Kiran Upadhyay

Loop Commerce, a company that has developed an alternative checkout technology for e-commerce sites that allows customers to more easily buy gifts for friends without having to worry with product details like size or color – or even recipient’s shipping address – is today announcing an additional $16 million in new funding. The round, led by Houzz, Chegg, and Audible investor Oren Zeev, comes largely from the company’s previous investors and brings the startup’s total raise to date to $30 million. As before, Loop Commerce focused on bringing in a number of strategic investors versus traditional venture capital. Others in the round included family office Wicklow Capital; PayPal; Don Katz (EVP at Amazon); Mark Carges (former CTO at eBay); Dan Rose (Facebook VP, partnerships and strategy); Ken Seiff (former EVP e-commerce at Brooks Brothers); Michael Scharff (former SVP at Toys R Us and Best Buy); Chuck Geiger (CTO of Chegg, former CTO of PayPal); Roy Rubin (founder at Magento); An

If you’re familiar with Gett, you probably know it as a service akin to Uber, enabling users to request rides via black cars on-demand. Pretty soon, however, it wants to be known as a platform for ordering all sorts of “essential” products and services via mobile app. Founded as GetTaxi in 2010, the company is rebranding as Gett in all markets as it expands into new verticals of on-demand and scheduled services. Today it operates in 32 cities throughout the U.K., Russia, and Israel, as well New York City in the U.S. Over the coming months, the company plans to enable customers in each of its markets to begin ordering new services beyond its initial car service. Just as it simplifies the process of ordering a car on mobile, with a flat, non-surge pricing structure for rides, the company hopes to make it ultra-simple to order products or services without having to do a whole lot of searching online. The hope is that it can reduce the friction and time it takes to order sushi or a

Dan Fredinburg, a respected Google executive who headed privacy for Google X and lead its product management team, has died in the avalanche on Mount Everest which was triggered by the huge earthquake in Nepal. The natural disaster has already killed over 2,000 people in the region and devastated infrastructure. Some 18 other climbers have been killed in what is being described as the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in the last 80 years. By all accounts, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who had also co-founded Google Adventure, a company team that filmed Google Street View images in “extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.” Fredinburg’s sister Megan confirmed his death via his Instagram account, while Google’s privacy director Lawrence posted the following earlier today: “Dan Fredinburg, a long-time member of the Privacy organization in Mountain View, was in Nepal with three other Googlers, hiking Mount Everest. He h

Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls. Hello’s caller ID feature could clue you in to whether you want to pick up a call from a number you don’t have saved by showing their name and profile picture — as long as they haven’t changed the default privacy setting that lets people search from using their phone number. You’ll then see whatever info they share publicly or with you, like city, employer, website, and more. Technically, nothing is changing about Facebook privacy, though it does make personal info more readily visible. Hello essentially just runs an immediate Facebook

As rumored for months, Google has just announced plans to offer its own wireless cellular service. Here’s what we know so far: It’s called “Project Fi” It’s for Nexus 6 owners only, at first. It’s invite only right now. You can sign up for an invite here. It’s built on top of Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks No contracts Subscribers pay $20 for unlimited talk/text, and then pay $10 per gig of data. So a 3GB plan would be $30 on top of that $20, coming out to a total of $50. You only pay for what you use, but in sort of a strange way: if you pay for 3GB of data per month ($30) but only use 1.5GB, you’ll get $15 back at the end of the month. It’s all tied into Google Hangouts, which will allow you to place calls from your number on any Hangouts-enabled tablet or laptop in addition to your phone. WiFi Tethering is included. This is what their US Coverage map currently looks like (Montana gets basically no love):

As the world moves from web to mobile, we’ve been thinking deeply about how people will discover mobile products and services and how we will find and access all the things we need in our digital lives. Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.” This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference happens June 8 through June 12 this year, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event is by invitation only, with tickets opening up for registration today, allowing developers to sign up for the random selection process. Registration ends on April 17, at 10 AM PT, with the lucky devs who win tickets notified by April 20 of their selection. To sign up, you need to currently be enrolled in either the iOS Developer Program, the iOS Enterprise Developer Program or the Mac Developer Program (as of April 14 at 5:30 AM PT) and you’ll be charged $1,599 US if you’re selected to attend. This is the 26th annual WWDC, and it will offer over 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers with information about using new and existing developer tools to maximum effect. Hands-on labs are also available to those who attend in person, and for those who don’t win a ticket in the random drawing, Apple is also live streaming select session

