Kiran Upadhyay

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

Why pay E*Trade $8 to buy or sell a stock when you can trade for free on Robinhood? After two years of development, $16 million in funding, and 500,000 waitlist signups, Robinhood finally hits the iOS App Store today. Robinhood lets you track the performance of stocks, and buy or sell them with just a few taps at no cost. The app could attract a younger, less wealthy demographic to the stock market because people can trade smaller amounts without having their potential earnings eaten up by the fees most brokerages charge. Instead, Robinhood makes money through interest on funds you hold with it or when you trade on margin, plus selling trade volume to stock exchanges. During my demo, I found Robinhood to be stylish, and easy to use — uncommon traits for financial apps. Robinhood hopes to onboard the waitlist within two months and then start adding those who signup today. But until then, anyone can use the app to just monitor stocks. Financial tech serial entrepreneurs Vlad Ten

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

While this footage isn’t as exciting as I’d like it to be – I’d really prefer a big old gross close-up of a splayed knee joint – what it represents is pretty wonderful. Essentially, doctors at the Columbia University Medical Center have been able to print a knee meniscus using a degradable plastic scaffold and a protein growth system. The body then subsumes the printed object and turns the protein into a knee joint. “At present, there’s little that orthopedists can do to regenerate a torn knee meniscus,” said study leader Jeremy Mao in a release. “Some small tears can be sewn back in place, but larger tears have to be surgically removed. While removal helps reduce pain and swelling, it leaves the knee without the natural shock absorber between the femur and tibia, which greatly increases the risk of arthritis.” The scaffold isn’t just a plastic shell, however. It contains two human proteins, connective growth factor (CTGF) and transforming growth factor β3 (TGFβ3). The scaffold r

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

The Internet is like a delicate rainforest ecosystem. You remove one player and the rest suffer and die. That happened in Spain this week when the government there began cracking down on Google. The Spanish government is requiring the company to pay Spanish news providers every time their content appears on the site. The search giant will shut down Google News there in response and no content will be available from the country’s major newspapers including El Pais and La Vanguardia. As you can imagine, this is bad news. While newspapers have long claimed they can survive in the Internet Age without outside support, this is dead wrong. Given that the vast majority of news traffic comes from search – everything from “new laser printer” to “is betty white married” returns information from news sources – I can only imagine how much Spanish newspapers depend on Google for their reach and visitor count. According to the Spain Report, the Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association is now

Back in June, Google announced a rather nifty new feature coming to Chromecast: your friends and house guests would soon be able to connect to your Chromecast without being on your WiFi network, thanks to the clever use of magic ultrasonic sounds. Today, after a few months of silence, that feature launches. One bummer of a caveat, though: it’ll only work if your friend’s phone is running Android, for now. Why? It all comes down to that age-old problem: iOS apps aren’t allowed to do certain things required to make it work, so they’re rolling with it on Android until that changes. Guest mode is off by default. Flip it on, and your Chromecast will start displaying a PIN on its idle screen. Meanwhile, your TV will start emitting ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the human ear*, which Chromecast-enabled apps on your phone will be listening for. When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.

In Silicon Valley and across the technology industry, there is a real risk of commoditizing engineers. What does that mean? Literally treating engineers like a commodity to be “bought” instead of thinking about the reasons they love to go to work. As the war for talent continues to heat up, hot startups and businesses need to think beyond throwing just money at the problem and gravitate more toward quality and longevity when it comes to making these strategic hiring moves. Throwing ridiculous amounts of money at an engineer is a possible signal that you don’t understand your audience, or your own value proposition – and it is a temporary fix, you’re allowing the market conditions to drive how you treat a very value-based part of the talent community. Money alone isn’t the end all be all of solving problems or building a technology team when you need to differentiate yourself for the long term and retain the amazing engineers you work so hard to hire. It’s no secret that it’s re

Skype has been talking about, and demoing, its new real-time translation software for Skype for a while now, but users will begin getting first-hand experience with the tool as of today. The Skype Translator preview program begins welcoming its first participants into the fold, based on sign-ups to the Translator preview page we told you about in early November. The Skype Translator project offers on-the-fly translation of both spoken and written languages for participants in Skype conversations, making it possible for two people who speak completely different languages to communicate with virtually no barriers to understanding. The preview program starts with support for English and Spanish spoken translation, as well as over 40 languages for real-time text chat. At launch, tis also limited to users of Windows 8.1 software (either desktop or mobile) so Microsoft is playing platform favorites with this early beta program. They’ve also already been testing it out with schools in

