Kiran Upadhyay

If you work in an office environment, you probably know a few people—maybe a lot of people—with two smartphones. One is a personal phone full of pictures of the family, games, social networking, and sports stuff, and the other is a company-issued smartphone full of e-mail, appointments, contacts, and documents. With two phones, your IT department has full control over your work data and can remotely wipe it, and they never get to see your personal pictures or other information. It's a workable setup, but the downside is all the duplication—you have two phones, two chargers, and almost no free pocket space. The other alternative is BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—in which the IT department takes over and installs a bunch of company software to your personal phone. There is a better way, though, and it's called a "dual-persona smartphone"—a way to have separate work and personal data on a single device. Blackberry was the first to have it baked into the OS in BB10, but ...

Facebook wants to be your source for everything — whether or not you’re actually on Facebook. Today at F8, Facebook introduced the ability to embed Facebook videos on other websites. While you’ve been able to upload your videos to Facebook for ages, embedding them anywhere else was a bit of a pain. You could tear through the video player’s source code and try to get something working — but in most cases, it was easier to just turn to YouTube. Now you just click the “embed” button and get a blurp of code, much like what you’d expect to see in any of the myriad video hosting sites. Paste that code into your blog, and the Facebook-hosted video should pop right up. It’s a small, but clever move. Want to upload something to Facebook, but also want it on your blog? Generally, that meant uploading it once to Facebook, and once to something like YouTube. Now, you’ll only need Facebook — and Facebook will be the one getting those oh-so-important video views.

Today at its F8 conference, Facebook announced its new Messenger Platform that will allow its 600 million users to create and share content with third-party tools, and communicate directly with businesses rather than calling or emailing them. The content tools platform and apps from initial partners including ESPN, JibJab, and Giphy, will become in an Messenger update available today. Facebook is working with a limited set of partners for business chat, which will roll out sometime in the future. Facebook today released an SDK to help developers start building experiences for Messenger. The announcement confirms my scoop from last week that Facebook would launch a Messenger Platform focused on content. Facebook Messenger head David Marcus tells me “In the West, it’s the first messaging platform at the scale of 600 million-plus users that’s opened up to developers.” Facebook also launched a slew of new capabilities for Parse developers, advertisers, websites, and the News Feed...

On Thursday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced plans to avoid the state of Indiana for any future company events following the passage of that state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. "Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination," Benioff wrote on his personal Twitter account. He then emphasized his "employees' and customers' outrage" over the bill and said that he would "dramatically reduce" the company's investment in Indiana as a result. Benioff spent much of Thursday posting links to stories about the bill's passage, most of which referred to its discriminatory aspects and its potential negative impact on Indiana's LGBTQ community. He also urged technology CEOs to "pay attention to what is happening in Indiana and how it will impact your employees and customers." The cloud computing company, headquartered in San Francisco, acquired In...

Your next Android Wear watch could be a TAG Heuer. Intel and Google are today announcing a partnership with the iconic watch brand that will result in a TAG-branded Swiss watch powered by Android Wear. The announcement came at the start of Baselworld, the world-famous watch show in Basel, Switzerland where companies like TAG and Swatch are looking to retain market share. The partnership is very much from the same vein as Intel’s partnership with Fossil and Luxottica Group. Details about the watch are unavailable at press time and there is no indication that there is any product to speak of right now. So what does all this mean? Intel clearly knows it needs help from top consumer brands to bring wearable products to market. TAG, part of the LVMH Group, is also looking at the Apple Watch as an oncoming threat. By creating a higher end smartwatch for luxury-loving Android users – an audience obviously underserved by the current Android Wear crop – Hauer, Intel, and Google can try t...

Last year, Amazon gave a boost to its Prime members when it launched a free, unlimited photo storage for them on Cloud Drive. Today, the company is expanding that service as a paid offering to cover other kinds of content, and to users outside of its loyalty program. Unlimited Cloud Storage will let users get either unlimited photo storage or “unlimited everything” — covering all kinds of media from videos and music through to PDF documents — respectively for $11.99 or $59.99 per year. And those who want to test drive it can do so for free for three months. The move is a clear attempt by Amazon to compete against the likes of Dropbox, Google, Microsoft and the many more in the crowded market for cloud-based storage services. It’s not the first to offer “unlimited” storage, but it looks like it’s the first to market this as a service to anyone who wants it. Dropbox, for example, offers unlimited storage as part of Dropbox for Business, Google also aims unlimited options currently...

