Kiran Upadhyay

If you’re a freelancer or self-employed person, you can now open a dedicated business account with N26 in just a few minutes. These business accounts are pretty similar to the consumer accounts with one additional feature — you get 0.1 percent cashback on all your card purchases. Business accounts are available in all European countries where N26 already operates. You can’t open an account for a full-fledged company yet, but N26 says that more business features are coming soon. Here’s a quick recap of what you can do with an N26 account. You can control your card in real time from the app. For instance, you can block foreign transaction or set a limit on ATM transactions because you rarely withdraw cash. You can pay anywhere around the world with your N26 card without any exchange rate markup or foreign transaction fee. You can also get real time notifications of your transactions on your phone if you care about security. N26 already has 300,000 customers. It’s clear that th...

Spotify will be launching a bot for Facebook Messenger users that lets friends discover and share music directly in their chats. The bot, which takes advantage of Facebook’s soon-to-launch chat extensions, includes search tools, music recommendations, and sharing functionality for sending 30-second song clips to friends that can either be listened to within Messenger, or launched in Spotify’s app to hear the song in full. The announcement of the new bot was published to Spotify’s blog this afternoon, but the post is not publicly available at present. It was likely posted ahead of Facebook’s big announcement at its developer conference F8, where it’s expected to unveil new features for Messenger, including “chat extensions,” which will expand the default Messenger experience with new functionality. However, we were able to read through the details of Spotify’s post, thanks to the magic of RSS readers. (Google it.) Explains the company, the Spotify bot will be able to serve up m...

Microsoft acquired the popular mobile to do list application Wunderlist back in 2015, and now it’s preparing users for its eventual demise with the release of its new application “To-Do,” announced today. The new app was built by the team behind Wunderlist, and will bring in the favorite elements of that app in the months ahead, Microsoft says. The company also added that it won’t shut down Wunderlist until it’s confident that it has “incorporated the best of Wunderlist into To-Do.” In case you’re hoping Wunderlist will get some sort of reprieve, Microsoft makes its forthcoming demise pretty clear. Stating its plans in black-and-white: “we will retire Wunderlist,” it says in a blog post. In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging Wunderlist users to make the switch by offering an importer that will bring in your lists and to-dos from Wunderlist into To-Do, where those items will now be available in other Microsoft products, like Exchange and Outlook. Microsoft’s plans for To...

Today at F8, Facebook revealed it has a team of 60 engineers working on building a brain-computer interface that will let you type with just your mind without invasive implants. The team plans to use optical imaging to scan your brain a hundred times per second to detect you speaking silently in your head, and translate it into text. Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s R&D division Building 8, explained to conference attendees that the goal is to eventually allow people to type at 100 words per minute, 5X faster than typing on a phone, with just your mind. Eventually, brain-computer interfaces could let people control augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with their mind instead of a screen or controller. Facebook’s CEO and CTO teased these details of this “direct brain interface” technology over the last two days at F8. Brain-Typing “What if you could type directly from your brain?” Dugan asked. She showed a video of a paralyzed medical patient at Stanford ...

Planned Parenthood has been threatened repeatedly with blockage of access in several states since Trump became our 45th president. But it also, as a consequence, has received a serious spike in donations (40 times its normal rate, according to the Guardian). The organization’s leaders are now looking to 500 Startups’ seed program to help them capitalize on the recent surge and harness technology to help further the momentum. 500 will donate $100,000 to the growing trove Planned Parenthood has already received since Trump took office, as well as kick off a hackathon for the organization. Planned Parenthood team members will also receive mentorship for its period-tracking app Spot On to help them find ways to improve the product and grow the user base. The American Civil Liberties Union did something similar this year, joining Y Combinator’s winter batch to gain mentorship and network with some of the Valley’s most powerful allies in what is being called “The Resistance” — a growing...

Craigslist is great for serial killers and spear-phishers, but less than ideal for anyone looking for housing. As a platform for renters, Bedly aims to take some of the pain out of the housing-rental process — and it’s hoping that’s a draw for landlords too. Co-founded by Martin Greenberg, formerly of IBM’s cybersecurity team, and Benjamin Chester, Bedly takes care of all the annoying stuff on both ends. For renters, that means furnishing apartments, screening roommates and setting up utilities. For landlords, that means attracting young professionals who don’t want to deal with the hassle of logistics, and offering property rentals through a clean, navigable platform. Like Airbnb in its frictionless ideal, Bedly instead concentrates on medium to long-term stays (think 3 months, 6 months and so on) rather than a per-night model. Once a renter is in Bedly’s network, the company wants to make it easy for them to move around if a place isn’t quite the right fit. Because 95 percent ...

