Kiran Upadhyay

The $250 Motorola Moto 360 – the Incredible Hulk of the Android Wear ecosystem – smashes its way into the wearable tech world with a circular screen and non-proprietary wireless Qi-charger, features unique among its peers. The smartwatch fuses beautiful and sleek design with functionality. But does it beat the $199 LG G Watch or the $199 Samsung Gear Live? Another question that I pose toward our readership: Should you wait for the upcoming avalanche of Android Wear products this holiday season? Feel and Aesthetic Design The Moto 360 comes with two possible bands, depending on what you buy – although users can swap out the default wrist strap for another 22mm band. The default, Horween leather band comes into two colors: Stone grey and black. The leather feels more like a synthetic rubber – smooth, textured and like a second skin. After strapping it on several dozen times, the leather begins wrinkling. Also, it quickly picked up a permanent water stain. In the long-run, the ba...

It’s not quite anonymous, but forums standalone app Rooms is Facebook’s first product that allows you to ditch your real name. Rooms lets you set up a mobile-only in-app discussion space about any topic, customize the look and moderation settings, set a screen name for the room, and choose who to invite to share text, photos, videos, and comments with others in the Room. It’s a bit like forums inside an Instagram-style vertical feed. Rooms doesn’t require a Facebook account or even an email address to sign up. It employs an innovative QR-code invite system where people take a photo or screenshot of a Room’s code to gain entry. Rooms lets you share things that might not fit in the News Feeds of your friends, from nerdy niche culture topics to serious discussions about health or other sensitive subjects. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Facebook was launching an app that allowed anonymity, which isn’t exactly right, but Rooms does allow people to discuss topics ...

Mark Zuckerberg may only own one hoodie, as far as we can tell, but he is multilingual. The Facebook founder was interviewed at business school Tsinghua University today and answered all questions in Mandarin, to the delight of the audience and the relief of Renee Zellweger, who is probably happy that the Internet now has something to talk about besides her face. The background of the talk is that Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management (SEM) recently appointed Zuckerberg to the school’s advisory board (in addition to Zuckerberg, the board also includes other tech luminaries like Tim Cook and Terry Gou, the founder and CEO of Foxconn Technology Group). It’s not certain exactly how Zuckerberg’s newly minted position on Tsinghua’s board will help Facebook in China, where the social network is blocked. But his Chinese Q&A surely ingratiated him with a lot of people. When Apple CEO Cook joined the board back in October 2013, it was soon after he said t...

The Civilization series has repeatedly roped me in for disappearances that span hours and even days, and the newest instalment, Civilization: Beyond Earth continues that storied tradition. The civilization building and management simulation keeps a lot of what has worked about the series, and adds substantial new gameplay elements – this is no warmed-over expansion with some sci-fi facepaint, nor is it even just a sequel to the excellent Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Instead, it’s a thoughtful extension of the Civilization series into a future era, with meaningful changes to mechanics that make sense in the context of the story. As for that story, the premise is basically that Earth has collectively put together a large expeditionary force, drawn from the people of various nations, to seek out and colonize new worlds. The colonizers hail from a wide range of backgrounds, and instead of being divided by nation as they were in previous Civilization games, they’re sponsored by differen...

In October of 2004, a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with a curious name—Ubuntu. Even then there were hundreds, today if not thousands, of different Linux distros available. A new one wasn't particularly unusual, and for some time after its quiet preview announcement, Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative. Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. That makes Ubuntu the world's third most popular PC operating system. By Canonical's estimates, Ubuntu has roughly 90 percent of the Linux market. And Ubuntu is poised to launch a mobile version that may well send those numbers skyrocketing again. This month marks the tenth anniversary of Ubuntu. As you'll soon see in this look at the desktop distro through the years, Linux observers sensed there was something special about Ubuntu nearly from the start. However, while a Linux OS that genuinely had users in mind was quick...

Use email? Own an Android device? Not a fan of Gmail? There’s good news coming your way. Google is preparing a major update for Gmail for Android that will, among many things, finally handle email accounts from other service providers, such as Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo and AOL [mandatory disclaimer: AOL is, of course, the owner of TechCrunch]. That’s according to the sleuths at Android Police, who discovered evidence of a redesigned app that is expected to launch soon. Update: The Verge also points out that POP, IMAP and Exchange are also supported. You can glimpse a look at the unified Gmail app for Android in the video tour below, which was surfaced by Android Police. The refreshed looking app — which follows Google’s new Material Design language — includes round icons, a clean and bright design and, most notably, said support for third-party email accounts. We expect this update to roll out this week and suspect that this update has been anticipated by loyal Google custo...

An 11-year-old reticulated python named Thelma produced six female offspring in June 2012 at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky, where she lives with another female python, Louise. No male had ever slithered anywhere near the 200-pound (91-kilogram), 20-foot-long (6 meters) mother snake. New DNA evidence, published in July in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, revealed that Thelma is the sole parent, said Bill McMahan, the zoo's curator of ectotherms, or cold-blooded animals. (Read: "'Virgin Birth' Seen in Wild Snakes, Even When Males Are Available.") "We didn't know what we were seeing. We had attributed it to stored sperm," he said. "I guess sometimes truth is stranger than fiction." Virgin births have been observed in other reptiles before, including other pythons and snake species, said James Hanken, a professor of herpetology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fatherless reproduction in animals that n...