When you chat with friends about settling debts or splitting the bill, Facebook doesn’t want you to have to open another app like PayPal or Venmo to send them money. So today it unveiled a new payments feature for Facebook Messenger that lets you connect your Visa or Mastercard debit card and tap a “$” button to send friends money on iOS, Android, and desktop with zero fees. Facebook Messenger payments will roll out first in the U.S. over the coming months. Facebook And PayPal: Frenemies? Rather than lean on a payments company like PayPal to power the feature, Facebook built it from the ground up from its experience processing over 1 million payments a day through its ads and games platforms. Transactions and payment info are encrypted, and Facebook says “These payment systems are kept in a secured environment that is separate from other parts of the Facebook network and that receive additional monitoring and control,” from an anti-fraud team. Read More

Gone, a service that launched out of Austin to help your sell your old crap, has today announced a partnership with UPS that will allow the company to rapidly scale nationwide. Gone traditionally works by letting users snap pictures of their old gear, which is then automatically priced, picked up same-day by a Gone helper, packaged, and either shipped to a buyer or sent over to Gone to re-sell for later. A few days later, a paycheck arrives in the mail to the original seller. With the UPS partnership, Gone is introducing Gone Lite, which automatically ships users the packaging materials necessary for them to send off the item themselves, either through a home pick-up from UPS or by dropping it off at a local UPS branch. The most helpful thing about Gone is that the app automatically lists a reasonable price for the seller and ensures no back-and-forth between buyers, as that’s all handled by Gone. But it goes deeper than that. As of today, Gone integrates with the user’s ema...

Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends. At first, Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content and information to flow through Messenger. Depending on the success of the early experiments, Facebook may then mull bringing more utilities to Messenger. While the Messenger platform is said to be a major part of F8 by all the sources, it’s unclear exactly what form the third-party integrations will take. Considering what WeChat and Line have done, there are plenty of opportunities including ways for businesses to communicate or share content directly with users, or options for richer friend-to-friend content sharing. The platform is likely to start slow, with Facebook working wi...

If you’re excited about the forthcoming cinematic universe Disney appears to be planning around Star Wars, then this amazing seven-and-a-half-minute short created by a fan over four years should do a lot to help tide you over. The animated film was created by Paul Michael Johnson, and animated in the style of epic 80s anime series’ like Mobile Suit Gundam, Patlabor and many others, which featured painstaking hand drawn detail and shading. The short also features an epic ’80s-ish soundtrack, and sound effects from the classic TIE Fighter series of games from LucasArts. There’s an official spin-off movie planned for 2016 release that will mostly likely focus on X-Wing pilots called ‘Rogue One,‘ but this Empire-centric perspective is a unique take. Disney, option this guy for a full-length series and we’ll all love you forever.

How can I know what your “favorite browser” is? It doesn’t matter, really; if it’s any one of the four most popular browsers — Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari — it’s just been successfully exploited. This past week marked the 8th annual Pwn2Own, where security researchers come from near and far to flex their talents. The goal? Demonstrate exploits on the latest builds of popular browsers, get a pile of cash in return. The good news: because of the nature of the competition, none of the specifics of these exploits are made public until the companies behind the browsers get a chance to patch things up. So while the bugs being exploited here might be lurking in your browser, you’re probably not in danger of actually getting nailed by them before they’re cleaned up. Mozilla, for example, tells me they’ll have Firefox patched by the end of today. None of the other browser makers had responded to our requests for comment at the time this was published. The definition...

A Japanese company called Exiii has created a sub-$300 bionic arm that connects to your cellphone in order to perform some surprisingly limber maneuvers. The arm uses 3D printed parts to make it easy to build and assembled and it can be repaired or reprinted in multiple colors. Unlike the mechanical EnablingTheFuture arms we’ve seen, however, this model is full of electronics and connects with your smartphone and an EMG sensor. When your nerves and muscles move, the phone translates those to arm motion and can open and close the hand or move individual fingers. You can even swap out the fingers for tools or a rubberized stylus. The arms are available for sale now but there is a waiting list (“We apologize in advance that delivery may be delayed due to congestion of 3D printing service,” write the creators) and they’re looking to supply enterprises and research institutions first before sending them off to normal humans. The fact that they’ve reduced the price to $300 is amazing ...