No one likes brands more than their friends, and there are plenty of ways to get their marketing updates. Facebook’s unique value is keeping you up to date on your real-life friends. So to “get this balance right” Facebook today announced it’s reconfiguring News Feed to show content from close friends higher up, which may push posts from business Pages further down. A few other tweaks include relaxing the limit on posts shown from a single friend to people with little content in the feed, and showing fewer stories about when a friend Liked or commented on a post so it can give more room to what you’re interested in. Combined, these updates, like several previous rounds of News Feed changes, could reduce visibility in the feed for Pages. While show more from friends might make the Facebook experience healthier in the long-run, it’s a tough pill to swallow for businesses who’ve built themselves up on Facebook referral traffic. As competition for limited attention grows, brands h

Docker, the company that kicked off the recent enthusiasm for containers two years ago, today announced that it has raised a $95 million Series D round led by Insight Venture Partners. New investors in this round include Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures also participated. As Docker’s VP of enterprise marketing David Messina noted when I talked to him earlier this week, it’s interesting to see the support from financial services companies in this round. This somewhat atypical investment, he believes, speaks to the support Docker has from developer teams in all kinds of organizations and how these companies now look at Docker as a key platform for their teams. “When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications,” Goldman Sachs global co-head of its Technology Divisi

Nokia has announced that it plans to move ahead with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, less than one day after confirming that the two companies were discussing a deal. Nokia will pay $16.6 billion in shares for the rival telecom equipment maker. The merger is expected to close in the first half of next year. The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent will strengthen its position against rivals like Ericsson, Samsung, and Huawei, though the consolidation means that carriers now have fewer options when purchasing equipment. On the other hand, the synergies between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent may allow it to cut research and development costs and deploy new services, including 5G infrastructure, more quickly. Despite concerns about antitrust concerns, the deal already has the backing of the French government. In a statement, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes said “This transaction comes at the right time to strengthen the European technology industry. We believe our customers will b

There’s an Uber for everything nowadays, so why not an Uber for weed? Eaze, a startup that enables medical marijuana patients to order cannabis products online and have those goodies delivered to their homes, today is announcing $10 million in Series A round funding led by DCM Ventures with participation from Fresh VC, 500 Startups, Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Ventures, and other strategic investors. The new funds come on top of $1.5 million in seed funding the company had raised last year. The cash will be used to help the company expand availability of its platform into new markets beyond just the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was founded. Launched last summer, Eaze is looking to take advantage of a few different trends. The first is just an acceptance that marijuana use — whether for recreational of medicinal purposes — is here to stay, and is likely to become more pervasive as more states legalize and/or decriminalize cannabis use. The second trend is the move to make eve

Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera tech company whose most recent offerings include multi-aperture camera models which can enable effects like background focus blur, parallax images and 3D picture capture. TechCrunch received the following from Apple, which is a statement the company provides in lieu of confirmation when it has, in fact, acquired a smaller company: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans. The LinX acquisition was valued at around $20 million according to the Wall Street Journal, according to sources familiar with discussions between the two. The Israeli startup’s hardware was targeted at tablets and smartphones specifically, and could not only offer the kinds of background defocus that’s popular on low aperture lenses paired with DSLRs, but could also help achieve better low-light performance, ideal for taking pictures indoors or at night without using flash. Apple’s plans could al

It’s been a good couple of months for grocery delivery startups in India, at least for funding. PepperTap announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A from SAIF Partners, as well as Sequoia Capital, which invested a $1.2 million seed round in the Gurgaon-based startup just last month. Other on-demand grocery startups that have recently received backing include ZopNow, which announced $10 million in new funding this week, and Grofers, which just received an additional $35 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia. (Grofers doesn’t focus exclusively on groceries, but it is one of its most important and fastest-growing verticals). Like its competitors, PepperTap is pouring its new capital into an ambitious expansion plan that will bring its services to 10 more cities by the end of this year. PepperTap launched its services in Gurgaon before expanding to Delhi and Noida last month. The new cities it plans to enter include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. While Pepp