On day two of Facebook’s F8 conference, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off designs for two new 360 cameras that the company is going to help push to market. The x24, with 24 cameras, and its little brother the x6, with six cameras, can each capture in six degrees of freedom for more immersive 360 content. Facebook plans to license the designs of the two cameras to select commercial partners to get each to market later this year. Prototyped in Facebook’s Area 404, the x24 combines the FLIR camera system with Facebook’s proprietary architecture. Being able to shoot in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) cuts out a lot of the work that would traditionally be required to create 360 videos where the watcher can tilt their head in all directions without sacrificing the believability of a given shot. The conceptual idea, sometimes referred to as volumetric capture, has been heralded for some time as a major milestone for VR. Startups like Lytro have been betting on light fields to g...

Facebook has been putting a lot of resources into improving internet connectivity in rural areas. At first, that may seem like a distraction for the social networking giant, but Facebook takes its mission to connect people pretty literally. And to do so, it’s taking a building-block approach that involves lots of different projects that all attempt to solve different issues of this larger technology challenge. At its F8 conference in San Jose this week, Facebook once again moved these connectivity efforts into the spotlight. While the most exciting example of its work in this area is surely its giant, solar-powered Aquila drone (which actually hangs over the exhibit area at the conference), a lot of the work Facebook is doing here is in the networking technologies that connect the drone (or multiple drones) with the internet. That includes a project like Terragraph, which is meant for urban environments, as well as the likes of the OpenCellular project, a fully featured wireless a...

Google is planning to add an ad blocker to Chrome, its web browser, and to possibly turn it on by default for all users. That seems counterintuitive for a company that makes the majority of its revenue (read: all the monies) from advertising, but it could actually be a way to beat blockers by becoming one itself, per a new Wall Street Journal report that first reported the news. If Google offers its own ad blocker in Chrome, targeting specific types of ads that users find particularly annoying, like pop-overs and autoplaying audio and video, those users might never seek out a third-party ad-blocking extension, the logic goes. The WSJ reports that Google doesn’t love the deals it often has to make with third-party blockers like Adblock Plus, which require payment of fees in some cases to whitelist ads by companies like Google who are willing to pay for the privilege of working around their filters. Chrome’s widespread uptake by internet users means the browser has almost half of...

Facebook will rely on an army of outside developers to contribute augmented reality image filters and interactive experiences to its new Camera Effects platform. After today’s Facebook F8 conference, the first effects will become available inside Facebook’s Camera feature on smartphones, but the Camera Effects platform is designed to eventually be compatible with future augmented reality hardware, such as eyeglasses. While critics thought Facebook was just mindlessly copying Snapchat with its recent Stories and Camera features in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg tells TechCrunch his company was just laying the groundwork for today’s Camera Effects platform launch. Because stylish, affordable AR glasses might be years away but everyone already has a camera phone, Zuckerberg tells me “the first augmented reality platform that becomes mainstream isn’t going to be glasses, it’s going to be cameras.” He says other apps (like Snapchat) have been keeping t...

Facebook has completely rewritten React, its popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. The company hasn’t previously talked much about React Fiber, as the project is called, but it has actually been working on it for a while. It’s now ready to talk about this project publicly in more detail (after word about it started spreading last year) and the plan is to put this rewrite into the hands of developers once React 16.0 launches later this year. It’s already in use on Facebook.com today, which clearly indicates that Facebook itself thinks it’s ready for prime time. In addition, it is also launching a rewrite of Relay, its framework for building data-heavy applications. React Fiber The idea behind React Fiber, the company tells me, is to take what the company has learned from developing React the first time around and put that into an updated framework that is still fully backwards compatible with existing React-based applications. React Fiber, Facebook tells me, ...

Xiaomi unveiled its newest flagship smartphone — the Mi 6 — today at an event in Beijing, having skipped Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s largest annual event where it announced the Mi5 last year. There’s plenty at stake with this new device, given that Xiaomi suffered a sales slump last year with CEO Lei Jun admitting that the company has entered a transitional period after growing too fast. So, what about the Mi 6? Well, the first thing to note is that there are plenty of similarities to the iPhone 7, but price isn’t one of them. The entry model — featuring 64 GB of storage — comes in at 2499 RMB, that’s around $360, with a 128 GB option (2899 RMB, $420) and ceramic edition (2999 RMB, $435) completing the range. All three are far cheaper than iPhone equivalents, but, interestingly for Xiaomi, the range is more expensive that the company’s usual flagship prices. The most obvious iPhone comparison is that there is no headphone jack on the Mi 6, just as Apple ele...

