availability. A source with knowledge of the matter confirms that the overwhelming majority of these sales occurred through Google Play and YouTube Movies, meaning Google’s ability to rally and offer up its media stores as sales platforms helped considerably with Sony’s ability to get eyeballs on the gross-out buddy comedy that sparked international incidents and terrorism fears. The Interview’s opening performance online has already helped it become the number one online film of all time for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Sony released the film beginning at 1 PM ET on Christmas Eve day, via Google Play, YouTube Movies, Microsoft’s Xbox Movies and SeeTheInterview.com. It has been streamed more than 2 million times already since being made available, according to Sony. While The Interview was cited as the reason behind th...

Following through on threats of a Christmas hack, a Twitter account claiming affiliation with Anonymous released a list of what it says are usernames and passwords for 13,000 accounts on Amazon, PlayStation, XBox Live, Hulu Plus, Walmart and other retail and entertainment services. In addition to providing account information for online retailer, gaming and video services, the cache also includes information for a variety of pornography sites. The Daily Dot has compiled a full list of affected companies. And just to top it off, the group included a stolen download of “The Interview.” When Sony pulled the release of “The Interview,” Anonymous claimed on Twitter they would release the film themselves. It seems the company’s decision to distribute the film in certain theaters and online in the U.S. did not deter the hackers. (As TechCrunch noted earlier, “The Interview” was reportedly torrented 750,000 times in its first 20 hours) The allegedly stolen account information for PlayS...

LG is partnering up with Mercedes-Benz to make the future of driving smarter and less about the drivers themselves. The Korean company announced that the duo are jointly working on “next-generation camera systems” which they said will allow computers and algorithms to handle “some aspects” of the driving experience. LG told The Verge that it will provide the “core components” of self-driving cars from Mercedes-Benz in the future. That joint system will be based on LG’s existing ‘ADAS’ (Advanced Drive Assistance System) products — which include cameras that produce alerts when a vehicle changes lane, read road signs, check the driver’s health status and issue proximity-based warnings for obstacles — by licensing Mercedes-Benz’s fascinating 6D Vision technology to advance LG’s tech. We could be looking at a range of things, from cars that automatically slow based on what is ahead of them — per the video below — right up to fully self-driving vehicles. LG also confirmed that it ...

Tesla isn’t done with its iconic Roadster. The company just took the wraps off the next generation of the sport car. Chief among the updates is a new 400 mile range, which will allow drives from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single charge. Tesla notes that it expects a 40-50% improvement on driving range between the original Roadster and Roadster 3.0. Tesla plans on demonstrating the Roadster 3.0 in the early weeks of 2015, but pricing and expected release date has yet to be released. The range increase is thanks to a new cell technology that resulted in a battery that provides 70kWh in the same package as the original Roadster’s 53kWh pack. That’s an additional 31% of energy. In addition to the more power-packed battery, Tesla also shaved 15% off the Roadster’s drag coefficient and installed new tires that result in a 20% improvement on the car’s rolling resistance. Elon Musk stated two days ago that the Model S will eventually see a similar battery update, but not anytime...

Curved TVs are silly – the result of an industry flailing for some new selling point, now that 1080p is pretty much a standard option and the market has proven that no one wants 3D TVs. Vizio wants none of it. To highlight its resistance as Samsung, Sony, LG and the rest of the lot venture into questionable curvy territory, it pushed out a surprisingly chuckle-worthy phony infomercial (infaux-mercial?) mocking the concept. For the curious: calling the number in the video plays back a message that points to this page, which in turn offers a $100 off coupon for Vizio’s 4K P-Series line. Because, in the end, getting you to buy their TVs instead of the other guy’s is what this is all about. Of course, 4K TVs are a bit silly right now, too, given that there’s next to no content available for them right now. But unlike curved TVs, at least it’s something that gets less silly over time.