SpaceX is going to try to launch its CRS-6 International Space Station resupply mission again today at 4:10 PM ET, after having to scrub the launch yesterday due to adverse weather conditions. Weather today looks mostly favorable, with NASA reporting a “60 percent chance of acceptable conditions” for the target window at the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. The launch today, if it goes off, will feature the Falcon 9 rocket transporting the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to orbit, where it will rendezvous with the ISS to delivery a cargo of supplies (including an Arkyd 3 satellite). For SpaceX, it also represents a second chance to attempt recovery of the reusable first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, using their autonomous drone barge landing platform. We’ll have updates as they come in, and will keep our fingers crossed that weather conditions hold out for the launch this afternoon. Read More

Microsoft today launched Office Lens, a mobile document scanner app that works with OneNote, for iOS and Android smartphones. The app, which allows users to snap photos of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more, was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for Windows Phone devices. But in conjunction with the company’s newer strategy to embrace other platforms outside its own, the app has now arrived on Apple’s App Store and on Android phones, where it will sit alongside dozens of other Microsoft applications, including Office and Outlook. Office Lens’ core functionality itself is not all that different from a number of document-scanning applications on the mobile app stores today, like Scanner Pro, TinyScan Pro, Scanbot and more. And much like Evernote’s Scannable app, for example, it exists more as an add-on or complement to a larger, more prominent product – in Microsoft’s case, OneNote. Like most scanner apps,

It’s official – Hillary Clinton is running for president. Clinton announced her bid for the 2016 U.S. presidential race on Twitter this afternoon, ending years of conjecture over what many assumed was a sure thing. The tweet was sent after an email from Clinton aide John Podesta went out to supporters of Clinton from the 2008 campaign, “spoiling” what political reporters had been expecting since Thursday: This isn’t the first time Clinton’s been tripped up by email. Early last month, it came out that she had used a personal email server during her time at the State Department, rather than using a government account. While the wave of hot takes during that news cycle made it seem like it could become a real controversy for her then-theoretical presidential bid, the issue has left headlines of late. In addition to her tweet, Clinton’s team has already launched the official campaign site, which includes a bio page that gives us a look at the experience Clinton will emphasize as

Ever try to read a Facebook message on the web and get distracted by your News Feed and notifications? Well now Facebook has a way to let you use Messenger in peace from your web browser. Today it launched Messenger.com as a dedicated chat interface. It’s rolling out worldwide for English users, with support for more languages to come. You can still send messages from Facebook.com as always, but Messenger.com could become a favorite of busy users concerned with productivity, or those that use Facebook to chat with friends but don’t like the social content chaos of its main site. The company tells me the “dedicated desktop messaging experience” is “meant to be complimentary to the Messenger mobile app”. The Messenger site features a list of your threads on the left, with a big, clean, white chat window on the right. You can use most of the mobile app’s features from here, including audio and video calls, stickers, and photos. For now it lacks the ability to record and send a

Apple has secured a new patent (via AppleInsider) for a special three sensor camera designed for thin, wireless devices like the iPhone. The three sensors would each capture a separate color component, as divided by a special light-splitting cube that would divide up light entering the camera into red, green and blue (or other color set) wavelengths. Why? Better resolution and lower noise since they don’t need special filters or algorithms to separate out the color information of a captured image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Using this tech, Apple would potentially be able to boost the image quality of its mobile cameras, especially in video capture scenarios. This would be a much more expensive technology to implement vs. current iPhone camera arrays, and its component parts would likely also take up more space inside the case, something Apple typically wants to avoid. But more accurate colors and better low-light performance might balance out those downsides, depending on how mu

In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be "banned from the Internet.” The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades (it’s sold on Amazon!), but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible. "I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine,” Feinstein wrote. "These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet." On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged the two American women living in New York City with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The 29-page criminal complain

Ouch. If you hate Game Of Thrones spoilers, you might want to keep your head down and your router disconnected for the next…like, month. Don’t worry, though: this post, at least, will be spoiler free. The very night before Game Of Thrones Season 5 was set to premiere, the first four episodes of the season have been leaked simultaneously. Rumors of this leak started circulating on the afternoon of the 11th; by 6 p.m., the files started appearing across myriad torrent trackers. In just a few hours since, over 50,000 people have grabbed the first episode. Game Of Thrones is already the world’s most pirated show. This.. probably won’t help it lose that title. Like each season before it, Season 5 of Thrones will consist of just 10 episodes. With this, nearly half of the season has leaked before the first episode even got a chance to officially premiere. While not as awful as having the entire season leak, I imagine some pretty harsh words are being thrown around HBO HQ right no