Traditional technical interviews are terrible for everyone. They’re a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. They’re a bad way for candidates to evaluate companies. They waste time and generate stress on both sides. Almost everyone, if pressed, will admit this. And yet they persist. I humbly suggest that it is time for engineers who have the luxury of choice to start to flatly refuse to participate in them. Don’t panic. I have a better alternative. Read on. In the last month Danny Crichton has written a couple of excellent posts about technical interviews: you should read them, but let me just cite some highlights: Few professions seem so openly hostile to their current members as software engineering … we expect people to do live engineering on a white board under stressful interview conditions because, well, because that is what we have always done … In a time of engineer austerity, we simply can’t afford to throw away so much talent. He in turn was inspired by Th...

For four years, journalists and entrepreneurs have asked me why we created an open salary policy at my company. Here’s the answer: it prevents evil. Open salary policies mandate truthfulness and ethical behavior in organizations that would otherwise abuse the secrecy. “Transparency” is just a hollow buzzword unless executives are candid about compensation. I would argue that in any company, salary transparency leads to better culture, higher retention and a more effective business than secrecy – with one caveat. If your company abuses rank-and-file employees to pay monstrous executive salaries that have nothing to do with their performance, then yes, open salaries will backfire. If most employees would be disgusted at the salary structure, you have bigger problems than transparency anyway. When everyone at a company knows what co-workers make, this knowledge banishes the inequities and lies that otherwise fuel resentment and high turnover. Open salary culture will always beat ou...

Startup accelerators have become a prominent feature of the tech landscape in recent years, with more and more programs popping up every month. In many ways, they have become a rite of passage for thousands of entrepreneurs who apply to and join programs annually. Yet, with so many programs to choose from, and little publicly available data on each program, it can be hard for entrepreneurs to figure out which programs are most effective and which specific program would be the best fit to help launch their startup. We founded the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project with this challenge for entrepreneurs in mind. Our aim is both to foster conversation about the accelerator model that has emerged over the last decade, and help entrepreneurs gain a measure of visibility into the strengths of various programs. The project is an outgrowth of the original accelerator rankings study conducted by Aziz Gilani, Kelly Quann and Yael Hochberg in 2010. Today, at SXSW, we released the lates...

According to multiple local outlets, WordPress blogs are currently not accessible in Pakistan and pointing the blockage at the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). TechCrunch has not been able to confirm that yet. As it stands right now, WordPress.com and blogs hosted by WordPress cannot be reached. Self-hosted WordPress blogs still work. The error above is currently displayed when attempting to access a WordPress site in Pakistan. The Pakistan government has a history of temporarily blocking websites including Facebook, Flickr, IMDb, Twitter and Wikipedia. Other times, the government reportedly stated a ban will be temporary, but as is the case with YouTube, the ban is ongoing. The government states these sites, and many others, host content that it sees as blasphemous and inflammatory. Several local news outlets cite sources in the PTA that state the ban will be temporary and could be lifted within several days. TechCrunch has reached out to several companies includin...

During his freshman year at Princeton, Michael Pinsky went to the student lounge to watch a Yankees game. Knowing there were plenty of other fans on campus, he was certain it would be packed. But the lounge was empty except for Vaidhy Murti, another fan, sitting on an adjacent couch. The two began to talk, becoming fast friends. But the pair realized it doesn’t always work that way. “You walk around campus and have hundreds of acquaintances, people you say, ‘Hey, let’s get a meal to,’” Pinsky said. “But you never do.” So the now-seniors decided to try to fix that with an app called Friendsy. The app, which launched nationwide earlier this month, aims to connect college students, whether it’s to be friends, date or hook up. Friendsy launched on about 40 campuses before its national launch. In the two weeks since, its user base has doubled to more than 45,000. Friendsy is essentially Tinder meets vintage Facebook. You need a .edu email address to sign up. “As an interested v...