Twitter’s not the only one Facebook is battling for control of news and content distribution. With Pages getting quieted down in the feed, Facebook wants to make its home for businesses less like a newspaper that come to you and more like TV channels you turn on. That’s why it’s YouTube that’s getting flattered by the social network with a new design for the Video section of Facebook Pages. All businesses will soon be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a live comment feed atop their Page, and cobble together playlists of more of their videos. This makes the Videos tabs of Pages look and feel a lot like YouTube Channels. TechCrunch spotted the new design and features on ABC News’ Page, and the company confirms it testing the format with a handful of Pages, and plans to roll it out to them all in the coming weeks. Facebook’s video product changes come alongside pushes on the monetization front. It just struck a deal with the NFL to show football game...

GameAnalytics, a free analytics platform for games developers, has leveled-up its funding. The Copenhagen-headquartered startup, which also has a sales office in London and a development hub in Berlin, has closed a $5.5 million Series A round. The new funding comes from previous backers — Sunstone Capital, CrunchFund (Disclaimer: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a Partner), Jimmy Maymann (CEO, Huffington Post) and René Rechmann (President, Maker Studio) — alongside new investor, Beta Angels, and the company’s newly-recruited management team. It brings the total raised by GameAnalytics to $8 million. Those changes in the startup’s management sees the recruitment of a new CEO, and a number of other executive hires. Replacing co-founder Morten Wulff in the top job is former Managing Director of Aol, Luke Aviet. Meanwhile, another ex-Aol employee, Nick Roveta, who held the role of Head of Product and Partnerships at the U.S. tech/media company (and owner of TechCrunch), becomes G...

Yesterday, Sony made “The Interview” available online through Google Play, YouTube Movies, and Xbox Video. Unfortunately, the film was restricted to the U.S. only, so viewers in other countries either had to celebrate Christmas with a Yule Log video or run off to a torrent site. Not surprisingly, many decided to illegally download the film. According to Torrent Freak, “The Interview” has been downloaded an estimated 750,000 times after 20 hours. It’s unclear why Sony decided to make “The Interview’s” online release U.S. only, considering how much attention the movie has gained worldwide. Then again, the company has already faced unprecedented obstacles, including a hacking that the FBI has blamed on North Korea (though many security experts believe it was actually an inside job) and terrorist threats against theaters that screen “The Interview,” so a slow and cautious roll-out probably makes sense. We’ve emailed Sony to ask about “The Interview’s” international release schedu...

stonian startup Taxify is one of a number of taxi apps aiming to help traditional taxi firms and drivers fight back against behemoth Uber and its ilk. It does this by providing an iOS, Android and mobile web app that lets you order a cab online. This helps to bring the same convenience of Uber et al. to the licensed ‘taxi’ industry, helping it compete via technology instead of merely lobbying regulators or protesting loudly, Ubergeddon-style. Today the company has picked up an additional €1.4 million in funding, adding to the previous €100,000 raised — money it will use to consolidate what it claims is a leading position in Eastern Europe, and for further European expansion. Specifically, Taxify is active in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, and I’m told is eyeing up four more countries in the near future, including Netherlands. Of the 53 countries Uber is present in, Finland and the Netherlands can be counted. However, my understanding is that it has also registered entiti...

It’s time to gather all your startup family and watch the epic annual First Round Capital holiday parody video once again. In this 7th annual creation, we find partners twirling around in ballet attire and telling us, “we’re taking off, taking off,” Taylor Swift-like. Parodies of Pharrell’s Happy, Gurley, Sam Smith and Meghan Trainor weave in (“cuz it’s all about burn rate. Bout burn rate, slow spending”), one after the other, whilst startup employees dance around with their own themed contributions. First Round is known for its holiday parody videos. Last year’s ritual included a nod to Cowboy Ventures Aileen Lee’s coining of the term “Unicorns” and Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball.’ Brief mentions of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and taking a selfie show up in this one, along with market bubble confessions sung to the same rythm as Trainor’s ‘All About That Bass’: I see the industry fearing a bubble pop We don’t build for hype We know it’s gotta stop If you make users happy and ...

