Kiran Upadhyay

After watching this video, no one should doubt Bill Gates’ commitment to raising awareness of the issues around sanitation and its importance to economic and social development in emerging markets. In the video, Gates drinks water made from human waste to prove that the technology developed by Janicki Bioenergy, a small engineering firm based outside of Seattle, works. Sanitation in developing countries is a huge problem. Poor waste disposal causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year and prevents them from developing both mentally and physically, as Gates notes in his blog post on the new technology. “If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy,” Gates writes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is backing a pilot project for Janicki’s project in Senegal later this year. The technology isn’t particularly groundbreaking. Distillation, which purifies a li

Hot on the heels of a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet, the announcement of the Datalogix acquisition marks an aggressive move on Oracle’s part — an attempt to prove to the market that it’s getting serious about data-driven marketing. Salesforce added Datalogix to its marketing cloud back in April 2014. This Oracle acquisition will probably be making some Salesforce folks feel like they got a lump of coal in their stocking this year. The past year has seen much fanfare surrounding marketing cloud solutions, integrated software promising to help maximize and measure marketing impact across all activities. Oracle’s Data Cloud is the latest part of the company’s answer to this growing category, and Adobe, Marketo, Salesforce, SAP, and IBM all have their own take on the one-stop enterprise solutions. In developing its own cloud platform, Oracle has been highly acquisitive in recent years — scooping up Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai and Compendium — among others. Not many people pre

Facebook has a acquired QuickFire Networks, a TC Disrupt 2014 Battlefield contestant that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news earlier today, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site. QuickFire’s tech speeds up encoding videos with different profiles for frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms. QuickFire’s solution relied on custom motherboards built to accommodate 11 high-end Intel Core i7 processors. Custom software let these processors work in unison, and a layer on top of that let the startup massively scale up by distributing work among multiple motherboards. For users, the end result of Facebook integrating QuickFire’s tech would be reduced buffering of videos without degradation in quality. According to a letter announcing the acquisition on QuickFire’s site from CEO Craig Lee, the company will wind down its prior business operations

From scrappy startups to mega giants like Philips and GE, it seems like everyone wants to build a smart lightbulb. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to flip off that light they left on downstairs from the comfort of their bed? Smart lightbulbs have one massive, glaring fault though: as soon as someone hits the light switch — as people tend to do — they’re worthless. Switchmate, a company competing in the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield at CES this year, wants to solve the problem from the other end: at the switch. Read More 

Apple’s 12-inch MacBook Air has been rumored for a while now, but the computer is very real, according to a new report from 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman. The resourceful and consistently accurate site has revealed specs and renders of a 12-inch MacBook (which is pegged for release anytime between the near future and mid-2015) that pushes the limits in terms of thickness, input and output ports, and overall design. The 12-inch notebook is almost twice as thin as the existing 11-inch model of the same computer. It has only a very slight taper from its thinnest point to its thickest, unlike the versions shipping now, and it manages to occupy a footprint similar to the current 11-inch Apple notebook, despite the larger display, thanks to the use of a nearly edge-to-edge chiclet-style keyboard, as well as smaller bezels surrounding the 12-inch Air’s screen on all sides. Apple’s boldest decision with this computer might be that it is apparently dropping almost all physical input and output po

You can get pretty much anything on a stick. You can actually, and I kid you not, get fried butter on a stick. And soon, thanks to Intel, you can even get a full, Windows 8.1 PC on a stick. The Windows 8.1-based Compute Stick contains a quad-core Atom processor, 32 gigabytes of storage, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and wi-fi and Bluetooth support. It will retail for $149, early this year. A separate Linux version will contain half the RAM, a third of the storage, and will sell for a reduced $89. Here’s the thing in all its stick-y glory: Intel is working to shrink the size of its computing products. Its new Quark SE SOC — system on a chip — could help the wearable revolution become less a dream, and more of a functional reality. Intel was late to smartphones and tablets — its earnings tell that story each quarter — but when it comes to even smaller machines, the company appears bent on not falling behind.

Taking lots of selfies is not currently considered a mental disorder, but the amount of products coming out to support our selfie obsession is ridick. There’s the selfie stick, toasted selfies and now there’s even the Belfie, a selfie stick for your butt. Kim Kardashian came up with the term while striking a pose of her behind in the mirror for Instagram one day. Model Cheryl Cole and Kelly Brook soon followed the trend with their own Instagram belfies and even Lady Gaga used a flattering rear photo for the cover of ‘Do What You Want.‘ But capturing your rear-end isn’t exactly easy if all you’ve got is your phone. Kim K is an expert selfie taker but a source close to the belfie incident told Life & Style magazine: “She took so many pictures and deleted them before she and Kanye decided on the one she posted.” The creators of selfie-plastered social network site On.com invented the Belfie to finally, “make it easy to take pics of your bum in any angle.” “We’ve noticed