Have you always wanted to check out that StarCraft game you’d heard so much about, but somehow managed to go nearly 20 years without buying a copy? Good news! Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game — plus the Brood War expansion — for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would’ve cost $10-15. The company says they’ve also used this opportunity to improve the game’s anti-cheat system, add “improved compatibility” with Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 and fix a few long-lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison — so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right? This is also good news for everyone who, like me, has want...

Tesla dropped the price on their entry-level Model S, with a $5,000 discount to the 75kWh version, which now starts at $69,500. The price drop comes as Tesla stops selling the 60kWh model, which it discontinued recently and sold only until remaining stock ran out. The price drop also comes with upgraded standard equipment, meaning you’ll get a better value overall. These include the all-glass overhead roof, and an automatic powered rear lift gate as standard features across all Model S battery options. Electrek reports that in addition to those changes, some other tweaks mean you can only get certain options on higher-priced models now, which it looks like are designed to help make sure the company continues to see a healthy mix of buyers at all points in its pricing matrix. The Model S still isn’t “cheap” by any stretch of the imagination, but the pricing and option changes do mean your money goes farther at the entry-level for the vehicle lineup. The lesson is this: Patience i...

The Shadow Brokers—the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency's weaponized software exploits—just published its most significant release yet. Friday's dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world. Friday's release—which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday—contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks. Inde...

A Republican lawmaker who voted to eliminate Internet privacy rules said, "Nobody's got to use the Internet" when asked why ISPs should be able to use and share their customers' Web browsing history for advertising purposes. US Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) was hosting a town hall meeting when a constituent asked about the decision to eliminate privacy rules. The person in the audience was disputing the Republican argument that ISPs shouldn't face stricter requirements than websites such as Facebook. "Facebook is not comparable to an ISP. I do not have to go on Facebook," the town hall meeting attendee said. But when it comes to Internet service providers, the person said, "I have one choice. I don't have to go on Google. My ISP provider is different than those providers." That's when Sensenbrenner said, "Nobody's got to use the Internet." He praised ISPs for "invest[ing] an awful lot of money in having al...

Location sharing is back in Google Maps. Google announced the addition of "real-time location sharing" to the Android and iOS apps, coming soon to an app store near you. The process seems pretty simple: Open the navigation drawer and press the new "Share Location" button. You'll be able to send a sharing permission to a Google contact or send a link over a messaging app, and you'll be able to pick how long you want to share your location for—permanently or for a set time. Anyone you share to will get a notification from Google Maps, and they'll be able to see your location on the smartphone and Web versions of Google Maps. There's also a "share trip" button you can activate while navigating somewhere, so rather than sending someone an ETA, they can just see you drive around on the map. This feature existed years ago in Google Maps—it was called "Google Latitude" and was great for friends and family. Latitude was kill...

We're going to get one thing straight right off the bat: The Dodge Demon is undeniably the star of the 2017 New York Auto Show. It takes guts to unleash an automobile designed for the road that's too fast to use on a dedicated race track, and clearly, FCA's got those guts. That out of the way, here's why the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk (also from FCA) is actually a more enticing prospect for nearly anyone looking for a brand-new street-legal muscle car. Let's talk performance. Yes, the Dodge Demon does 0-60 in 2.3 seconds, and that's way faster than the 3.5-second estimate of the Trackhawk. But, even putting aside the argument that 0-60 measurements are overrated, the Jeep will still hit 60 miles per hour in about the amount of time it takes you to say "zero to sixty in three-point-five seconds." That's not just impressive; it's quicker than a Chevy Corvette Stingray. You can't talk about performance without also thinking about how e...

Almost exactly a year after the Android N Developer Preview launched, Google is unleashing a developer preview of the next major version of Android, "Android O." We haven't tried it yet (images should be dropping any minute now), and the heavy developer documentation is still on lockdown, but we do have a big list of new features to go over. This first developer preview is apparently not going to be super stable. Google's blog post notes that "it's early days, there are more features coming, and there's still plenty of stabilization and performance work ahead of us. But it's booting :)." Because of the early status, this first version of Android O won't be rolling out to the Android Beta program, which offers handy in-place OTA upgrades. Instead Google will be kicking it old school with images for the Nexus 5X, 6P, Player, and the Pixel, Pixel XL, and Pixel C. There's a Wear 2.0 version of Android O, but it's only available via ...

