Kiran Upadhyay

Google was showing off its Project Jacquard at I/O 2015, a connected fabric tech that lets you build connected surfaces right into your clothes, in a way that makes it easy to connect to devices and power, while letting clothes makers make stuff that actually looks good. It seems promising, especially because they’ve already signed on Levi’s as a first partner. Levi’s, the SF-based maker of jeans and various other clothing, came on stage at the I/O ATAP special presentation today, and discussed why it decided to jump into this new tech. Basically, they were looking to make it easier to integrate our device use into our daily lives, making it easier to access and less generally obtrusive. The company is looking to build its own apps, but is also seeking contributions from the developer community, which it called “fashion designers” now with the advent of this new tech. Right now the partnership seems to be in very early stages, with no product announcements just yet. But the te...

Facebook this afternoon confirmed that it will now support animated GIFs in the Facebook News Feed. Not everyone will see the added functionality immediately, we understand, as the update is still rolling out. The move represents a significant change in direction for Facebook, which has historically made a conscious decision to avoid supporting GIFs, claiming that doing so would make its News Feed “too chaotic.” Instead of allowing GIFs, Facebook’s focus to date has been on video. The company introduced support for auto-playing videos in late 2013, but despite bringing a more lively, animated feel to the News Feed, the move did not lead Facebook to rolling out support for GIFs. Neither did the introduction of support for GIFs on Twitter last summer — a change that some felt might force Facebook’s hand in the matter. Though Facebook had built in support for GIFs for quite some time, the company has long felt that GIFs could lead to the site being cluttered with low-quality memes,...

If you’re looking to turn your WordPress site into an online shop, one option reigns supreme: WooCommerce. With roughly 7.5 million downloads, it’s easily the most popular e-commerce WordPress plugin — hell, it’s one of the top 10 most popular WordPress plugins overall. And now it’s officially a part of the WordPress family. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has just acquired WooCommerce. Automattic isn’t disclosing the price of the acquisition, but tells me that it’s by far “the biggest acquisition by Automattic to date.” We’ll keep digging for details beyond that, of course. So why might Automattic snatch up an e-commerce plugin? Because it’s what the people want. “I remember a few years ago I was at [a WordPress conference],” says WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in a video announcing the acquisition. “Someone stood up in the Q&A and asked me ‘When are you going to make it as easy to publish stores online as you’ve made it to publish websites?’… and there ...

Home security and automation starts and ends with the front door. It needs to keep the bad guys out yet let the good guys in without hassle. Either a system gets it right or it doesn’t, and, until now, I had yet to see a system that’s truly impressive. Meet the Vivint Sky Smart Home — a home security and automation system that offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future but is available today. When a person approaches the door, the Vivint Sky Smart Home’s inconspicuous doorbell cam starts recording. Ring the doorbell, and the homeowner gets a live video feed (with 2-way audio) through a smartphone app or on the system’s wall panel installed in the home. If the person inputs the correct code on the deadbolt, the system disarms and performs any number of set actions from turning on lights to adjusting the climate control. Like good technology, the experience is magical. The Vivint Sky Smart Home is pricey but it’s more complete than anything offered by Google, Samsung or ADT. ...

Real-time search-as-a-service provider Algolia just raised $18.3 million with Accel Partners leading the round — Philippe Botteri will join the board. This represents some serious funding following Algolia’s $1.2 million second seed round. As a reminder, Algolia makes your website’s search box suck less. It feels like using OS X’s Spotlight feature on the web. Moreover, Algolia is very easy to implement on your website as the company opted for a SaaS strategy. It means that you can implement the company’s search engine for database objects in just a few lines of code thanks to its hosted API, feed the service with JSON-formatted data, and customize it to your needs. After that, your users can start searching right away. They will interact with Algolia’s servers without ever leaving your site. With 12 different data centers across the world, Algolia tries to make the experience as responsive as possible for its users. On most websites, search is a painful process. You don’t know ...