It’s been a year in the making. Transit startup Leap is finally launching in San Francisco with completely overhauled buses and a route from the Marina to the downtown area. The startup, which is trying to rethink mass transit, is competing with a host of other shared transit companies from Y Combinator-backed Chariot to ride-pooling startup Loup and, of course, Uber and Lyft. Leap, however, is aimed at regular commuters who are doing a predictable route every day and may not want to jump for the price points of on-demand services like UberPool and Lyft Line. Tickets cost $6 individually or $5 in packs of 20. If you use commuter benefits, you can get the cost down to $4 a ride, according to co-founder Kyle Kirchhoff. The buses circulate every 10 to 15 minutes and take about 25 minutes to go from one end of the line on Lombard Street to the other end in the Downtown area. The service runs during peak commute hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The key differenti...

While many of the bills introduced in state legislatures attempt to interfere with science education, there are a number that, through misguided fears, attempt to eliminate some of the benefits of scientific or technological developments. These efforts are often focused on radiation, such as that from Wi-Fi and cell phones, but they can target just about any item that's the subject of unsubstantiated worries (and the problems aren't limited to the US states, either). Genetically modified organisms are another technological development that, by all indications, are safe for human consumption. But some of the public is uneasy with the technology, and naturally there are legislators who are either members of or representatives of this constituency. New York state Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti (D) appears to be one of them and, in his rush to keep the public safe from genetically modified organisms, is now trying to outlaw major public safety developments: vaccines. Abinanti has...

Google is launching a new cloud storage service today that has the potential to change how many companies, ranging from startups to enterprises, view online storage. With Google Cloud Storage Nearline, businesses can store the data they or their customers don’t frequently need to access (think backups, log files or older photos), for $0.01 per gigabyte at rest. Cold storage isn’t a new concept. Unlike other cold storage services like Amazon’s Glacier, where it can take hours before your data is available again once it has been put on ice, Google promises to make your data in Nearline available again in about 3 seconds. As Google director of product management for the Cloud Platform team Tom Kershaw told me earlier this week, he believes that the gap between the cost of online and offline storage has to decrease. Online storage has always been relatively expensive, but if you run a large email service, for example, your customers expect to be able to search through all of their...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on stage at Nivdia’s 2015 GPU Technology Conference, chatting with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang about autonomous cars and the hurdles standing in the way of self-driving tech. Musk said that a fully autonomous driving system might actually only be as little as a year away, but noted that regulation will lag several years behind tech that actually makes such a system possible. Still, he said that Tesla wants to be the leader in autonomous cars, even though it’s currently seen as an electric vehicle maker. Musk also said we’ll actually start taking self-driven cars “for granted” much faster than many may realize, and noted that one of the key areas of focus for the company is actually on protecting any future self-driving software from malicious attacks. In addition to physical controls for manual override, Musk says there will be additional levels of security on driving systems, so that even if infotainment software is hacked, vehicle drive systems remain unaffected. ...

Today, some of the world’s most respected and successful figures are in the tech industry. They include the entrepreneurs who have developed innovative products and launched industry-changing companies and the venture capitalists who provide money and assistance to help these companies thrive. But while the technology sector continues to flourish, and its luminaries are seen as role models, the industry as a whole is suffering from a lack of diversity that has undermined its ability to fully realize its transformative potential. African-Americans Are Under-Represented In The Good Ol’ Boys Club The venture capital industry in the US (and thus, in turn, Silicon Valley) is made up of nearly all white males. In fact, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), the trade group for the industry, has recently acknowledged the lack of diversity in the industry and has recently formed a task force to help tackle the problem. However, even the task force lacks diversity, with ...

Twitter’s firehose of tweets has long been offered as a goldmine for businesses trying to understand how to improve or market their products, and now Facebook will allow privacy-safe peeks at its treasure trove, too. Today Facebook launched a new insights product called “Topic Data” in the U.S. and U.K. with the help of brand analytics leader DataSift. Facebook explains that “Topic data shows marketers what audiences are saying on Facebook about events, brands, subjects and activities.” For example, “A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity’s effects on their hair.” On days when everyone’s posting status updates about how frizzy their hair is, a brand could step up its ad spend knowing it’s the perfect time to reach potential customers. Sentiment, location, volume of mentions and words often mentioned alongside a brand can be pulled, too. Out Of Datasift Because much of Facebook’s data is private, unlike Twitter...