The ability to walk upright is a defining characteristic of humans, one that emerged through a long evolutionary history. It's not just a matter of the right bones; our muscular, skeletal, and neural systems have evolved to enable our coordinated movements. The nerves allow us to develop a gait that is optimized to minimize the amount of energy necessary by modulating aspects of our movement such as our step length or arm motions. Even with all that optimization, walking can be tiring; in fact, people expend more energy walking than any other daily activity. As we age, walking often becomes even more difficult. For decades researchers have explored ways to mitigate the energy cost associated with walking—studies that are typically aimed at helping those who are weaker or disabled. Recently, scientists and engineers started to look at this issue from a new perspective; they questioned whether the human gait is as efficient as it can be. This interdisciplinary research team de

This is my third attempt at an Elite: Dangerous review. It’s one thing to play a game for a few dozen hours to form some opinions and then write a release-day review—not to trivialize game reviewing, but that’s a relatively easy task (in the same way that any kind of journalism is "relatively" easy—it’s mostly a straightforward process, at least). But I’ve been living with Elite: Dangerous since June of 2014, and it’s been in a state of almost constant flux the entire time–adding features, removing features, changing gameplay elements. That means I’m not condensing a few days or weeks of playtime down into a review—I’m trying to wrap my head around ten months of time spent sailing out in the black. Here is the plain truth: Elite: Dangerous was released unfinished, and it’s still unfinished. There’s every indication that the December 16 1.0 release occurred in order to hit an arbitrary "before the end of 2014" release date, and the 1.0 product we got was not rel

Confirming reports from last fall, YouTube announced today its plans for an ad-free, subscription-based service by way of an email sent out to YouTube Partners. The email details the forthcoming option, which will offer consumers the choice to pay for an “ads-free” version of YouTube for a monthly fee. The additional monetization option requires partners to agree to updated terms on YouTube’s Creator Studio Dashboard, which notes that the changes will go into effect on June 15, 2015. The email touts the potential for YouTube Creators to generate additional income beyond what’s available today through advertising and speaks of the subscription service as something that will “excite your fans and generate a previously untapped, additional source of revenue for you.” YouTube’s plans to move into subscriptions have been underway for some time. In October, YouTube head Susan Wojcicki, who had been spearheading the monetization efforts, explained at the Code Mobile conference that the

Apple has released a series of four videos today that show — explicitly — exactly what the Apple Watch can do, how it will do it and why you might be interested in buying one. If it seems to be a bit late in the cycle to get something like this out, I agree. Apple’s early marketing around the Watch has focused mainly on its construction, originality and possibilities for customization. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it’s much more suited to a product that’s entering an upgrade cycle. The last few years of iPhone or iPad releases is a good example of this. If you’re going to convince someone they might like to purchase the new one you’re going to highlight differentiating design, color, materials or functionality. For a completely new category of product, Apple had to dig back — all the way to the original iPhone — to remember how to position these things. It’s probably difficult to recall, but the first iPhone was such a radical departure from anything that had come before i

As my flight out of Beirut reached cruising altitude, and the seat buckle lights flickered off, I leant back in my chair and wondered if I had, in fact left the country just in time. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite an ‘Argo-esue’ escape from another Middle Eastern country, but labelling a controversial government minister on a conference stage as an “idiot” maybe wasn’t the wisest of moves. Beirut is not a town known for its placid history, after all. Furthermore, my comment had made the front page of the Beirut Daily Star the next day. Perhaps it was just as well that I left the next day. But the trip was worth it. Beirut is rapidly shaping up to be a powerhouse for startups in the Middle East. It has many of the key elements: a highly entrepreneurial culture; incubators and accelerators; venture capital; some gradually favourable government policy and access to growth funding. The exits and the ‘PayPal mafias’ may be a ways off but its a beginning. In part because it is the most libe