Tesla showed off its upcoming battery swapping technology for the Model S electric vehicle last year, which would let users change out their battery rather than charging when on the road for a quick fill-up that’s speedier than actually refuelling a standard car’s gas tank. Starting next week, it’s launching the pilot program of that advancement in Harris Ranch, California, at a new facility directly across the street from the Supercharger in that area. The pilot project is just that – an initial demonstration of how the system will work, designed to test the technical aspects of the procedure, and to see if it’s something Tesla drivers actually want. Unlike a recharge of their car’s existing battery pack, the swap won’t be free: instead it will cost “slightly less than a full tank of gasoline for a premium sedan,” according to Tesla’s official blog post on the matter. That could change in the future, but the swap involves labor and facility costs that charging does not. Swaps al...

Over the past few years, technology has given educators and the parents of autistic children tools they could never have imagined before. Mobile apps and games help kids learn communication skills, while virtual reality can potentially teach them how to cope in different social situations. Many of these tools are created by independent developers, but as autism diagnoses increase, large companies have also begun focusing on the neurodevelopmental disorder. The latest tech company to come out with an autism tool is Samsung, which just released Look At Me, an Android app that it claims can help kids learn how to better maintain eye contact, something that many people with autism have difficulty doing. The app’s launch comes a few weeks after Google and advocacy group Autism Speaks announced MSSNG , a project seeking to develop the world’s largest database of sequenced genomic information from people with autism spectrum disorder and their families, which will be stored on Google Cl...

Keurig is a company that makes a product that produces an insane amount of plastic waste and a little bit of coffee. They’re also a company that thought this idea was so brilliant that it needed to be locked down under DRM — a system which, as you might expect, was utterly destroyed in no time flat. Now they’re also company that is recalling 7 million coffee makers. Before you get your hopes up: no, they’re not recalling the coffee makers because they’ve realized the whole DRM thing was a bad idea. They’re recalling the coffee makers because instead of making coffee*, some of the machines are burning people. WHOOPS. [* OR PERHAPS “IN ADDITION TO MAKING COFFEE”, BUT IF YOUR COFFEE MAKER SHOOTS HOT STEAM IN YOUR FACE YOU PROBABLY DON’T WANT THE COFFEE ANYMORE ANYWAY] These little machines are in just about every startup and tech company office I’ve been in (hell, we’ve got one), so I figured it was worth a note. According to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commiss...

If you’ve got more time than money and have a startup idea that you think you have the skills to build, a new partnership between Amazon Web Services and online education portal edX will hook you up with $1,000 in credit for completing one of two courses on entrepreneurship. Unless you’ve already taken some classes on building a startup, you’re not going to be able to completely BS your way through MITx’s Entrepreneurship 101 or 102 on edX. You actually have to pass the course, so expect to put at least tens of hours into the class. But once you make your way through the coursework, you automatically receive $1,000 in credit to spend on processor time and/or storage in Amazon’s cloud. You also get a few more bonuses meant for those more comfortable with code than administrating infrastructure, including credit for instructor-led training and web classes on using AWS, free support at Amazon’s premium tier, and “office hours” with Amazon specialists who can help figure out how to ...

Microsoft’s Sway, an online tool for creating presentation documents, is now generally available to the public. Previously, a waiting list was in place. That Sway has taken down its rope line isn’t surprising. What is perhaps slightly unexpected are the metrics that Microsoft announced in its blog post concerning the product’s availability. Here’s the company: It’s been only 10 weeks since we kicked off Sway Preview, and we’ve already had over one million unique visitors to Sway.com and over 175,000 requests to join, and those numbers grow by thousands daily. Ten weeks is 70 days, implying that Sway has seen around 14,285 hits and 2,500 signups per day, so far, on average. The actual count on the traffic side of things is slightly higher, but as Microsoft only specified “over one million,” we can’t be more precise. I would have had no guess what sort of traffic a product like Sway could attract. It’s from a large company, so that was an advantage. But being placed behind a ...