Algorithmia , the startup that raised $2.4 million last August to connect academics building powerful algorithms and the app developers who could put them to use, just brought its marketplace out of private beta. More than 800 algorithms are available on the marketplace, providing the smarts needed to do various tasks in the fields of machine learning, audio and visual processing, and even computer vision. Algorithm developers can host their work on the site and charge a fee per-use to developers who integrate the algorithm into their own work. The platform encourages further additions to its library through a bounty system, which lets users request algorithms that researchers familiar with the field can contribute from their work or develop from scratch for a fee. To demonstrate the platform’s algorithm hosting tools, the Algorithmia team built a simple app using seven user-contributed algorithms that visualizes what a crawler does as it works through links to build the struc...

Damn, this is more fun than I would’ve expected. Do you ever type things into Google just to see what whacky stuff pops up in the autocomplete box? GoogleFeud takes that concept and turns it into a Family Feud-style game. How well do you know the hivemind? GoogleFeud provides the first half of a search query, and you fill in the rest. Your goal is to guess as many of the most popular queries as you can. If it provides “Should I sell my ….”, for example, you might guess “house”, “car”, or “dog”. If your guesses line up with one of the most popular queries as searched for by Google visitors, you get a point; if it doesn’t, you get a strike. Three strikes, and the game is over. Want to see the answers to that board up above, for example? Here you go. One downside I’ve noticed: the engine isn’t very good at combining similar results, something that the real Family Feud accounts for behind-the-scenes. You also have to be absolutely specific in your answers — if you say “plane” ...

A small group of protesters held signs and handed out t-shirts to protest robots today at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. What did they have against robots you might ask? Well, they are (apparently, seriously) concerned that robots could one day surpass human intelligence and they were genuinely anxious about this. A spokesperson for the group told TechCrunch they hoped to raise awareness about the possible dangers of uncontrolled growth and development around artificial intelligence and robotics. He stressed, however the group wasn’t against technology per se or even robots and AI, but they wanted to make sure that these technologies were developed in a controlled way. The protest spokesperson cited Elon Musk as a prominent person who has expressed concern about robots and the development of artificial intelligence, and in fact TechCrunch reported in January about a $10M donation by Musk to the Future of Life Institute to “keep AI beneficial to humanity.” Read More

Apple’s newest MacBook is clearly designed to set the stage for all Apple notebooks to come – it has a dramatically thin body, which measures only 13.1 mm deep at its thickest point, and a 12-inch display with a very small surrounding bezel. The screen has Retina resolution of 2304×1440, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, and the computer has just one port for power and data input/output (plus a 3.5mm stereo jack for headsets). It really is, top to bottom, a computer that pushes the edge of technical advancement forward, and Apple’s decision to call it simply the “MacBook” signals that this is the way of the future. In person, the computer’s technical achievements are even more stunning than they were on stage. The notebook weighs only around 2 lbs, which is amazingly only about half a pound heavier than the original iPad. Holding it in the hand tricks your mind into thinking it’s even lighter, though, thanks to that larger display and the fact that you remember it’s actually a notebook. ...

IP addresses linked to the New York Police Department's computer network have been used to sanitize Wikipedia entries about cases of police brutality. This wouldn't be the first time we've seen nefarious alterations to Wikipedia entries, and it won't be the last. But the disclosure of NYPD's entries by Capital New York come as the Justice Department announced a national initiative for "building community trust and justice" with the nation's policing agencies. As many as 85 IP addresses connected to 1 Police Plaza altered entries for some of the most high-profile police abuse cases, including those for victims Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, Capital New York said. Edits have also been made to other entries covering NYPD scandals, its stop-and-frisk program, and the department leadership. One of the most brazen alterations concerned Eric Garner, who was killed by police last year during an arrest that was captured on video by an onlo...