Professional network LinkedIn is getting into the professional skills education market in a big way: The social company purchased Lynda.com, the online learning company founded in 1995 by technical skill instructional book author Lynda Weinman and co-founder Bruce Heavin. Lynda.com has long been the go-to resource for online learning on subjects like Photoshop, basic HTML, CSS, management practices and many more, offering instructional videos and tutorials from industry experts and vets long before e-learning was at anywhere near the level of interest it enjoys today. The acquisition is valued at $1.5 billion total, combining 52 percent cash payout and 48 percent stock, with an expected close date sometime in the second quarter of this year. “Most” Lynda.com employees will join LinkedIn as part of the deal, according to a release from the companies. In a blog post addressing the deal, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner talks about how the acquisition helps his company move closer towards

Virtual reality and augmented reality are exciting – Google Glass coming and going, Facebook’s $2 billion for Oculus, Google’s $542 million into Magic Leap, not to mention Microsoft’s HoloLens. There are amazing early-stage platforms and apps, but VR/AR in 2015 feels a bit like the smartphone market before the iPhone. We’re waiting for someone to say “One more thing…” in a way that has everyone thinking “so that’s where the market’s going!” A pure quantitative analysis of the VR/AR market today is challenging, because there’s not much of a track record to analyze yet. We’ll discuss methodology below, but this analysis is based on how VR/AR could grow new markets and cannibalize existing ones after the market really gets going next year. AR is from Mars, VR is from Venus VR and AR headsets both provide stereo 3D high-definition video and audio, but there’s a big difference. VR is closed and fully immersive, while AR is open and partly immersive – you can see through and around

Well, damn, that was fast. Just four hours ago, Facebook launched a new, dedicated interface just for Facebook Messenger. Want to send a Facebook Message but don’t want all the other cruft that comes with Facebook? Just go to Messenger.com. Bam. If you’re on OS X, now you don’t even have to do that — someone has already wrapped up the new interface into a dedicated, standalone app. It’s not perfect, which is completely understandable given that it was built in three hours… but it works surprisingly well, already. Image uploads don’t seem to work, and for some reason it makes an error noise every time I start typing a message — but overall, it’s quite solid. For being what is essentially a webpage wrapped in a sandboxed browser, it feels almost native. The project was started by Dropboxers Rasmus Andersson and Josh Puckett, who have made the source code available for your perusal and modification on GitHub right over here. If you’d rather just download the pre-built client, t

West Virginia became at least the fifth state to ban the direct-sales approach practiced by Tesla Motors following Friday's signature by Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. The bill was championed by West Virginia's Senate president, Bill Cole, who is an auto dealer in his home state and Kentucky. Tesla denounced the legislation. "Despite a campaign based on pro-business and free market principles, the Senate president's bill prevents competition and protects the car dealer monopoly," Tesla said in a statement. "West Virginians deserve the right to choose how and from whom they purchase their vehicles. We will return next year to fight for consumer choice and free market access." The President of the West Virginia Automobile & Truck Dealers Association, Ruth Lemmon, said the measure was not "anti-Tesla." "Tesla could better serve the consumers, the local communities and their product by becoming a true business partner to all concerned

It was always weird that Snapchat exposed who you snapped with most in the “Best Friends” list, so today the app is ditching that for a new private way to see who you’re closest to. Only you will see these new Friend Emojis on your screen of incoming snaps. Here’s what Snapchat’s Friend Emojis mean: 💛- Gold Heart – You’re #1 Best Friends – The person you send snaps to most sends snaps to you most too 😬- Grimace/Grit Teeth – You Have A Mutual #1 Best Friend – The person you send snaps to most is also who this person sends snaps to most 😊– Smile – One Of Your Best Friends – This is one of the people you send snaps to most 😎- Sunglasses – You Have A Mutual Best Friend – One of the people you send snaps to most is also one of the people this person sends snaps to most 😏- Smirk – You’re Their Best Friend But They’re Not Yours – You’re one of the people they send snaps to most, but they’re not one of the people you send snaps to most 🔥- Fire – You Two Are On A Snapstreak –