The much awaited trailer of Sachin Tendulkar's biopic, 'Sachin: A Billion Dreams' directed by James Erskine was finally released today. The documentary depicts his journey, from him playing cricket as a child to representing the nation in the sport and becoming a legend of the game. 'Sachin: A Billion Dreams', forces us to shout the iconic and famous chant, 'Sachin' Sachin!'. A phenomenon in the cricket world, Sachin himself will appear in the movie, which is directed by London based director, James Erskin. He has directed a number of sports biopics. The movie will showcase the professional and personal life of the Master Blaster in detail. What's further interesting is that A R Rehman, the maestro, has composed the music, which adds to the effect of the biopic. 'Sachin: A Billion Dreams' will be releasing in 2000 theatres across the world. The release date for the biopic is May 26, 2017. Source

Reliance Jio has launched a new tariff plan dubbed 'Dhan Dhana Dhan'. Starting at Rs 309, the new plan offers 1GB of data per day and has a validity of 84 days. This means users will get 1GB data per day with unlimited national calling for 84 days (28 x 3). There's another plan available at Rs 509, offering users 2GB of daily data with the same validity of 84 days. Both these plans are exclusive for Jio Prime members. Incidentally, the offer is not for members who are eligible for the company's 'Summer Surprise' offer. As for non-Prime users, the 1GB per day plan is priced at Rs 408. For 2GB data per day, users will need to pay Rs 608. The validity of both these plans is 84 days as well. The all-new Jio 'Dhan Dhana Dhan' offer replaces the company's 'Summer Surprise' offer. Late last week, telecom regulatory body Trai had asked the Reliance-owned telecom service provider to withdraw its 'Summer Surprise' offer+ . Trai said that...

Mumbai: Radhakishan Damani may shun the limelight, but investors in his firm Avenue Supermarts, the owner of D-Mart chain of retail stores, have no such qualms. On Monday, they bought heavily into Avenue shares, boosting its market cap past the Rs 50,000-crore mark and its share price to a new high of Rs 806.80. The shares rose 7% initially before ending the day 3.3% up. Investors' fervour for Avenue has shown no signs of easing since March 21 when its shares listed at more than 100% premium to offer price of Rs 299. The shares are up 160% as of Monday , making Avenue the most expensive brick-and-mortar retail stock in the world on key financial parameters. While giants such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Tesco, Target, Metro and Carrefour among others are trading at a market cap-to-sales ratio of below 1, Avenue is trading at nearly 5.6 times. The market capto-sales ratio measures the premium that investors are willing to pay for future sales. D-Mart's eye-popping valuation and t...

As widely speculated, India's biggest e-commerce website Flipkart has acquired eBay India. The company announced this on Twitter. Flipkart has also raised $1.4 billion from Tencent, eBay and Microsoft. This is the biggest round of funding by an Indian internet company till date. With this latest round of funding, Flipkart valuation has reached $11.6 billion and US software giant Microsoft joins the marketplace as a strategic investor. In exchange for an equity stake in Flipkart, US-based eBay will make a $500 million cash investment and sell its eBay.in business to the e-commerce major. Bengaluru-based Flipkart will own and operate eBay.in business once the transaction is closed, which is expected by the end of this year. eBay and Flipkart have also entered into an exclusive agreement in which they will jointly pursue cross-border trade opportunities. "We are delighted that Tencent, eBay and Microsoft — all innovation powerhouses — have chosen to partner with us on thei...

With 'Summer Surprise' offer termed 'void', Reliance Jio seems set to woo users with new offers. The company has announced on its website that it will soon be announcing new tariff packs with more exciting offers. "We are updating our tariff packs and will be soon introducing more exciting offers," reads the banner on the company's website. A company's spokesperson also confirmed to ET telecom the same. However, he didn't divulge any details. In a surprise move last week, Telecom Regulatory Authourity of India (TRAI) had asked Reliance Jio to withdraw its Jio 'Summer Surprise' offer. Trai said that the offer did not fit into the "regulatory framework," prompting it to order the company to stop the plan. The 'Summer Surprise' offer gave three more months of complimentary benefits to all Jio Prime members who made their first recharge of Rs 303 (or more) by April 15. The complimentary services include three more month...