Kiran Upadhyay

Microsoft’s Sway, an online tool for creating presentation documents, is now generally available to the public. Previously, a waiting list was in place. That Sway has taken down its rope line isn’t surprising. What is perhaps slightly unexpected are the metrics that Microsoft announced in its blog post concerning the product’s availability. Here’s the company: It’s been only 10 weeks since we kicked off Sway Preview, and we’ve already had over one million unique visitors to Sway.com and over 175,000 requests to join, and those numbers grow by thousands daily. Ten weeks is 70 days, implying that Sway has seen around 14,285 hits and 2,500 signups per day, so far, on average. The actual count on the traffic side of things is slightly higher, but as Microsoft only specified “over one million,” we can’t be more precise. I would have had no guess what sort of traffic a product like Sway could attract. It’s from a large company, so that was an advantage. But being placed behind a

Milliseconds make a difference when it comes to chat. The less lag, the more it feels like being in the same room. But with texting, we lost the cues like nods and “mmhmm”s that tell you someone heard what you said. Today Facebook Messenger takes a leap forward on both fronts with a big speed improvement across all its versions, and a new animation that shows you whether your message is sending, sent, delivered, or read. And rather than some tiny gray text, Messenger uses your photos of your friends’ faces to show exactly who in the convo has seen what, the company tells me. Facebook originally came up with the FacePile design about five years ago for a plugin that showed which of your friends Liked a website. Now it’s found to repurpose the design to let you know at a glance who has seen your messages. The new Messenger design is now rolling out on iOS and Android in Europe and the US, and will go worldwide soon. You can see how the read receipts work in this quick demo video:

It seems that Facebook quietly removed Bing as its primary search provider over the weekend, announcing plans to debut its own search tool on Monday, according to Reuters. The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other information from friends. Facebook has been building out its search products for a long time, using Bing as an extra layer to provide results beyond the Interest Graph in an effort to avoid letting rival Google into the system. A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters: “We’re not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we’re focused on helping people find what’s been shared with them on Facebook. We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft of lots of different areas.” Microsoft said almost the same thing to VentureBeat: “Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that’s been shared with them on Facebook versus

Disagree with Sony’s decision to pull The Interview from theaters? So does President Barack Obama. In a statement during a press conference this afternoon, President Obama said: “I am sympathetic to the concerns that [Sony] faced. Having said all that, yes, they made a mistake. We cannot have a society where a dictator someplace else can start imposing censorship here in the United States. That’s not who we are. That’s not what America is.” He continues: “I’m sympathetic that Sony as a private company was worried about liability, but I wish they’d spoken to me first. I would’ve told them do not get into a pattern in which you are intimidated by those kinds of criminal attacks “We can’t start changing our behaviors, any more then we’d stop going to football games because of the possibility of a terrorist attack.”

Quick! The bad guy/super villain has left the room! Plug in a mysterious device that’ll hack up their computer while an on-screen progress bar ticks forward to convey to the audience that things are working! It’s a classic scene from basically every spy movie in history. In this case, however, that mystery device is real. Samy Kamkar — developer of projects like that massive worm that conquered MySpace back in 2006, or SkyJack, the drone that hijacks other drones — has released a video demonstrating the abilities of a particularly ridiculous “necklace” he sometimes wears around. Called USBdriveby, it’s a USB-powered microcontroller-on-a-chain, rigged to exploit the inherently awful security flaws lurking in your computer’s USB ports. In about 60 seconds, it can pull off a laundry list of nasty tricks: It starts by pretending to be a keyboard/mouse. If you have a network monitor app like Little Snitch running, it uses a series of keystrokes to tell LittleSnitch that everyt

Artificial Intelligence has been in the media a lot lately. So much so that it’s only a matter of time before it graduates to meaningless buzz word status like “big data” and “cloud.” Usually I would be a big supporter. Being in the AI space, any attention to our often overlooked industry is welcome. But there seems to be more misinformation out there than solid facts. The general public seems to view AI as the mythical purple unicorn of technology; Elusive, powerful, mysterious, dangerous and most likely made up. And while there is plenty of debate in the scientific community, I can at least tell you what AI is definitely not. First of all, AI is nothing to be frightened of. It’s not a sentient being like SkyNet or an evil red light bulb like HAL. Fundamentally, AI is nothing more than a computer program smart enough to accomplish tasks that typically require human quality analysis. That’s it, not a mechanized, omnipresent war machine. Secondly, AIs are not alive. While AIs ar

Well-known tech billionaire Sean Parker suffers from asthma and allergies so severe that he doesn’t know how many times he’s landed in the emergency room just for accidentally eating something that touched a peanut. He tells TechCrunch that at least 14 of those visits have happened since he’s been with his wife. “Nuts, avocados, shellfish, all of it. I was in the ICU for three weeks of my senior year,” he says. Given that there’s a genetic component to allergic reactions and that he’s the proud father of two, this concerns him. Parker is handing over $24 million of his own cash to fund research at Stanford to find the cure. The endowment will be used to build the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford, making this one of the largest private donations to allergy research in the United States. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the global population suffers from one or more allergic conditions. And according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immu