What happens when NASA gets together with IBM’s Bluemix cloud services and sponsors a worldwide hackathon? They hope to challenge participants to build apps that help solve issues around space exploration and earthly problems too. The ambitious event, called The Space App Challenge, is taking place this weekend simultaneously in 162 countries involving 136 cities and 10,000 participants, who will be attacking a range of problems in categories such as ‘Print Your Own Space Food’, ‘Robots, Robots, Robots’ and ‘Clean Water Mapping.’ Main themes include Outer Space, Earth, Humans and Robotics and participants could include developers, scientists, students, entrepreneurs and educators. IBM is joining NASA to offer participants access to a set of cloud services in its Bluemix Platform as a Service portfolio, says Sandy Carter, who is general manager for cloud ecoystem and developers at IBM. While participants are free to use any cloud platform they wish, IBM plans to sweeten the

Say hello to yet another cute toy with a mission to lift dollars out of parents’ wallets get kids coding and grasping the basics of logical thinking. Codie is a programmable robot that’s controlled via an app, using a visual programming language simplified into draggable blocks to make it easy for kids to play with. Its target age group is 8- to 12-year-olds The $150+ Codie bot takes the form of a wheeled vehicle that can perform a variety of actions and reactions, thanks to seven on-board sensors — including a temperature sensor, ultrasound distance sensor, light sensors, and a line tracking sensor — plus a buzzer, microphone and LED lights. The bot’s functions are designed to be configured via the companion iOS and Android apps, using a Bluetooth link between bot and app, so kids can make Codie move and respond to its environment. The Hungarian team behind Codie, which is raising crowdfunds on Indiegogo to get their gizmo to market, is following in the connected footsteps of t

Send an instant message asking for something, and they’ll do the grunt work of placing your order and getting it delivered to you. That’s the idea for Uber co-founder Garret Camp‘s new startup Operator that’s still in stealth, according to sources with direct knowledge of the app. You might have heard of a similar startup called Magic that recently blew up. But Magic was slapped together atop SMS over a weekend as a side project of Y Combinator company Bettir. In contrast, our sources say Operator is a highly polished native app that’s been in testing for over a year with much bigger plans for changing commerce. Operator’s website is just a teaser waitlist form. And a job listing for Operator only says “Our product lies at the intersection of technology’s biggest trends today—messaging, mobile, and on-demand services.” But we know a lot more. Read More

Yahoo is bidding adios to China with the closure of its research center in Beijing — its only location in the country — as SCMP first reported. Hundreds of staff are expected to be laid off. “We are constantly making changes to align resources, and to foster better collaboration and innovation across our business. Today we informed our employees based in Beijing that we will be closing our office there,” Yahoo said in a statement. The Beijing office originally ran Yahoo services in China, but with all of its consumers-facing activities in the country now shuttered — including its web portal, music service and email — the office effectively become a research center. Sources at the company told SCMP that, with wages two times higher in China than India and no specific services in China, the presence wasn’t particularly logical. Alibaba manages Yahoo’s operations in China, but the Beijing office was notable for being Yahoo-controlled. Yahoo employed 350 staff there. It hasn’t sai

Batteries are often still the main limiting factor when it comes to most electronic devices we use every day, and that includes electric vehicles. That’s why Dyson has invested $15 million into Sakti3, a Michigan-based firm that is developing a solid state battery tech that theoretically has much higher energy density (power per inch, essentially) than the current, liquid-based Lithium ion tech used in smartphones, notebooks, and (relevance alarm) Dyson’s handheld cordless vacuums. Batteries continue to be among the wonder technologies most resistant to change, as the liquid Li-ion tech used in today’s gadgets was essentially pioneered back in 1991 by Sony, as a means of achieving higher energy densities vs. nickel cadmium rechargeables. Sakti3’s tech is based on University of Michigan tech, and switches to a solid-state format, similar in many ways to the kind of solid state storage tech used for SSD computer drives. Instead of liquid Li-ion, Sakti3’s batteries use solid lithium

You’re in your chair at home, the latest Oculus VR headset encircling your head, and you use its voice recognition feature to access Facebook. Facebook’s virtual reality newsfeed appears in front of you — a three-dimensional, horizontally-scrolling wall of cards. Each card contains a virtual experience, and much like the auto-playing videos in Facebook’s newsfeed today, each of them offers a few moments of the experience on a loop. The first card is from one friend, who uploaded a video (filmed with a consumer-friendly VR camera) featuring her three-year-old daughter and the family dog chasing each other in circles. It’s cute… and not what you’re looking for. Instead of using a mouse or a finger-swipe to scroll through a flat, one-dimensional newsfeed, you lift your arm and make a swiping gesture to the left. The next experience in the queue is from your best friend, who uploaded a clip taken from his video-drone’s flight over Manhattan at dusk. With the drone’s multiple cam