For a long time, if you wanted to get into PC gaming and experience the highest quality models, textures, and shaders that developers could come up with, you had to buy an overpriced gaming rig from someone like Alienware, a more affordable PC from a shady OEM, or build a machine yourself. It was easier and cheaper to just buy a console. That’s no longer the case. Pushed by Valve’s Steam Box initiative, several manufacturers have come out with affordable laptops and desktops that can play games at really high settings as long as you’re willing to play at reasonable resolutions — generally, 1080p HD. Curious to see what life was like with an affordable Windows gaming PC in the form factor of a console, I bought the $799 Alienware Alpha early last week. As it turns out, it’s pretty awesome. I don’t have a high resolution monitor to play on, so I hooked it up to the 39-inch TV my roommates and I have in our living room. At 1080p, it’s been able to play any game I’ve thrown at it at H

Remember back in November of last year when I wrote that YouTube needed to build its own tool for making GIFs from videos? Some called me crazy. Many, however, agreed completely. It seems YouTube agreed, too. YouTube is now quietly rolling out its own GIF maker. It doesn’t seem to be enabled on all videos just yet, but it’s definitely there for some. Take, for example, pretty much any video from PBS’ Idea Channel (as spotted first by Andy Baio). Click to one of their videos, hit the share button, and GIF away. GIF creation through the tool is quite simple: tap the share button, set your start/end points, set any captions you might want, and create away. The tool is super fast, and YouTube hosts the GIFs themselves. The final look of the tool isn’t too unlike the mockup I did back with that first post, which means I’m totally going to take 100 percent credit for this idea despite the fact it had probably been in the works for months/years. Need to make a GIF now, but YouTub

In a flawed bit of analysis, Nielsen researchers are claiming that e-book adoption is slow among teens, an interesting finding if it were actually true. “While 20% of teens [are] purchasing e-books, 25% of 30–44 year olds and 23% of 18–29 year olds buy digital copies,” said the report. Despite teens’ tech-savvy reputation, this group continues to lag behind adults when it comes to reading e-books, even with the young adult genre’s digital growth relative to the total e-book market. While 20% of teens purchasing e-books, 25% of 30-44 year olds and 23% of 18-29 year olds buy digital copies. While younger readers are open to e-books as a format, teens continue to express a preference for print that may seem to be at odds with their perceived digital know-how.Several factors may play a role in teens’ tendency toward printed publications. Parents’ preference for print could have an effect or teens’ lack of credit cards for online purchases. But another explanation may be teens’ penc

Remember Wahooly? We wrote about the startup a couple of years ago, describing it as “Klout meets Kickstarter” because it allowed users to gain startup equity in exchange for promoting the company on social media. Since then, Wahooly joined the AngelPad accelerator, rebranded as Chasm.io, and shifted focus to reciprocal sharing (“I’ll tweet your link if you tweet mine”). Now it’s announcing a merger with Loot, an Orlando, Fla.-based startup. Chasm.io co-founder and CEO Dana Severson told me that the merger basically means two things — he’s joining Loot as vice president of sales and marketing, and he’ll be working to bring Wahooly/Chasm.io’s customers onto Loot. So, what is Loot? It’s a mobile app where marketers can offer cash and other rewards to users who perform tasks, like taking photos or sharing content on social media. Severson noted that those tasks don’t have to involve social sharing at all — marketers could just ask you to download an app and play for a certain peri

Want the experience of a kinda-sorta-hover-board, but don’t have $10,000 and a copper halfpipe laying around? Fret not! As Texan Ryan Craven proves, you can pull off something of a similar vein with four gutted leafblowers, a sheet of plywood, and some gorilla tape. The disclaimers here are the same as the rest of the “hoverboards” of 2014: it’s neat, but it’s not going to turn you into Marty McFly. Without any sort of friction between you and the ground, you’re not so much steering the board as you are standing atop it as it glides wherever the hell it wants. With that said, I’d totally ride this thing until the batteries were dead and/or I fell off and broke both my wrists. Whereas the Arx Pax Hendo uses a damned clever magnetic propulsion system to keep itself afloat, this one uses a pocket of air trapped inside a shower liner. Whereas the Hendo roars to life as it battles gravity, this one makes an endless series of fart noises. We’ll call it a draw. Ready to make your

