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...