Following threats from hackers responsible for large-scale server breaches and leaks at Sony, the entertainment studio has made the official decision to cancel The Interview, which was set to be released on Christmas Day. In a prepared statement (below), the company said that it was “deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie” and “extremely disappointed by this outcome.” Earlier today, the top five theater chains in North America (Regal, AMC, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment) announced that they would not be showing the film. This comes on the heels of threats from the hackers, a group calling itself the Guardians Of Peace, who said that people who are at or around a showing of The Interview will “be shown how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to,” and referencing 9/11. Given the severity of the threats and the withdrawal of major theaters from participation with the film, Sony has released a statem

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile has come under attack from a large number of online trolls who are taking advantage of the opportunity to leave comments, including stickers, photos and other “meme” images, on the Facebook CEO’s public posts. The attackers are largely based in Brazil, and their barrage of comments and jokes have continued for several days now, nonstop. We’ve heard some reports, via tipsters, that the attack started as some kind of protest against the low reach of Facebook Pages, but that remains unclear. The messages and comments currently visible don’t speak to any specific agenda or complaint against Facebook or its founder, but rather seem to be random, and sometimes bizarre, posts typical to spam attacks instigated by trolls. The trolling is taking place on older posts which are further back on Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline. It appears the attacks began in the comments section of a post in May 2012 where Zuckerberg added a “life event” announcing his marriage

Each year, Google releases a list of the topics we’ve collectively searched for the most over the past 12 months. Each year, I try and see how many I can guess beforehand. This year, I got about half. How many can you get? [Pro tip: remember, people generally search for depressing/scary stuff more than pretty much anything else.] Google released two lists this year — one for US search trends, and one for worldwide search trends. The lists are mostly the same, with just a few differences. US Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines Flappy Bird ALS Ice Bucket Challenge ISIS Ferguson Frozen Ukraine Global Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Flappy Bird Conchita Wurst ISIS Frozen Sochi Olympics The two lists are strikingly similar, save for the global list leaning toward Conchita Wurst and the Sochi Olympics in place of Ferguson and Ukraine. Interesting to note: this is t

Instacart , the home grocery delivery service that launched back in 2012, is close to raising a massive Series C round of funding north of $100 million, according to sources. The raise will value the startup at $2 billion, or more than quadruple the $400 million valuation of its Series B financing from June. Including this round, Instacart has raised a total of $154.8 million with other investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, Y Combinator boss Sam Altman and Box founder Aaron Levie. We’re still working on verifying the lead investor, but at this time, sources indicate that Kleiner Perkins is in the driver’s seat. We heard rumors that KPCB took a look at Instacart during its last fund raise, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz instead. Instacart launched two years ago to become the Uber of grocery delivery. Users choose a grocery store, shop for items, and get on-demand delivery of those items within an hour, either from their phon

As we learned back in June, Comcast has decided to turn every cable router on its network into a public wi-fi access point. While this may sound like a good idea – free Internet for all Comcast subscribers everywhere is the goal – the reality clashes with the Internet user’s sense of freedom and control. And, unfortunately, Comcast is making it harder and harder to opt out of their service. DSLReports has noted that many users have found that even after disabling the sharing updates to the firmware re-enable it automatically. Wrote one user, Moulder3:  So again, my ability to turn WiFi off via the “Users & Preferences” page did not exist. Calling the 800 number and going to internet support gave me someone who only suggested trying to disable & re-enabe bridge mode (which didn’t eliminate ‘xfinitywifi’). He then suggested I (get this!) read up on the Comcast customer forums on their website as “there are constantly updates to the firmware in our modems and this is prob

Researchers have uncovered a group of Wall Street-savvy hackers that has penetrated the e-mail accounts of more than 100 companies, a feat that has allowed them to obtain highly valuable plans concerning corporate acquisitions and other insider information. FIN4, as the group is known, relies on a set of extremely simple tactics that in many cases has allowed them to remain undetected since at least the middle of 2013, according to a report published Monday from security firm FireEye. Members boast a strong command of the English language and knowledge of corporate finance and Fortune 500 culture. They use that savvy to send highly targeted spearphishing e-mails that harvest login credentials for Microsoft Outlook accounts. The group then uses compromised accounts of one employee, customer, or partner to send spearphishing e-mails to other company insiders. At times, the attackers will inject a malicious message into an ongoing e-mail discussion among multiple people, furthering t