Spotify’s press event today wasn’t just about adding video and other content types. The company also revealed that it’s adding new features to improve the experience for anyone who listens to the app during their runs. To do that, Chief Product Officer Gustav Söderström said Spotify will now use the sensors on your phone to detect the pace at which you’re running. Then, when you hit the running man button in Spotify, the app uses your tempo to select the right tracks. And if you want to change the tempo, Söderström said, “We’ll find the right music for that, again and again and again.” Even more impressive, he said Spotify is working with musicians (including Tiesto, who made a brief appearance at the event) to create specific tracks for running. After all, he noted that when his team talked to runners, they said that when the right song comes on, it makes them “feel like a hero.” But that effect only lasts for about a minute and a half, and then wears off — at least until the n...

Immediately, a startup building mobile tools for salespeople, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in funding. Here’s the pitch, from the funding release: “We believe the future of sales is not CRM, but a beautiful data­-driven, highly automated, and platform­-agnostic integrated sales experience.” More specifically, the company says it helps salespeople manage their workflow — they can connect Immediately with their existing email and sales database accounts (including Google Apps and Salesforce.com), then track their leads, detect when their emails are opened, log their phone calls and more. The team started out working on email organization app SquareOne before deciding to focus specifically on sales with Immediately. ReTargeter founder Arjun Dev Arora recently joined the team as co-founder and chief revenue officer. Co-founder and CEO Branko Cerny said Immediately is now on-boarding its first pilot customers, including Tapsense, UserVoice, NatureBox, Spark Centra...

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Is that a message from some rando, a spammer, or the nice guy you met yesterday? Facebook Messenger wants to give you some clues before you consider responding. The app will now surface publicly shared biographical info like current city and job title at the top of message threads from people you haven’t chatted with before. The update starts rolling out today on iOS Android in U.S., U.K., France, and India. For example, if you received a message from someone you’re not friends with, Messenger could show that they’re a “Food Blogger” from “Seattle.” That info could jog your memory, reminding you they’re the woman you met in the fish market on your recent trip to the Northwest. Knowing they’re someone you’ve actually met could make you a lot more likely to reply, and get the conversation going naturally rather than stumbling with “oh…hey…how did we meet again?” Messenger can also pull up this kind of info for existing Facebook friends you’ve never messaged with before. Maybe your...

Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast (or beautiful Hillsboro, OR — the home of the Hillsboro Hops — to be precise). Microsoft says the New Cross Pacific (NCP) Cable Network will provide faster connections for its customers and help it compete on cloud cost. In addition, Microsoft also today announced deals with Hibernia to offer faster connectivity between Canada, Ireland and the U.K., and AcquaComms to use its upcoming AEConnect cable between Shirley, NY and the West Coast of Ireland (with backhaul connections to the U.K.). The Hibernia Express cable, the first new transatlantic cable in twelve years, will launch in September. It’s partly optimized for very low-latency operations (the promise is under 60 milliseconds between New York and London) and will be able to handle up to 10 Tbps ...

Plenty of people have compared the Apple Watch to the classic Casio calculator watch; these guys went ahead and made the inevitable app. Meet GeekWatch — the app that turns your Apple Watch into an old-school calculator watch. I mean, sure — you could buy a calculator watch on Amazon for like 15 bucks. But where’s the meta/hipster/ironic/kinda-obnoxious humor in that? They swap out the “Casio” brand for “Geekio” for obvious (read: legal) reasons, but the inspiration is clear. One catch: since Apple hasn’t enabled custom watch faces yet, it’s not able to take over the entire screen, and you’ll still have some borders/margins/text around the edges. Alas, it costs a $1. On the upside, there are myriad goodies to unlock if you poke it in the right way. Remember trying to spell words upside down to pass the time in class as a kid? That’s a good place to start. Alternatively, check out the tizi Calc app; the Casio-style homage isn’t as direct (and also costs a buck as an in-app p...