Microsoft wasn’t kidding when it promised to ship Windows 10 builds more quickly. Today, less than two weeks after its last iteration, the company has kicked out a new build that contains an important new feature: Project Spartan. The new build’s number is 10047 10049, up a total of 6 from the preceding release. If you are currently on the “fast ring” of the Windows Insider program, say hello to the new code. For the rest of you on the more conservative build cycles, wait for the dust to settle. You can, of course, change your ring setting and get the new tools more quickly. (Note: This is not the upcoming build that will support a host more Windows Phone handsets. This build is nearly all about Project Spartan.) Project Spartan, the current, public codename of Microsoft’s new browser, will replace its venerable predecessor not all at once, but in steps. This fact has caused some confusion. What can Project Spartan do? It comes with Cortana, the company’s digital assistant th

Wearable fitness trackers can enhance fitness. But only if you work out. Don’t expect a health tracker to act like a personal trainer; they only log biometric data that users can apply to their exercises. There is therefore a single benchmark for the efficacy of a fitness wearable: does it help optimize your workout? The $250 FitBit Surge claims it can do just this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N68CDqAJs5U FitBit released two new fitness trackers at the beginning of 2015: the $150 Charge HR, and the $250 FitBit Surge. Unlike its companions, the Surge throws in all the bells and whistles. Like its competitor, the Basis Peak, the FitBit offers smartphone notifications, biometric sensors, and sleep tracking; but it also throws in GPS capabilities, which can track the path of a run. Aside from GPS, it’s more similar to Basis’s Peak than any other wearable fitness device on the market. Design and Physical Appearances The Surge’s external design appears similar to its cousins

With forecasts projecting that billions of new devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020, device makers are rushing to release new products they hope will corner the Internet of Things market. This much was evident at CES this year, when dozens of companies exhibited new connected hardware for the home, car, body, factory floor and more. Whether it’s fitness tracking, plant moisture monitoring or connected lightbulbs, each of these markets will host individual battles among IoT segment contenders, all vying with a simple goal – to sell more boxes of hardware than competitors. But this traditional retail approach to the Internet of Things opportunity overlooks several alternative business-model variants that may be far more suitable in this emerging space. Many companies in traditional business make a product, sell it on shelves and, hopefully, make a profit. Whether it is Philips’ Hue or Parrot’s Flower Power, one can understand why technology companies are choosing the

On Christmas morning of 1996, the first level of Super Mario 64 was blowing the minds of millions of kids around the world simultaneously. It looks a bit rough around the edges nearly 20 years later — but it’s still truly excellent. And now it’s been remade in glorious HD. Now, don’t go looking for Nintendo’s official stamp of approval, here: it’s a fan-project, of sorts. It was built by Unity developer Erik Roystan Ross to show off his custom character controller — which, if you’re into Unity, you can check out here. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replayed the original version of this level; even if I had an exact count, I’d probably be embarrassed to say. Let’s just estimate it at “hundreds”. Here’s what it looks like in action: The remake isn’t one-to-one, but it’s close. Close enough that navigating the level from that decades-old memory map was a breeze. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the visuals. But some things were removed for the sake of expediency, s

The Pebble Time Kickstarter gained some momentum thanks to Apple’s special Watch event Monday. The new smartwatch from the smartwatch pioneer was drawing in funding at a rate of around $6,000 per hour on Sunday, March 8, which rose to $10,000 per hour on Monday, March 9 (when the event took place), and capped out at $16,000 per day on average during March 10, the day following Apple’s press presentation. Pebble CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky told former Y Combinator lead and investor Paul Graham that interest in Apple’s media event had a doubling impact on the rate of its ongoing crowdfunding campaign, but in fact the numbers reveal it more than doubled, and in fact almost tripled in the extended wake of the announcement. The Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel hardware refreshes were announced around two weeks prior to the Apple event in San Francisco, and the new Kickstarter campaign quickly rose to become the most-funded of all time. Currently, the campaign has racked up over