Terry Pratchett, one of the world's top fantasy authors and creator of the Discworld universe, has died at age 66. Reports note that Pratchett died at home surrounded by his family, with his cat sleeping on his bed. Over on Terry Pratchett's Twitter feed, Rob Wilkins announced the author's passing in a beautifully poignant way—he tweeted a little scene between Pratchett and Death, one of the writer's most popular characters. As someone who has read the entirety of the Discworld series of books—multiple times in the case of the Death and Guards series—those tweets made my eyes well up. Read More

There has been a lot of interest—and a lot of skepticism—generated by privacy-oriented Internet gadgets recently. Many of them have focused on using Tor to anonymize network traffic completely, using inexpensive pocket routers and open-source software. But some of these projects have failed to launch or (like Anonabox and Torfi) have been outright pulled by the crowdfunding sites they were offered on, for a number of reasons—including serious doubts about whether they actually were secure, or if they were even products. One hardware-based approach to privacy currently in development takes a different tack. Rather than relying on Tor's anonymizing network, ExoNet and ExoKey—a pair of devices from a four-year-old Santa Barbara-based startup called x.o.ware—create an encrypted personal virtual private network back to the user's home network to evade eavesdropping on untrusted Wi-Fi networks and secure traffic all the way back to a trusted exit. The result is, in theory, a ful...

The current scandal roiling over the use of a private e-mail server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is just the latest in a series of scandals surrounding government e-mails. And it’s not the first public airing of problems with the State Department’s IT operations—and executives’ efforts to bypass or work around them. At least she didn’t set up an office in a restroom just to bypass State Department network restrictions and do everything over Gmail. However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats. Why would such high-profile members of the administra...

Apple announced the new MacBook today, and in true Apple fashion, it does things differently. A lone USB-C port will handle the charging, data input and video out. So how will users recharge an iPhone and the laptop at the same time? Buy these adapters from Apple of course! Apple just released a series of accessories for the USB-C port in the new MacBook. To use a standard USB cable, you’ll need this $19 adapter. Both costing $79, the USB-C Digital and VGA adapters each add another USB-C port, a standard USB port and an HDMI or VGA output, respectively. So as it stands today the new MacBook cannot directly recharge an iOS device without an adapter. Unless Apple releases the USB-C Lightning cable before launch, users will have to plug the standard USB Lightning cable into the $19 USB adapter. This isn’t the first time Apple has charged into the future without consulting the consumer. Back in 1998 the company launched the iMac G3 without a floppy drive or serial port. Then, late...

Most of us will never travel to the Khumbu region of Nepal, which is home to Mount Everest, but thanks to Google’s Street View, you can now get a better idea of what this part of the world looks like (and some Far Cry 4 players will find it looks quite familiar to them). Street View is probably the wrong name for Google’s latest effort here. It’s more like “Trail” View. Google partnered with Apa Sherpa, who holds the record for reaching the summit of Mount Everest more than anybody else (21 times!). Together with his Apa Sherpa Foundation and the Nepalese nonprofit Story Cycle, Google mapped and photographed the region on a 10-day expedition. In the process, Google created these new Street View images and improved its maps in the region. The closest to Mount Everest you will get on this virtual trek is Gorak Shep, but the team also gathered some indoor imagery from the Everest Summiteer Lodge, which was built by Apa Sherpa in 1996. Other interesting sights include a number of othe...

Behind every product is a product, almost invariably a computer-aided design (CAD) software package known as Solidworks. If you are a designer and want to draft a belt buckle for a new handbag, you have to use this software to carefully extrude the metal contours so that it is ready for manufacturing. Nearly every physical object we use – from our iPhones and headphones to our paper towel holders and toilet seat covers – started off as bits inside a computer. Solidworks is now twenty years old though, and the package is starting to show its age. Collaboration is immensely tough, since it continues to use a file model not dissimilar from Microsoft Word. When you have product development teams with dozens if not hundreds of members, separating out parts of a product and tracking changes across sub-teams becomes an almost impossible problem to tackle. That’s why a number of veterans of Solidworks, including its original founder Jon Hirschtick, have come together to completely reima...

(Update March 5: A few graphs have seen minor adjustments—2013 release Call of Duty: Ghosts was removed from the "most played" graph, and free-to-play title Dead Island: Epidemic was removed from the pay-to-own graph. The "Top 400" list has also been corrected to fix occasional row mismatches between games and developers/publishers. We regret the errors) When we first unveiled the Steam Gauge project last April, we were tracking just over 2,700 games released on Steam to that point. Since then, the library of games on Steam has ballooned to include more than 4,400 games by our count. That's incredible acceleration for a service that until recently was satisfied to grow slowly. For context, the last 18 months have seen as many new games added to Steam as the service's first 10 years combined. FURTHER READING INTRODUCING STEAM GAUGE: ARS REVEALS STEAM’S MOST POPULAR GAMES We sampled public data to estimate sales and gameplay info for every Steam gam...