The Light Phone is the opposite of every other phone in existence. It is thin, light, lasts 20 days on a charge, and literally does nothing but make and answer calls. It’s as if the makers of the Sports Illustrated Football Phone had studied the timeless teachings of William Walker Atkinson and created a telephone that was the platonic ideal of the ultimate telecommunication device. The best thing? It costs $100. What does it do? Nothing. You put in a SIM card, press a few buttons, and make a call. There’s no browser. No games. No NFC. It has quick dial, which is nice, and it doubles as a flashlight. Did I mention it lasts for 20 days on a charge? The creators, Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, created the phone at Google’s 30 Weeks incubator in NYC. They both came from a design background by Kaiwei has a background in building phones. “We started building this because it became very clear that true happiness means being present. This has been written about by so many of the smartest...

There’s Maker Media, MakerCon, MakerShed, Make: magazine and 131 Maker Faire events that take place throughout the world. Now the founders of all these Makers want a way to connect what they refer to as the “maker movement” online. So Maker Media created a social network called MakerSpace, a Facebook-like social network that connects participants of Maker Faire in one online community. “Communities are built around strong cores and the core for us is the Maker Faire but you see so much during the faire that you can’t remember,” Maker Media CEO Gregg Brockway told TechCrunch over the phone. “We want to move that excitement and innovation online so you can connect with the makers on there.” The new site will allow participants of the event to display their work online by making a profile page to host their projects. Interested parties are able to follow one another in the same way as a Tumblr profile and makers can also post the progress of their work that will appear in a Facebo...

So this just happened. AOL, owner of TechCrunch, is getting acquired: U.S. carrier Verizon said in a statement that it is buying the company for $4.4 billion, or $50 per share. We’ve just been sent an internal memo about the deal that we are embedding below. AOL will become a subsidiary of Verizon as part of the deal, overseeing a bigger push into content and mobile video by Verizon. “Verizon’s acquisition further drives its LTE wireless video and OTT (over-the-top video) strategy,” the carrier said in a statement. In addition to original content across different platforms like video and written word, and desktop and mobile, there are other assets that could be interesting fits for Verizon. For starters, AOL has been building up a programmatic advertising business to build up how AOL monetizes alongside newer formats like video and mobile. Currently that business — which is the fastest growing operation at AOL in terms of revenues — is split between ads on AOL-owned sites and...

Google has been testing self-driving cars for years. Six years in fact, with a fleet of 20+ self-driving cars, which have self-driven almost a million miles over that period — and are now averaging around 10,000 self-driven miles per week. So how many accidents have Google’s autonomous rides got into over that period? Eleven “minor accidents”, according to Google’s Chris Urmson, writing in a blog post on Medium yesterday. However Urmson lays the blame for all 11 fender-benders at the feet of the other human drivers — rather than the self-driving machines. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident. Going into a little more detail, Urmson says Google’s driverless cars have been hit from behind seven times — “mainly at traffic lights but a...

Duet Display has added a feature that I frankly never thought it would get: Windows support! That means with the app and a Lightning cable you can use your iPad as a secondary display for your Windows PC or tablet. The app supports devices running either Windows 7 or Windows 8, letting you relish the extravagant advantage of multiple screens on the go even if you’re not cool enough to own a Mac. I kid, I kid; Windows owners can be perfectly cool, but Duet Display’s features can make them even cooler. In case you missed the news when it launched for Mac, it allows you to use your iPad as a wired secondary display, without the traditional lag and other glitches that have accompanied wireless secondary display solutions for iOS devices. It’s built by former Apple display engineers, and it uses an actual display driver to recognize your iPad hardware.

It’s tough to find a good tutor, and it’s even tougher to find a good tutor on short notice. MathCrunch is trying to change that, with a mobile app that provides on-demand tutoring for students at a low price. To pursue that goal, the company has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to expand and reach new users. MathCrunch* hopes to provide a mobile marketplace that will enable students seeking help with their math problems to be matched with tutors who can guide them through the process and teach users how to solve them. The platform leverages two big trends taking place today: The first is the move to mobile messaging, and the second is the ability to enable on-demand connections with folks who have specialized knowledge and spare time on their hands. In the case of MathCrunch, that means finding university students and teachers with knowledge of various different math subjects — like algebra, calculus, geometry, and the like — and pairing them with people who need help with s...