Google has been working on self-driving cars for a few years now — but up until recently, they were mostly modifying the heck out of existing cars, not building a vehicle from the ground up. Back in May, they released a mockup of what they expected their first built-in-house vehicle to look like. Today, they’ve released a photo of the real deal. Here was its original early mockup, from May: As you might notice, the final product ended up looking pretty darn similar to the early shots. While the vehicle still looks a bit like something out of a Richard Scarry book, some tweaks have been made. For example: It has headlights now, which is a good thing. Even if a self-driving car can see other cars without headlights (thanks, RADAR!), that doesn’t mean other (non-self driving) cars can see you. They’ve tweaked the front grill a bit, adding reflector dots and generally making it look a bit less like this emoticon: . The hardware on top of the car (a camera/radar ...

You need a big sub-woofer for big bass, right? Wrong. After 10 years of research, French acoustic engineers as Devialet just unveiled a giant step forward in audio that’s just one foot long. The Phantom is a petite, spherical, all-in-one amplifier and speaker that delivers what audiophiles think may be the best sound in the world for around $2,000. Of course, $2,000 is pretty steep, and that’s just for one of these things. But it’s about the same as a 5.1 stereo system from Sonos or a traditional set of hi-fi speakers, sub and amp. When Sting from The Police heard the Phantom, he said “I want people to listen to my music on this.” Hip-hop producer Rick Rubin was amazed by the depth of its bass. And former Beats Music CEO David Hyman said: “This small beautiful object will create a sound in your house that is just staggering. I’ve heard it. Nothing comes close. It can knock your walls down too.” Devialet has been awarded 77 patents, and has racked up 37 awards for sound and de...

Milliseconds make a difference when it comes to chat. The less lag, the more it feels like being in the same room. But with texting, we lost the cues like nods and “mmhmm”s that tell you someone heard what you said. Today Facebook Messenger takes a leap forward on both fronts with a big speed improvement across all its versions, and a new animation that shows you whether your message is sending, sent, delivered, or read. And rather than some tiny gray text, Messenger uses your photos of your friends’ faces to show exactly who in the convo has seen what, the company tells me. Facebook originally came up with the FacePile design about five years ago for a plugin that showed which of your friends Liked a website. Now it’s found to repurpose the design to let you know at a glance who has seen your messages. The new Messenger design is now rolling out on iOS and Android in Europe and the US, and will go worldwide soon. You can see how the read receipts work in this quick demo video:...

Many have called for Sony to release ‘The Interview’ online. However, Sony CEO Michael Lynton stated earlier that there has not been a major video on demand service, “that has stepped forward and said they are willing to distribute this movie for us.” Several major movie chains pulled out of the scheduled Christmas Day release of the film after hacker group Guardians of Peace threatened to attack any theater that decided to show the film. The studio said it was forced to then cancel the release, blaming theaters. “We do not own movie theaters. We cannot control what is shown,” Lynton said. Sony has confirmed it was looking for alternatives to release the film. Some have suggested Netflix as an alternative. Sony’s lawyer David Boies later confirmed Sony was looking into an alternative way to present the film when he called the theater cancellation a “delay” on Meet the Press. “Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. it will be distributed. How it’s going to be d...

I’ve always been interested in the latest shiny thing so when I was asked to review Opera’s feature-filled latest release, Opera 26, I jumped at the chance. Opera, like it’s musical counterpart, has always been the choice of aficionados. It doesn’t come included with your operating system and nor is it peddled by the world’s largest search provider. You have to make the conscious choice to be an Opera user. And oh are you rewarded for that choice. In countless performance tests, Opera comes out ahead. Opera is often the first of the major browsers to implement new features — it had tabbed browsing 6 years before Internet Explorer — and seems determined to continue this tradition. While the gaps have closed between modern browsers — especially when it comes to how they render webpages — there is still room for them to differentiate. I’ve come to appreciate Opera more and more as I’ve used it. Everyone knows Opera is fast and stable. What I’ve grown to love is the interface and th...

Here’s something neat. Google has introduced offline video playback for YouTube mobile users. That’s an exciting feature but there’s bad news for most TechCrunch readers: it’s only available on Android devices in India, Indonesia or the Philippines at this point. The company said the update will allow “much of [the] popular YouTube content” in these places to be watched without an internet connection. Videos that support playback will include an offline icon which, once tapped, offers a choice of playback quality. Once cached, each one is available to watch without internet access for up to 48 hours. Google has specifically picked these three markets because of the importance of mobile internet, coupled with the lack of people with data packages — not to mention the sometimes frustratingly poor quality of internet too. “Asia has proven itself to be a mobile-first world in terms of smartphone adoption, but access to high-speed, affordable data remains a big challenge. In respo...

