Kiran Upadhyay

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Google today announced a new machine learning platform for developers at its NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference in San Francisco. As Google chairman Eric Schmidt stressed during today’s keynote, Google believes machine learning is “what’s next.” With this new platform, Google will make it easier for developers to use some of the machine learning smarts Google already uses to power features like Smart Reply in Inbox. The service is now available in limited preview. “Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply),” the company says. “Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.” Google’s Cloud Machine Learning platform basically consists of two parts: one that allows developers to build machine learning models from their own data, and another that offers developers a pre-trained model. To train th...

In case there was any doubt that messaging apps were the future of communication in the mobile-first era, a new study released this morning puts some solid numbers behind their traction – and their increasing dominance over email, among today’s youngest users. According to a report from App Annie, email is effectively dying among this crowd. Those aged 13 to 24 now spend more than 3.5 times overall usage time in messaging apps than those over 45 years old, while the older users still default to apps that replicate desktop functions, like email and web browsers. The data for these findings comes from a large sample of real-world users, notes App Annie, combined with the company’s own proprietary data sets. However, it only focuses on Android smartphone users, which in the U.S., doesn’t present a holistic overview of the market. Adding iOS data could change these numbers somewhat, though it’s likely that the larger trends would remain. For those who did not grow up with a smartphone...

Over 30 million Americans have used an online dating service or mobile dating app, according to Pew Research Center. Yet Black online users face apparent bias: Data collected from 25 million OkCupid accounts demonstrated that when users rated their matches they penalized Black men and women. Bae :: Before Anyone Else, a mobile dating app created by Jordan Kunzika, Brian Gerrard and Justin Gerrard, hopes to make online dating a better experience for Black people. Bae founders cultivated their user base by going directly to the communities they believe need the app. They hosted an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) tour which consisted of parties and mixers where people who matched on Bae could meet in person. All attendees had to have Bae downloaded to participate. Within a few weeks of their April 2015 launch, they reached 17,000 downloads, and have grown over ten times since. Bae’s founders are from the community they are building for–an essential dimension of th...

Good news for amateur and professional photograph enthusiasts. Google has just made its Nik Collection photo editing software available completely free of charge. That collection includes seven different desktop services that fell into Google’s lap after it acquired Nik Software back in 2012. That deal was largely about getting control of popular photo app Snapseed, a pretty powerful tool in itself, but Google later pulled the remaining Nik Software services together in an attractive $149 bundle. That’s now become free, and anyone who forked out to buy it this calendar can claim a refund. Read More

At this point, there’s very little difference between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could only play with Xbox and PC players as Microsoft was restricting access to the multiplayer component. Microsoft just announced that game developers can now create cross-platform multiplayer modes that work with other consoles and operating systems. So it means that the next Call of Duty or FIFA could feature a multiplayer mode that works with both Xbox and PlayStation gamers. It just depends on developers now. Microsoft has historically restricted cross-platform play as the Xbox Live was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles. The PlayStation Network only appeared with the PlayStation 3. And yet, Microsoft is now lagging behind the PlayStation 4 with its Xbox One. There are more online players on competing platforms, and Microsoft is now the underdog. By opening up cross-platform multiplayer, Microsoft could co...

It’s finally here. After teaming up with Michael J. Fox to tease us with self-lacing Nike Mags on Back To The Future day in October, Nike has finally announced a mass production shoe that will feature real-life power laces. Meet the HyperAdapt 1.0. Announced today at the Nike Innovation Summit, the HyperAdapt 1.0 will be the first shoe to take advantage of Nike’s adaptive lacing (self-tying) technology, which the company is touting as an entire new platform for sneakers. This means that one day your Jordan’s, Air Max’s, and FlyKnit shoes could all be built on top of Nike’s adaptive lacing platform. But before we get ahead of ourselves, lets take a closer look at how the shoe will actually work. In the launch announcement, Nike touted the self-tying shoes as a way to reduce a typical athlete concern, distraction. So, to save wearers time, the shoes will automatically tighten as soon as you step into the shoe. “Your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically...

The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what’s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram announced it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Instagram will order posts “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” The testing will start out slowly; at least at first “all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.” But eventually, low-quality posts might be filtered out entirely. The changes mean if you don’t check your feed until the next morning but a friend whose photos you usually Like posted something awesome the night before, it could appear at the top of your feed even if it is hours old. This is essentially how Facebook’s feed works, and how Twitter recently reconfigured its feed to work On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Insta...