SoundCloud has been beta testing its podcasting features with a private group since 2011, but today it’s finally letting everyone in. The SoundCloud podcasting features come in multiple tiers, including one free and two paid options. They challenge existing industry leaders, including Libsyn, as well as provide the RSS hooks necessary to also publish to iTunes and get picked up by podcast apps like Overcast. SoundCloud is aggressively competitive with its primary competitors out of the gate – it charges $55 per year for six hours of audio uploads per month and provides unlimited-length hosting for $135 per year. Lisbon charges $5 per month to start, but you only get 50MB of storage per month, which runs out pretty quickly. $15 per month gets you a more reasonable and generally useful 250MB, but SoundCloud’s unlimited tier seems like it will be a popular option. There’s also a free tier for more casual users, providing three hours of audio uploads. Previously, anyone could technic...

The final frontier of the digital technology is integrating into your own brain. DARPA wants to go there. Scientists want to go there. Entrepreneurs want to go there. And increasingly, it looks like it’s possible. You’ve probably read bits and pieces about brain implants and prosthesis. Let me give you the big picture. Arkady flicked the virtual layer back on. Lightning sparkled around the dancers on stage again, electricity flashed from the DJ booth, silver waves crashed onto the beach. A wind that wasn’t real blew against his neck. [Adapted from Crux, book 2 of the Nexus Trilogy.] Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all five senses; augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy – sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others. Sound crazy? It is… and it’s not. Via

Social marketing company Brand Networks continues to gobble up the competition — it just announced that it’s acquiring Shift in a $50 million cash-and-stock deal. Back in 2013, it acquired Optimal, another social media advertising company. Brand Networks founder and CEO Jamie Tedford (pictured above) said “the success of our own business on-boarding Optimal” made him confident about integrating Shift. Tedford added that his company and Shift (previously known as GraphEffect) have been “friendly competitors for many years,” and that it was an attractive acquisition because of Shift’s technology, its team and its client list. Shift co-founder and CEO James Borow will become chief product officer at Brand Networks (a role once held by Optimal’s Rob Leathern, who’s now working on a new startup), and he said “a very large portion” of his team is moving over as part of the acquisition. “Our goal was always to have a complete social marketing platform,” Borow said — and in his view...

You can check out Instant Articles for yourself by visiting the feature’s Facebook Page on an iPhone. For more on Facebook’s strategy, read our feature piece: Facebook’s Quest To Absorb The Internet. Assuaging publishers’ fears that Facebook would keep all the data, the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics. Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Instant Articles won’t receive preferential treatment from Facebook’s News Feed sorting algorithm just because of their format. But if users click, like, comment, and share Instant Articles more often than others, they may show up higher and more frequently in feed like any piece of popular content. That could incentivize, or implicitly force, more pu...

If you need a computer about the size of a credit card, look no further. The CHIP is a $9 single-board computer that runs Linux and can do just about anything you want it to… including play Quake. The board includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well as optional ports for VGA and HDMI monitors. On board you’ll find a 1GHz processor, 512 RAM, and 4GB of storage. You can install a light version of Debian and you can even plug it into something called the PocketCHIP that adds a touchscreen and keyboard to the mix in a package about as big as the original Game Boy. Why do you need this thing? Well, first off it’s pretty cool. A $9 computer – $19 with the VGA adapter and $24 with the HDMI adapter – is a wonderful feat. Like the Raspberry Pi, the medium is the message. Now that we have the ability to buy a tiny computer, we will all discover places we can use it. Furthermore, the creators have added the handheld device as a sort of spur to innovation. If you can carry the little guy around ...