It seems that Facebook quietly removed Bing as its primary search provider over the weekend, announcing plans to debut its own search tool on Monday, according to Reuters. The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other information from friends. Facebook has been building out its search products for a long time, using Bing as an extra layer to provide results beyond the Interest Graph in an effort to avoid letting rival Google into the system. A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters: “We’re not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we’re focused on helping people find what’s been shared with them on Facebook. We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft of lots of different areas.” Microsoft said almost the same thing to VentureBeat: “Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that’s been shared with them on Facebook versus...

Disagree with Sony’s decision to pull The Interview from theaters? So does President Barack Obama. In a statement during a press conference this afternoon, President Obama said: “I am sympathetic to the concerns that [Sony] faced. Having said all that, yes, they made a mistake. We cannot have a society where a dictator someplace else can start imposing censorship here in the United States. That’s not who we are. That’s not what America is.” He continues: “I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liability, but I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would’ve told them do not get into a pattern in which you are intimidated by those kinds of criminal attacks “We can’t start changing our behaviors, any more then we’d stop going to football games because of the possibility of a terrorist attack.”

Mixpanel, which describes itself as offering “the most advanced analytics platform ever,” is announcing that it has raised $65 million in new funding. That round comes entirely from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz, and co-founder/CEO Suhail Doshi told me that it values Mixpanel at $865 million (the valuation includes the new cash). Mixpanel was incubated by Y Combinator and launched in 2009. As Doshi (he’s the middle guy on someone else’s shoulders in the team photo above) tells it, the company decided a year later to make “a big bet” by focusing primarily on mobile. To be clear, the technology works with websites too, but Doshi said the mobile focus gave Mixpanel on edge over the big players in analytics, who were slow to respond to the new opportunity. At this point, he said the company has become “king of the mobile analytics enterprise mountaintop.” (If that sounds like startup hyperbole, albeit fairly specific startup hyperbole, I will note that Mixpanel is usually ...

There once was a man from Blue Grouse Who wanted to become fully soused He got in his car And went to the bar And wished he had stayed in his house. “A robot I need,” said he. “To prepare a tipple for me.” He bought some steel rods And some whiskey pods And started to work on his spree. The robot he made is a thrill It spits out your booze with a chill Called the Somabar It’s now a Kickstar And has so far raised nearly 1/10th of a mill. And what does this drink machine void when you select a drink on your Droid? It mixes your booze And out does it ooze Perfectly blended and poured. And so now this kind man he is drunk Thanks to Somabar he’s no longer so sunk. And four hundred clams he will see From each devotee Who wants to get massively crunk.

Citigroup raised the valuation of Instagram this morning from $19 billion to $35 billion. The photo-sharing network recently announced it had surpassed 300 million active users, and has taken steps toward cleaning up spam accounts, as well as adding new filters and features in an update this week. Instagram was acquired by Facebook back in April of 2012 for $1 billion. The acquisition came at a time when Instagram only had around 27 million users on iOS. However, the company saw over a million downloads n the first day of launching on Android, and Facebook put the pedal to the metal and closed the deal.

We’re not ace photographers, but we all take photos. Most could use a little help with light and shadow. So rather than making you manually filter them, Facebook tells me it will now auto-enhance newly uploaded photos starting today on iOS and soon on Android. You’ll be able to adjust a slider to control just how enhanced you want the light, shadow, and clarity, or revert back to your original shot. The tool could make it much quicker to post well-lit photos so you can share on the go and get back to what you were doing. Facebook and the other social apps are locked in a battle for photo sharing. To the winner goes tons of engagement. That’s why Twitter just revamped its filtering interface, Snapchat started letting you dual-filter with color filters and its geo-filter titles, and Instagram today added five new filters. Google+ added a similar auto-enhance feature a year ago. Previously when you uploaded a photo to Facebook from mobile, you were shown your unedited image, and c...