Trying to control customer opinions online is nearly always a losing game for a business, and there's now a long line of cases where it has backfired on companies. We uncovered a new example this month, when a reader contacted Ars Technica to show us the "Social Media Addendum" that his Florida apartment complex, called Windermere Cay, included in his lease. The Social Media Addendum, published here, is a triple-whammy. First, it explicitly bans all "negative commentary and reviews on Yelp! [sic], Apartment Ratings, Facebook, or any other website or Internet-based publication or blog." It also says any "breach" of the Social Media Addendum will result in a $10,000 fine, to be paid within ten business days. Finally, it assigns the renters' copyrights to the owner—not just the copyright on the negative review, but "any and all written or photographic works regarding the Owner, the Unit, the property, or the apartments." Snap a few shots...

It's been a long time since a brand new desktop browser landed on the Web. Web newcomers might even be forgiven for thinking that there have always been just four such browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. After the vicious early days when the world of Web browsers closely resembled the ruthless world of the railroad barons a century earlier, the browser market settled down to something pretty boring. First there was IE and Firefox. A few years later, Apple introduced Safari. Several years after that, Google launched Chrome. And since Chrome arrived in 2008, the Web hasn't seen another major browser launch—until now. The browser is dead, long live the browser Part of the reason no one seems to be building new browsers is that it's a massive undertaking. Another part, though, is likely due to the rise of mobile devices, which have spawned a thousand browsers that are all quietly, invisibly embedded into other applications. Site-specific mobile ...

Apple proudly proclaims that the Apple Watch has an all-day battery life. But what does that mean? Well, hopefully your workout doesn’t last longer than 30 minutes. Apple defines the Apple Watch battery life here. According to the page, the “all-day battery life is based on 18 hours with the following use: 90 time checks, 90 notifications, 45 minutes of app use, and a 30-minute workout with music playback from Apple Watch via Bluetooth, over the course of 18 hours.” The page is buried deep in the Apple Watch product page. Apple clearly does not foresee selling the Watch based on its battery life. For specific usage, the life varies. Apple states that the Watch’s battery can last up to seven hours during a workout when heart rate sensor is turned on. When playing back music, the battery will last up to 6.5 hours and up to 3 hours when the Watch is used for phone calls. However, if the Watch is used as a watch, the battery can last up to 48 hours. When the Apple Watch’s batter...

goFlow is an app for weather-driven sports like surfing, kiteboarding, skiing, and snowboarding, which gets its data from users uploading the conditions. Founded by Roni Eshel, a pro-surfer turned tech entrepreneur, it claims to have generated over 1 million surf reports worldwide in the last year. It’s now launched ‘goFlow Sports’ with 10 new sports activities including: Surfing, Snow, Paddleboarding, Fishing, Diving, Cycling, Kitesurfing , Boating, Golfing, and Skateboarding. The company has also closed a $500,000 seed round led by Angels Shalev Hulio, Omri Lavie and the founders of NSO group and Kaymera. In addition, Daniel Recanati of Rhodium, Mehrdad Piroozram from Widgetlabs. Most competitors focus on one outdoor sport vertical only, like kitesurfing. A few other competitors are focused on particular sports verticals, such as ‘Weendy’ for kite surfers; ‘Surfr’ for surfers and ‘Fishbrain’ for fishing. goFlow is going after 10 verticals. This means it can crowd-source weat...

Almost a decade ago, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox (pictured above) started playing weddings with a reggae band out of East Palo Alto. At the time, the company had barely launched beyond college campuses and Cox had just finished Stanford. East Palo Alto, in contrast, is this community that sits right across the Highway 101 from Palo Alto, the originally home city of Silicon Valley which gave rise to iconic companies like Hewlett-Packard, VMWare, Tesla and Facebook itself. Unlike its neighbor to the west, East Palo Alto has double the unemployment rate and one-third of its residents lack more than a high school diploma. As I wrote about last month in a very long and through history, a lot of this has to do with unjust land-use and local government policies from the past 70 years. Today, Facebook’s headquarters sits right on the Menlo Park and East Palo Alto border, and the city has shifted toward a Latino majority from its historically black roots. It is one of the...