Google quietly rolled out a new login screen for Gmail this week, and not everyone is happy with the update. Where before, Gmail users would enter their username and password on the same page, the new login flow separates this process. Now, you’ll first enter your username, then be directed to a second page where you enter your password. Some complain that this change slows them down, while others point out that the update has broken their ability to log in using various password managers. According to Google, the change was implemented to prepare for “future authentication systems that complement passwords.” The company is vague on the details as to what those may be, but may be referencing other methods to secure accounts like two-step/two-factor authentication, hardware dongles, or perhaps even some web-based variation of Android’s “Smart Lock” system. That latter item allows Android users to keep their devices unlocked when they have a trusted Bluetooth device connected, a...

Those combination locks you pick up for a few bucks at the office supply store have never been the epitome of security — but in recent weeks, they’ve taken a beating. A few weeks ago, Samy Kamkar — the endlessly clever gent behind the USB necklace that’ll hack your computer and the self-title Samy virus that devastated MySpace back in the day — demonstrated a way to crack a Master Lock by hand in just a few minutes. Now he’s back with a robot that does all the hard work for you: (If you just want to see the lock get owned in a heartbeat, skip to 0:25 or so in the video above) Effectively an automated version of the manual process he detailed weeks ago, Samy’s Combo Breaker is a witch’s brew of geeky goodness: a stepper motor to spin the dial, a servo motor to tug the lock to see if it’s open yet, a 3D printed harness to hold everything in place, and an Arduino to handle all the math and tell the motors what they should be doing. So is it time to throw out all of your co...

Always. Be. Raising. On-demand transportation an logistics company Uber could raise another $1.5 billion to $2 billion in funding, adding to an already massive war chest as the company expands into new markets and new verticals around the world. As reported by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the latest fundraising effort could value the company above $50 billion, which would put it in the same league as Facebook in its last private funding round before going public. The new valuation would also once again make it the most highly valued private company in the world by topping consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi, which was valued at $45 billion in its most recent round of funding. Uber has already raised some $5 billion in debt and equity since being founded five years ago, but what’s another $1.5 billion between friends? The company has been growing rapidly, after all, and it continues to experiment with new services and features that could complement its p...

Almost exactly a year ago, Mozilla announced that it would (very reluctantly) implement the HTML5 DRM specs into Firefox. Today, the organization officially launched HTML5 DRM support with the release of Firefox 38. In addition, however, Mozilla also announced the launch of a separate Firefox download that won’t automatically install Adobe’s technology for playing back DRM-wrapped content in the browser. With the launch of Firefox 38 today, the default version of the browser now supports the Encrypted Media Extensions API on Windows desktop (Vista+) and automatically downloads the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM). The argument here is that this will allow users to watch content from Netflix and similar services without having to deal with plug-ins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is on its way out, and Adobe’s Flash. Having a built-in DRM solution in the browser that plays nicely with the HTML5 standard means users can watch their videos without having to think about plu...

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was a technical feat on a home console back in 1991 when it was launched, but today a team has brought the entire overworld map from the game to your browser using only HTML5. Thanks to the team behind “JADSDS engine,” you can now navigate to Hyrule from any device, including your iPhone or iPad, and check out a scrollable version of the map from the game complete with environment and NPC animations. It’s an impressive demo of their JavaScript animator tech for web developers, but it’s also awesome even if you have no interest in the nuts and bolts behind the tech. There’s something very nostalgic about being able to zoom out and take a good look at the animated Hyrule map from a bird’s eye view right in Safari or Chrome.

Microsoft is moving to a different kind of software model with Windows 10. A developer evangelist noted that Windows 10 would be the “last version of Windows” during the company’s Ignite conference this week, and a follow-up confirmation from an official Microsoft spokesperson revealed (via the Telegraph) that, indeed, updates to Windows after that release would follow an incremental path that would lead to ongoing improvements, instead of splashy, more occasional numbered launches. Arguably, it’s a change that has been progressively happening ever since the easy and affordable availability of Internet connectivity came to the personal computer. Software companies have been releasing continuous updates for their apps, operating systems and firmware via Internet connection gradually over time since it became practical to do so. But Microsoft’s decision to fully embrace this marks a big change in the way it conceives, markets and sells its desktop OS. Other companies have already fu...