Quick! The bad guy/super villain has left the room! Plug in a mysterious device that’ll hack up their computer while an on-screen progress bar ticks forward to convey to the audience that things are working! It’s a classic scene from basically every spy movie in history. In this case, however, that mystery device is real. Samy Kamkar — developer of projects like that massive worm that conquered MySpace back in 2006, or SkyJack, the drone that hijacks other drones — has released a video demonstrating the abilities of a particularly ridiculous “necklace” he sometimes wears around. Called USBdriveby, it’s a USB-powered microcontroller-on-a-chain, rigged to exploit the inherently awful security flaws lurking in your computer’s USB ports. In about 60 seconds, it can pull off a laundry list of nasty tricks: It starts by pretending to be a keyboard/mouse. If you have a network monitor app like Little Snitch running, it uses a series of keystrokes to tell LittleSnitch that everyt...

An Uber driver in Boston has been charged with rape, according to Bloomberg. He allegedly picked up a female passenger on the evening of December 6, asked her to get cash out of an ATM, and took her to a secluded area where he beat and raped her. Police Commissioner Robert Haas and Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan have identified the suspect as Alejandro Done, 46, through Uber records. The statement given by the police says that Uber cooperated and aided police in the investigation of this incident. Bloomberg reports that it is unclear whether or not Done used Uber to specifically target the victim, though it is confirmed that Done is an Uber contractor. Read More

iPad-as-secondary-display apps have been around almost as long as the iPad, but most who used them once have seldom used them since. These things mostly work over Wi-Fi, and work poorly over Wi-Fi at that, with unwatchable video performance, choppy animation and tons of lag, even in the best of circumstances. Duet, a new app from a team that includes ex-Apple display engineering talent, changes all of that with a secondary display experience on an iPad (or even an iPhone) that feels like magic. I was initially highly sceptical of Duet founder Rahul Dewan’s claims regarding his app’s performance – lag free performance, even for games (on recent Macs) with 60fps refresh rates? Sounds like a “go home, you’re drunk” situation. But Duet manages it, and with minimal installation headaches, too. The key to the magic is using a wired connection (via Lightning or 30-pin dock connector) and the mandatory installation of a new display driver on your Mac that will recognize the connected iPad...

Artificial Intelligence has been in the media a lot lately. So much so that it’s only a matter of time before it graduates to meaningless buzz word status like “big data” and “cloud.” Usually I would be a big supporter. Being in the AI space, any attention to our often overlooked industry is welcome. But there seems to be more misinformation out there than solid facts. The general public seems to view AI as the mythical purple unicorn of technology; Elusive, powerful, mysterious, dangerous and most likely made up. And while there is plenty of debate in the scientific community, I can at least tell you what AI is definitely not. First of all, AI is nothing to be frightened of. It’s not a sentient being like SkyNet or an evil red light bulb like HAL. Fundamentally, AI is nothing more than a computer program smart enough to accomplish tasks that typically require human quality analysis. That’s it, not a mechanized, omnipresent war machine. Secondly, AIs are not alive. While AIs ar...

Google has just released its ‘best stuff of the year’ on Google Play for 2014, and in terms of most downloaded content, it’s not all that different from Apple’s list. Frozen, The Walking Dead, and Fancy by Iggy Azalea all placed at the top of the list in their respective categories, though the app situation varied a bit from that of Apple’s list, which is an editorial decision while Google focuses on downloads. In the Google Play store, top apps included Duolingo (which made Apple’s list last year), Netflix, Facebook, and MyFitness Pal to name a few. Google also said that Health and Fitness was the fastest growing app category. Here’s the full list from Google. Congrats to the folks who are on it. APPS Most Downloaded Apps by Category in 2014 Education: Duolingo Health & Fitness: MyFitnessPal Music: Pandora Photography:Flipagram Social: Facebook Entertainment: Netflix Sports:NFL Mobile Travel: TripAdvisor The Year’s Fastest Growing App Category Health &...