Uber is trying to force GitHub to disclose the IP address of every person that accessed a webpage connected to a database intrusion that exposed sensitive personal data for 50,000 drivers. The court action revealed that a security key unlocking the database was stored on a publicly accessible place, the online equivalent of stashing a house key under a doormat. Uber officials have yet to say precisely what information was contained in the two now-unavailable GitHub gists. But in a lawsuit filed Friday against the unknown John Doe intruders, Uber lawyers said the URLs contained a security key that allowed unauthorized access to the names and driver's license numbers of about 50,000 Uber drivers. The ride-sharing service disclosed the breach on Friday, more than two months after it was discovered. "The contents of these internal database files are closely guarded by Uber," the complaint stated. "Accessing them from Uber’s protected computers requires a unique sec...

They lurk, unnoticed in the great halls of engineering that are the office strips along Highway 101. “Programmers” not programmers, people who have cheated, stolen, and lied their way through engineering careers without anyone realizing they can’t code. They are among us, incompetent Cylons secretly plotting to undermine us at a crucial time. Secretly terrible engineers (STEs) are everywhere, and they may be on your very team as we speak. There is only one way to stop this scourge, one interview to defeat them all. Well, more like a dozen interviews with white boards, but that doesn’t sound nearly as cool. But I digress. One interview to rat these jackals out, to prove just once that no matter how much you did in the past, you will be discovered as the Person Who Doesn’t Know The Big-O Of Trie Insertion. The interviewer, preparing for this moment for years while waiting for git pushes, stands up and stabs his finger at the interviewee. “I’ve got you!” Via

Apple just announced its latest MacBook. It’s tiny. It makes the Macbook Air look like a Dell Inspiron circa 2002. But hopefully you’re not one of those jerks that actually uses the ports on the side of your computer. This MacBook only has a single USB-C and it does everything from charging, to sending video out and transporting data. It’s the only port on the computer meaning owners cannot charge the computer and an iPhone at the same time. It’s not possible to output video to a monitor and input data from an external drive — at least not without a hub. This single port was likely the byproduct of Apple’s quest to make the thinnest MacBook possible. Ports take a lot of room. Thanks to their physical structure, the female jack cannot be made that much smaller. This isn’t the first time Apple threw out industry standards. In 1998 Apple shocked the industry and didn’t include a floppy drive or serial ports in the iMac G3. Instead Apple included a CD-ROM and two USB ports. In 20...

Imagine never having to buy new and expensive hardware to upgrade your personal computer with more speed and storage space. That’s the vision behind Y Combinator-backed Paperspace, a new company launching today, which is building a full, personal computer that lives in the cloud, which you access from any web browser. Similar, to some extent, to enterprise-grade solutions like VMWare, Citrix or Amazon Workspaces, but aimed also at a consumer or “prosumer” audience, the company is selling a small hardware device that plugs into any older desktop or laptop in order to provide you with the computing power you need on demand. Called Paperweight, this low-cost hardware device connects you with your own remote machine on Paperspace’s servers, where you can choose from either a “basic” or “pro” option based on your computing needs. The device is considered a “zero client,” because unlike thin client technology, there’s only a small microprocessor on the inside – all the processing is tak...

“Smoking Kills” is more than just a catchy PSA or smoking cessation campaign slogan—it’s verifiable fact. Since the mid-1900s, study after study has generated compelling evidence linking smoking to increased mortality rates. Arguably, the most influential of these is the 1956 publication of smoking data on the “British Doctors Study,” which presented compelling evidence that over half of smokers would eventually die due to smoking-related complications. A new study published in BMC Medicine asserts that this mortality rate may even be as high as 66 percent, meaning that two out of three smokers will eventually die from conditions associated with their smoking. This study, put together by investigators from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, followed 204,953 men and women over 45 years old from New South Wales, Australia. These participants were categorized into groups of smokers, past smokers, and never smokers. The ...