Key officials at the FTC aren’t mincing words in a new post defending the right of manufacturers to sell directly to consumers: Part of the U.S. regulatory trade organization’s executive team detailed its wider position following the publication of a letter of comment specific to new legislation in Michigan that would ease that state’s blanket ban on manufacturer-direct sales, but only for a unique new category of vehicle dubbed “autocycles.” Tesla has long borne the brunt of these kinds of state laws, which were ostensibly first put in place to protect consumers, but which now serve largely to protect third-party dealer interests. Tesla has been fighting an uphill battle against these outdated regulations, most visibly in New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie first forebode direct sales, bowing to powerful dealer local interests, then had to go back on that move following a decision by the New Jersey Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee, which resulted in a new law just passed...

It was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps. While this let developers build powerful, personalized products, the privacy concerns led Facebook to announce at F8 2014 that it would shut down the Friends data API in a year. Now that time has come, with the forced migration to Graph API v2.0 leading to the friends’ data API shutting down, and a few other changes happening on April 30. Today Facebook assembled journalists in San Francisco to discuss the rhetoric behind the change. All apps created since April 20, 2014, already have the new systems, so you’ve probably seen them in the wild. But all new developers must comply with updated APIs, or their connection to Facebook will stop working.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Visual Studio Code, a lightweight cross-platform code editor for writing modern web and cloud applications that will run on OS X, Linux and Windows. The application is still officially in preview, but you can now download it here. This marks the first time that Microsoft offers developers a true cross-platform code editor. The full Visual Studio is still Windows-only, but today’s announcement shows the company’s commitment to supporting other platforms. “A lot of people use Windows as their development environment, but we are also seeing a lot of people on Linux and Mac,” S. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate VP of its developer division, told me earlier this week. “Instead of making them go to Windows, we want to meet them where they are.” Developers on these platforms are also often perfectly happy with using a regular code editor like Sublime Text instead of a full IDE like Visual Studio. Visual...

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X. In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today. The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me earlier this week, the company now aims to meet developers where they are — instead of necessarily making them use Windows — and .NET Core is clearly part of this move. Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to d...

The absolute worst part of traveling, whether it’s for business or for pleasure, is packing and unpacking a suitcase. The work it takes to pack a bag is negligible, but having a clean inventory of clothes each time you pack takes far more planning. Dufl, a service that launches today, is looking to change all that. The idea behind Dufl is that frequent travelers waste a lot of time trying to clean and prep their clothes for each trip, especially when those trips are pretty much back-to-back. With Dufl, the user never has to pack a bag or clean their travel clothes ever again. Here’s how it works: An interested user downloads the Dufl app and signs up. Soon after, a Dufl-branded suitcase will appear at that user’s door, ready and waiting to be filled with the clothes that user most commonly travels in. Dufl then picks up the bag through its partner FedEx, takes inventory of all the clothes in your suitcase and takes professional photographs, and repacks the bag with the preci...

Thanks to the release of Windows 10 for multiple single-board computers, tinkerers are now waking up to the possibility of running Windows as a usable and surprisingly polished alternative open source operating systems like Raspbian. But how do you run Windows on a RaspPi? And why? First, I invite you to check out Microsoft’s refreshingly complete GitHub page where they offer instructions for installing Windows 10 onto Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Galileo, and MinnowBoard. The page offers instructions for getting the official “Windows Embedded IoT” image for use with these devices. You can also just download it here. A note to OSX users: I originally hoped to include instructions on how to flash an SD card for RaspPi2 using OS X or Linux but, sadly, Microsoft’s FFU image files require specific Windows file handling software. I tried converting this to an image file using obvious methods (changing the extension) and unobvious methods (looking hither and yon for an answer) but generally...