If you’re visiting any Yahoo property today, chances are you’ll see an “Upgrade to the new Firefox” link in the top-right corner of your browser window. The prompt also appears if you’re using Internet Explorer, Opera and even the new Yandex browser. However, the prompt is missing from Safari, which will surely prompt a new round of speculation about Apple’s rumored switch to Yahoo as its default search engine. Given that Firefox now uses Yahoo as its default search engine, this move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Yahoo clearly wants as many people as possible to use Firefox — and with it its search engine (which is powered by Microsoft Bing). Firefox’s user share has dropped quite a bit over the last few years, so Mozilla has no objections to putting the Firefox logo in front of as many Yahoo users as possible. Changing the default search engine in Firefox is trivial (and Firefox recently made it even easier), but most users never bother to make the switch. The new Yahoo Searc

In October, we spotted that Amazon had quietly launched a hidden and functional app store within its main Android application which was available for download on Google Play. Now, according to new reports from varying sources, Amazon’s flagship application’s listing is no longer available via search from within Google Play, though its direct link is still live. Additionally, there’s now a newly launched application called Amazon Shopping which looks much like the original application, but no longer includes the Appstore section. The change was first spotted by German site Caschys Blog who also received a statement from Amazon which claims that this is related to a September update that brought Amazon’s Prime Instant Video to Android users. That update involved having users update to or install the newest version of the main Amazon app, then download the Amazon Instant Video Player app afterwards, in order to watch Prime Instant Video on their Android devices. Amazon has sent us t

Apple and IBM’s enterprise partnership is resulting in its first outward-facing software today, with new apps in IBM’s MobileFirst for iOS making their way to iPhones and iPads at partner enterprises. These include apps built for Citi, Air Canada, Sprint and Banorte, and they allow for various functions covering flight planning, financial advice, customer retention, government case worker support and sales assistance, to name a few. This first fruit of the IBM/Apple partnership makes it clear that the app side of the equation is going to be about providing analytics-driven, secure software that covers a range of industry verticals, and that can be tweaked to suit the needs of any particular customer organization. The list of these initial apps also includes software that focuses on the insurance industry, retail and telecommunication in addition to those listed above. The apps make up just one par of the IBM and Apple partnership, which also includes mobile device management, App

While the last time most of us thought of shingles was when we were itchy in eighth grade, Seagate has been thinking of them as a way to store data. Called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives, Seagate’s new drives can store eight terabytes of data for about 3 cents a gigabyte. The catch? These are great back-up drives but they’re not very fast. At 5,900 RPM and an average read/write speed 150MB/sec you’re looking at something that’s far slower than an average SSD drive (1,800MB/sec) and even the average 7,200 RPM hard drive. Shingled drives cram more tracks onto a single platter and reduce the minuscule space between tracks. This means you can fit over a terabyte on one spinning HDD platter. Therefore these drives work best with a faster SSD drive on the front end and then these slower drives for less important storage. For example, you could stack a few for some serious fleet backup power or you could place seldom-used data files on the drive and work with fast-moving fil

Google Cardboard was the big surprise of this year’s Google I/O, and Google today announced that more than 500,000 of these extremely minimalist, phone-based virtual reality viewers have shipped since then. The early cardboard app was a lot of fun, but over the last few months, it felt like development had stalled a bit. Today, however, the company is launching an update to the cardboard app and new SDKs. It’s also showcasing some of the apps that developers have created over the last few months. These apps now also have their own dedicated collection page in Google Play and range from a Paul McCartney performance video to a 360-degree view of the Lord Of the Ring’s Shire movie set in New Zealand, with a couple of games and a Volvo-sponsored driving app thrown in for good measure. The open-source Cardboard viewer itself isn’t seeing any changes, but Google is introducing new SDKs for Android and the Unity game engine today that will make it even easier for developers to create ne

If you want further proof that Microsoft is going through a transformative phrase, you may be interested to hear that the company has jumped on the bitcoin wagon. The Redmond-based tech giant is now accepting bitcoins for buying games and other digital content on its Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox platforms, as the folks at Coindesk noticed today. Members of Reddit’s bitcoin subred noted that Microsoft appears to be working with payments firm Bitpay to make this happen. Neither Microsoft nor Bitpay have formally announced the partnership or details, but the former does have a series of instructions related to bitcoin payments within its ‘billing help’ pages. We’ve contacted both companies for further information, but did not hear back at the time of writing. There are some caveats to note, however. Customers can use bitcoin to load money into a Microsoft wallet or to create digital gift cards, but direct payments with the cryptocurrency are not supported at this time. Fina