For a year now, Mozilla has categorically stated that it wouldn’t release a version of Firefox for iOS because Apple won’t let it use its own web engine on its platform. With a new CEO on board, however, it looks like Mozilla’s position may be changing. At an internal Mozilla event in Portland today, the organization talked about the need to get its browser onto iOS. “We need to be where our users are,” Firefox release manager Lukas Blakk wrote on Twitter today (quoting Mozilla’s VP for Firefox Jonathan Nightingale, we think). “So we’re going to get Firefox on iOS.” Apple has been very restrictive with regard to third-party browser engines on its platform. Current third-party iOS browsers like Chrome or Opera can only operate on iOS because they use Apple’s own JavaScript and rendering engines, for example — or, as in the case of Opera, by rendering sites on a server and then sending them to the device. It’s unclear how Mozilla plans to bring Firefox to iOS, but given that Appl

Five movie screeners from Sony Pictures have made their way onto torrent sites after the studio’s computer system was hacked earlier this week. These include unreleased titles “Annie,” “Mr. Turner,” “Still Alice,” and “To Write Love On Her Arms,” as well as World War II drama “Fury.” The latter has been in theaters for over six weeks, but is now the second most popular pirated film with more than 1.2 million downloads as of 11AM on Sunday, notes Variety . The leak is most likely related to the hacking last week of one of Sony Pictures’ servers, which caused all computers used by the studio to go down. An image with the words “Hacked by #GOP” (which stands for Guardians of Peace, not the Republican Party) appeared on employees’ computer screens, along with a demand for access to financial documents. The studio is also reportedly investigating a link between the attack and North Korea, as retaliation for “The Interview,” a comedy film about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-Un.

We don’t often see companies announce funding rounds on the weekend, but that’s not stopping Lazada, the Rocket Internet-backed e-commerce firm in Southeast Asia, from revealing today that it has pulled in €200 million (around $250 million) in fresh capital. The round is lead by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, which manages a $100-billion-plus portfolio and this year invested in another Amazon rival: Snapdeal in India. The deal includes participation from a number of existing Lazada investors, including Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Rocket Internet, and it values the company at €1 billion ($1.25 billion). Lazada operates in six countries in Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — largely in tandem with Zalora, another well-backed e-commerce service started by Rocket Internet. This new funding round takes Lazada to more than $700 million in money from investors. Its most recent round was also $250 million back in December 2013, which include

WHOOPS. Seems Best Buy was ill-prepared for today’s post-Turkey shopping madness — at least online. BestBuy.com has been down for nearly an hour now (since roughly 6:15 AM Pacific), on a sales day that the company likely hoped would be one of its best. It’s unclear whether the outage is due to a technical screw-up or traffic overwhelming its servers. For what it’s worth, the “Oh god, our website is broke” page itself loads pretty quickly — but that page is probably a whole lot easier to serve up than a zillion simultaneous searches and shopping-cart additions. Perhaps they should call the Geek Squad? Update: Two hours in, still down. Update #2: Seems their apps are broken, too. Read More

Roomer is doing for hotel rooms what Airbnb did for your very own home. According to the startup, which has just raised $5 million in Series A led by Disruptive, there are 81 million hotel room cancellations in the United States every year. Roomer tries to solve that problem by letting users sell their unwanted hotel room, which would otherwise cost a cancellation fee, at a discounted price. For the user, they avoid paying money for the unwanted room (and they might even make a few bucks), while the hotel makes far more money than they would from a cancellation fee from incidentals like WiFi, minibar, etc. Roomer sets up through hotels and travel agencies directly, so that each time a user wants to cancel their hotel room, they’re sent to the Roomer site to list it for sale. Roomer handles everything from marketing to reservation transfer to payment out to you, all from simply sending the hotel confirmation email to the service. The user gets all this for free, and then pays ou

For more than 12 years now, the .NET framework has been the programming model for developers who want to build apps for Windows. But in its efforts to take many of its developer tools cross-platform, Microsoft today announced that it plans to take .NET to both the Mac and Linux soon and that it is open-sourcing most of the full server-side .NET core stack (not client-side .NET), starting with the next version. As Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me, about 6 million developers are now building applications on top of the framework. “We’ve been widely successful with that,” he said. But now the question is, how do you move .NET forward? Microsoft already open sourced the .NET compiler earlier this year, so it’s not new to this (even though many pundits may still take a double-take when they hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence). Looking at Microsoft’s recent history, however, today’s announcement doesn’t come a

When you are building Web apps — and especially when you are debugging them — all the subtle differences between the different browsers start coming into play. Testing on every single browser is a hassle and there are no good tools available that help you easily automate these tests, partly because the different browsers’ developer tools can’t talk to each other. Mozilla, however, has now built an adapter that allows it to connect the Firefox developer tools with Chrome and iOS to help developers test their web apps there right from Firefox. For the time being, this new tool is only available in Firefox’s Nightly builds with the Firefox Developer Tools Add-on installed. It also only works with the latest beta of Chrome (37) and Safari on iOS (but not the desktop). All of these limitations clearly show that this is still a very experimental preview release, but it’s something the Firefox team has been working on for a while. Mozilla says it expects that it’ll be a few more mont