We knew that Internet Explorer was dead. We knew a successor was coming. We just didn’t know the official name, beyond the “Project Spartan” placeholder. Now we do: Microsoft’s new browser is called Microsoft Edge. Just announced at the company’s build conference, Edge will be the primary/default browser built into Windows 10. Details are still light on of what’s unique to Edge, but here’s what we know: It has built-in Cortana support. It has built-in reader, note-taking and sharing features. The design focuses on simplicity and minimalism. The rendering engine is called EdgeHTML. While no full-size screenshots have been released yet, here’s what we could grab from the demo screen as it debuted:

Microsoft just demonstrated one of the intriguing possibilities from its single platform/multiple form factors approach for Windows 10: the ability to use your phone as your desktop computer. In contrast to Apple’s “Continuity,” which aims to make moving between phone, tablet and desktop seamless, Microsoft’s Continuum instead has the phone you’re using adapt its interface depending on the context you’re using it. In an on-stage demo, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore connected a phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and instantly the UI he was using adapted to the new inputs and outputs. While the operating system interface we saw on screen didn’t look exactly like Windows 10 on a laptop or desktop computer, the applications shown (especially PowerPoint) did. Instead of making minor adjustments to a presentation using a 5-inch screen, you can simply connect to an HDMI-compatible monitor and have all the space and tools you would on a full PC. Belfiore pointed out that the feature re...

How old do you look? Old for your years? Young enough that you get carded every time you try to buy a beer? Now, how old do you look… to a computer that does nothing but guess ages? As something of an experiment, Microsoft’s machine-learning team has built a site that takes any photo you throw at it and tries (with varying success) to guess the ages of those it portrays. They say they put it up in hopes of “perhaps 50 users” trying it out; within hours, it was getting hammered by tens of thousands of people. After a quick demonstration today at the BUILD conference, it’s popular enough that they’re having trouble keeping the servers up. You can upload any photo under 3 MB, which has people trying out all sorts of silly stuff. How old does your dog look? Or that weird stain on your wall that kind of looks like a face? 37? Okay! Give it a few well-lit photos, and it’ll generally get your age right within a year or two. If it gets your age terribly wrong, though, fret not —...

Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages. Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees, including top talent like Sarah Haider, Safeer Jiwan, and Amol Jain have left the company over the past month or so. One source says the company has been whittled down to under 10 employees from over 20 several months ago and has been in “maintenance mode.” Requests for comment to Secret’s employees and CEO have gone unreturned. It’s probable that Secret will hand its remaining cash back to investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield...

Microsoft today announced a new service in its Azure database lineup during its Build developer conference keynote today. The Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which will go into public preview in June, is meant to give businesses access to an elastic petabyte-scale, data warehouse-as-a-service offering that can scale according to their needs. With SQL Data Warehouse, enterprises can ensure that they only pay for the usage they need and when they need it, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its data platform T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan told me earlier this week. Customers are billed for their Azure blob storage, as well as the hourly compute rates they incur while working with the data. Because it separates compute and storage, users only pay for the queries they need. This means a business can aggregate all of its data and only pays for storage until it needs to run a quarterly report over this information, for example. Via

Microsoft’s HoloLens is no joke. We’ve now tried the company’s latest revision of its unreleased augmented reality headset and even built an app for it. The new hardware, which Microsoft also showcased during its Build developer conference keynote yesterday, feels very solid and the user experience (mostly) delivers on the company’s promises. Earlier today, Microsoft gave developers and some of us media pundits a chance to spend some quality time with HoloLens by building our own “holographic application” using the Unity engine and Visual Studio. HoloLens is all about augmented reality. It’s about placing objects into the real world, which you can still see while you’re wearing the headset. It’s not a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift, so it’s not about total immersion. Instead, it lets you see objects on a table in front of you that aren’t there in the real world, for example, and it lets you interact with them as if they were real objects. When you first see someb...