It’s no fad. Just nine months after hitting 200 million users, Instagram now says 300 million people use its photo app every month, with 70% of them coming from outside the US. That makes Instagram officially bigger than Twitter, which had 284 million active users as of six weeks ago. Instagram’s been going strong for four years now, and despite fears that the acquisition by Facebook would screw it up, there’s now 70 million photos shared each day, and over 30 billion total. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom says “Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community.” Between Facebook’s 1.35 billion, Messenger’s 500 million, and WhatsApp’s 600 million users, Facebook has developed a jaw dropping mobile footprint. With growth steady, Instagram is now looking to strengthen its authenticity. Soon it plans to launch verified badges for celebrities, brands, and athletes so people don’t accidentally follow parody, tribute, or look-alike accou

For a while HBO has been rumored to be building its own in-house streaming platform, separate from HBO Go, to serve up its long-awaited standalone streaming service. According to an internal memo obtained by Fortune, that in-house platform, code-named Project Maui, was shelved recently. Instead, HBO will partner with Major League Baseball's MLB Advanced Media platform to provide streaming services for HBO content (don't that beat all). Also according to the memo, HBO’s standalone service will launch in April, along with the Game of Thrones premier. And, according to yet another internal memo obtained by Variety today, HBO’s Chief Technology Officer Otto Berkes resigned late Tuesday afternoon. Anonymous sources speaking to Fortune say that the scrapping of project Maui was due to a growing distrust of Berkes. Berkes joined HBO in 2012 from Microsoft and built a Seattle office with 55 engineers, many of whom he worked with at Microsoft. The office’s separation from New York

On Tuesday, a District Court judge in Minnesota ruled [PDF] that a group of banks can proceed to sue Target for negligence in the December 2013 breach that resulted in the theft of 40 million consumer credit card numbers as well as personal information on 70 million customers. The banks alleged that Target had “failed to heed warning signs” that would have stymied the banks' losses. The breach occurred between mid-November and mid-December in 2013, after hackers placed malware on Target POS systems that made it possible for them to steal credit card numbers as consumers swiped. The vast number of people affected by the breach made Target's hack the most notorious, but subsequent reports revealed that Target was only one of many big-name retail stores that had credit card data stolen—Neiman Marcus, Michaels, and later Home Depot customers were also revealed to be targets. After the breach, multiple banks and consumers sued Target in Minnesota, where the company is headquart

The idea of putting body-worn cameras on police officers has spread since protests and unrest following the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. Earlier this week, the Obama administration proposed federal funding to get 50,000 more officers equipped with the cameras. The increased use of cameras makes a few policy questions around them more pressing. One such question: what happens when a police officer fails—or straight-up refuses—to turn on the body camera? The issue was highlighted in today's Wall Street Journal, which features a story about a New Mexico police officer who "was fired for allegedly not following an order to record and upload all contacts with citizens," according to the Albuquerque Police Department and the officer's lawyer. Officer Jeremy Dear shot and killed a 19-year-old woman in April, an incident that heightened the already intense scrutiny of the Albuquerque Police Department. The city's police department had earl

It’s official: Obama writes code. He probably won’t be up to debating the merits of Ruby vs. Python any time soon, but the President took the time to crack out a few lines of Javascript as part of the Hour Of Code — an event that encourages students to try just one hour of programming to see if it piques their interest. While I imagine most TC readers don’t need to hear it, I’ll say it anyway: if you’ve never tried to code, try it! Even if you never intend to do it for a paycheck, learning even the most basic of basics can change the way you look at our increasingly digital world. You don’t have to dedicate your life to carpentry to learn to use a hammer. Ready to dive in? Here’s Khan Academy’s intro tutorial for absolute beginners, specifically tailored to fit within one hour. As for what the President coded up: he wrote a ranking algorithm that might just rival Larry and Sergey’s. Wait, sorry, wrong line — he wrote a little blurp of code that renders a square on the screen.

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

Have you seen the new Star Wars trailer? Do you, like Darrell, see all sorts of design flaws in that oh-so-medieval lightsaber they revealed? If you want one of your own to test your theories, you could wait until Disney starts slingin’ them on the shelves for $50 a pop. Or you could bust out the 3D printer and get to swingin’ today. French 3d printing shop leFabShop wanted to give the new Claymore-style saber a spin, so they designed and printed their own, piece-by-piece. It even telescopes! Better yet, they’ve shared the printable files on Thingiverse, so you can print one of your own. A word of caution, though: you’ll want to be pretty familiar with your printer before diving into this one. With a good 20+ interlocking/swappable pieces to print, your printer will be churning away for a while. Is it perfect? Eh, maybe not. The clip in the trailer was dark and some details were hard to glean. Meanwhile, they put this thing together crazy quick. But to build something like th

Another day, another funding from SoftBank. This time the corporation, one of Japan’s leading telecoms, has invested $7 million in Altaeros Energies, which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and makes airborne wind turbines. SoftBank’s investment in Altaeros is tiny compared to its recent pouring of hundreds of millions of dollars into GrabTaxi, Snapdeal, and Ola, but it’s notable because it shows just how wide the company’s investment portfolio is. It also comes at a time when investments in clean-tech companies have fallen, due in part to the increasing availability of renewable energy sources. SoftBank, however, has been keen to grow its clean energy business in Japan, where the Fukushima disaster in 2011 spurred interest in finding alternatives to nuclear energy. For example, earlier this year the company announced that its clean energy business unit will start retail distribution of renewable energy sources including solar and wind power. In statement,

This act was considered important enough to mark the occasion with a party but not important enough to invite its author. The truth is, nobody really saw the significance of what they were working on. Twenty-two years and quadrillions of text messages later, SMS is the king of electronic communications. It makes tens of billions of dollars for network providers and connects billions of people around the world. Annual text traffic is expected to reach 9.4 trillion by 2016. And why wouldn’t SMS statistics be so impressive? Cheap, effective and widely available, the rude health in which texting finds itself in 2014 was patently obvious in 1992. Or at least that’s what hindsight bias tells us. The truth is a little more complicated… ‘Perfectly Sufficient’ Those twenty characters summed up, with stereotypically Teutonic concision, Friedhelm Hillebrand’s thoughts on the optimal length of the standardized text message protocol he and a dozen colleagues were working on in 1985. As

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

Lightbulbs, washing machines, thermostats, fridges and locks. If you believe the Internet Of Things salespeople, over the next 10 years, everything in your home is set to become connected. Imagine a world where you could turn on your porch light from the office or unlock your door for a visitor, all from a smartphone app. Well, like a growing number of early smart-home adopters, I have seen this future today — and let me tell you, it’s a mess. Blame the interface. Connected slow cookers and smart plugs may be turning on geeks today but, if user experiences are not improved quickly, the smart home dream is at risk of going belly-up. As a case in point, take one of the connected home’s leading lights — literally. Philips’ Hue lightbulbs impress aficionados for being controllable via a mobile app from any location. That’s fine for truly remote control — for instance, illuminating a room from hundreds of miles away — but, at home, smartphone control is positively retrograde. Wan

Last year, Microsoft announced that its consumer-facing Skype communications service and its enterprise-focused counterpart would begin to interoperate, first with IM and audio, and later expanding to support video. Today, the company says, the video integration is complete. Skype users can now video call contacts on Lync, and vice versa, Microsoft announced this morning. The change follows a series of deeper integrations between the two products, the latter of which will be rebranded “Skype for Business” sometime in 2015. To use the now cross-platform video calling feature, you don’t have to do anything differently from before – you just kick off the call the same way you do today. However, video calling is supported only on an up-to-date Lync 2013 client on Android, iOS or Windows and on Skype for Windows desktop. Skype is now working to expand this integration to more platforms, starting with iOS and Android. Under the hood of this integration, the teams have worked

Last night, I stepped into Marquee night club in New York City. David Guetta was on the set list. People were dressed their best, lights were flashing, and I had a fresh glass full of booze in hand. I should have been excited, but instead my head just hurt. Am I getting old? Are clubs just getting louder? In either case, Dubs Acoustic Filters solved my problems. Created by Doppler Labs, Dubs are the modern-day reinvention of earplugs. They’re entirely mechanical earplugs that maintain acoustic quality while simply lowering the decibel level, so your ears aren’t ringing all night. Dubs are sold online and in Best Buy, as well as various music festivals like Europe’s ADE, having sold more than $1 million in the past 60 days. At $25/each, that’s 40,000 units pushed in two months. Of course, Dubs aren’t the only option on the market. You could also pop in some of those bright orange, squishy earplugs they sell in 20 packs at gas stations, or you could buy massive, over-the-ear