Apple has just released its fiscal Q2 2015 earnings, reporting $58 billion in revenue, $13.6 billion in net profit representing $2.33 per share. Compared to the year-ago quarter, it corresponds to a growth of 27.2 percent in revenue, and an impressive 40.4 percent jump in EPS (adjusted for the 7-for-1 split). Expectations were pretty high following Apple’s blockbuster quarter three months ago — the company reported the largest corporate quarterly earnings of all time. And it turns out that this quarter was Apple’s second-largest earnings of all time. In particular, services are now a $5 billion business, and Apple reported a gross margin of 40.8 compared to 39.9 for Q1 2015. Apple is increasing its share buyback program with an authorization of $140 billion compared to $90 billion last year. Stockholders will also get a 11 percent higher dividend of $0.52 per share. Fortune’s consensus among analysts was for Apple to report earnings of $2.21 per share on $56.85 billion in reve...

IBM researchers say they’ve solved a big piece of the quantum computing puzzle with a new system for protecting against errors that can crop up among quantum bits, or ‘qubits.’ The issue the team is addressing is similar to an error that can crop up among the bits storing data in traditional computing. Sometimes, a bit that ought to be a 0 turns up as a 1 (or vice-versa), resulting in inaccurate or broken data. To deal with this, an extra bit is added whose state indicates whether or not the other bits are all correct. Jerry Chow, Manager of Experimental Quantum Computing at IBM Research, told TechCrunch his team is looking for those same bit-flip errors, but also something a bit gnarlier that’s unique to qubits. Given their quantum nature, qubits can be 0 or 1, but the “phase” of the relationship between 0 and 1 can change between negative and positive. In the system designed at IBM Research, there are two qubits that hold data, and another two “checking” for errors — their s...

Today as expected, Microsoft announced that developers will be able to more easily bring their Android applications to Windows devices. The company said developers will be able to “reuse nearly all the Java and C++ code from an Android phone app to create apps for phones running Windows 10.” Developers will also be able to recycle their Objective-C apps for iOS using new tools in Visual Studio. King, for example, used these tools to bring Candy Crush Saga to Windows Phone. During today’s demo, Microsoft was relatively light on the details of how this will work. Tomorrow’s Build keynote, which is traditionally heavy on on-stage coding, will likely provide us with more details. Microsoft has suffered from a chronic shortage of applications on its Windows Phone and Windows 8.x platforms. The issue has been built by negative reinforcement: A lack of apps in the early days of Windows 8 likely dissuaded users from frequenting the store, limiting downloads and, thus, developer attent...

It’s not polite to call someone out of the blue anymore. Best to text them first. That’s why Facebook thinks video calling will live naturally inside Messenger. Today, Messenger is launching free VOIP video calling over cellular and wifi connections on iOS and Android in the U.S., Canada, UK, and 15 other countries. Facebook’s goal is to connect people face to face no matter where they are or what mobile connection they have. With Messenger, someone on a new iPhone with strong LTE in San Francisco could video chat with someone on a low-end Android with a few bars of 3G in Nigeria. Here’s a quick video from Facebook showing Messenger video calls in action: Facebook first introduced desktop video calling in partnership with Skype in 2011, but eventually built its own video call infrastructure. Bringing it to mobile could Messenger a serious competitor to iOS-only FaceTime, clunky Skype, and less-ubiquitous Google Hangouts. With 600 million Messenger users and 1.44 billion on F...

You almost certainly associate Tesla with cars — very cool cars — but the company has an even grander vision beyond that. Today, CEO and founder Elon Musk unveiled ‘Tesla Energy’ — a new business arm that is focused on ending our dependence on grid power and switching instead to solar energy. The first Tesla Energy product is ‘Powerwall Home Battery,’ a stationary battery that can power a household without requiring the grid. The battery is rechargeable lithium-ion — it uses Tesla’s existing battery tech — and can be fixed to a wall, removing much of the existing complexity around using a local power source. “The issue with existing batteries is that they suck,” Musk said in a press conference announcing Tesla Energy. “They are expensive, unreliable and bad in every way.” Tesla’s solution, he said, is different. For one thing, the company’s batteries cost $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh — add your snarky Apple Watch price comparison here. They are open for pre-orders in...