Kiran Upadhyay

Social marketing company Brand Networks continues to gobble up the competition — it just announced that it’s acquiring Shift in a $50 million cash-and-stock deal. Back in 2013, it acquired Optimal, another social media advertising company. Brand Networks founder and CEO Jamie Tedford (pictured above) said “the success of our own business on-boarding Optimal” made him confident about integrating Shift. Tedford added that his company and Shift (previously known as GraphEffect) have been “friendly competitors for many years,” and that it was an attractive acquisition because of Shift’s technology, its team and its client list. Shift co-founder and CEO James Borow will become chief product officer at Brand Networks (a role once held by Optimal’s Rob Leathern, who’s now working on a new startup), and he said “a very large portion” of his team is moving over as part of the acquisition. “Our goal was always to have a complete social marketing platform,” Borow said — and in his view

You can check out Instant Articles for yourself by visiting the feature’s Facebook Page on an iPhone. For more on Facebook’s strategy, read our feature piece: Facebook’s Quest To Absorb The Internet. Assuaging publishers’ fears that Facebook would keep all the data, the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics. Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Instant Articles won’t receive preferential treatment from Facebook’s News Feed sorting algorithm just because of their format. But if users click, like, comment, and share Instant Articles more often than others, they may show up higher and more frequently in feed like any piece of popular content. That could incentivize, or implicitly force, more pu

If you need a computer about the size of a credit card, look no further. The CHIP is a $9 single-board computer that runs Linux and can do just about anything you want it to… including play Quake. The board includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well as optional ports for VGA and HDMI monitors. On board you’ll find a 1GHz processor, 512 RAM, and 4GB of storage. You can install a light version of Debian and you can even plug it into something called the PocketCHIP that adds a touchscreen and keyboard to the mix in a package about as big as the original Game Boy. Why do you need this thing? Well, first off it’s pretty cool. A $9 computer – $19 with the VGA adapter and $24 with the HDMI adapter – is a wonderful feat. Like the Raspberry Pi, the medium is the message. Now that we have the ability to buy a tiny computer, we will all discover places we can use it. Furthermore, the creators have added the handheld device as a sort of spur to innovation. If you can carry the little guy around

Google quietly rolled out a new login screen for Gmail this week, and not everyone is happy with the update. Where before, Gmail users would enter their username and password on the same page, the new login flow separates this process. Now, you’ll first enter your username, then be directed to a second page where you enter your password. Some complain that this change slows them down, while others point out that the update has broken their ability to log in using various password managers. According to Google, the change was implemented to prepare for “future authentication systems that complement passwords.” The company is vague on the details as to what those may be, but may be referencing other methods to secure accounts like two-step/two-factor authentication, hardware dongles, or perhaps even some web-based variation of Android’s “Smart Lock” system. That latter item allows Android users to keep their devices unlocked when they have a trusted Bluetooth device connected, a

Those combination locks you pick up for a few bucks at the office supply store have never been the epitome of security — but in recent weeks, they’ve taken a beating. A few weeks ago, Samy Kamkar — the endlessly clever gent behind the USB necklace that’ll hack your computer and the self-title Samy virus that devastated MySpace back in the day — demonstrated a way to crack a Master Lock by hand in just a few minutes. Now he’s back with a robot that does all the hard work for you: (If you just want to see the lock get owned in a heartbeat, skip to 0:25 or so in the video above) Effectively an automated version of the manual process he detailed weeks ago, Samy’s Combo Breaker is a witch’s brew of geeky goodness: a stepper motor to spin the dial, a servo motor to tug the lock to see if it’s open yet, a 3D printed harness to hold everything in place, and an Arduino to handle all the math and tell the motors what they should be doing. So is it time to throw out all of your co

Always. Be. Raising. On-demand transportation an logistics company Uber could raise another $1.5 billion to $2 billion in funding, adding to an already massive war chest as the company expands into new markets and new verticals around the world. As reported by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the latest fundraising effort could value the company above $50 billion, which would put it in the same league as Facebook in its last private funding round before going public. The new valuation would also once again make it the most highly valued private company in the world by topping consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi, which was valued at $45 billion in its most recent round of funding. Uber has already raised some $5 billion in debt and equity since being founded five years ago, but what’s another $1.5 billion between friends? The company has been growing rapidly, after all, and it continues to experiment with new services and features that could complement its p

Almost exactly a year ago, Mozilla announced that it would (very reluctantly) implement the HTML5 DRM specs into Firefox. Today, the organization officially launched HTML5 DRM support with the release of Firefox 38. In addition, however, Mozilla also announced the launch of a separate Firefox download that won’t automatically install Adobe’s technology for playing back DRM-wrapped content in the browser. With the launch of Firefox 38 today, the default version of the browser now supports the Encrypted Media Extensions API on Windows desktop (Vista+) and automatically downloads the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM). The argument here is that this will allow users to watch content from Netflix and similar services without having to deal with plug-ins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is on its way out, and Adobe’s Flash. Having a built-in DRM solution in the browser that plays nicely with the HTML5 standard means users can watch their videos without having to think about plu

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was a technical feat on a home console back in 1991 when it was launched, but today a team has brought the entire overworld map from the game to your browser using only HTML5. Thanks to the team behind “JADSDS engine,” you can now navigate to Hyrule from any device, including your iPhone or iPad, and check out a scrollable version of the map from the game complete with environment and NPC animations. It’s an impressive demo of their JavaScript animator tech for web developers, but it’s also awesome even if you have no interest in the nuts and bolts behind the tech. There’s something very nostalgic about being able to zoom out and take a good look at the animated Hyrule map from a bird’s eye view right in Safari or Chrome.

Microsoft is moving to a different kind of software model with Windows 10. A developer evangelist noted that Windows 10 would be the “last version of Windows” during the company’s Ignite conference this week, and a follow-up confirmation from an official Microsoft spokesperson revealed (via the Telegraph) that, indeed, updates to Windows after that release would follow an incremental path that would lead to ongoing improvements, instead of splashy, more occasional numbered launches. Arguably, it’s a change that has been progressively happening ever since the easy and affordable availability of Internet connectivity came to the personal computer. Software companies have been releasing continuous updates for their apps, operating systems and firmware via Internet connection gradually over time since it became practical to do so. But Microsoft’s decision to fully embrace this marks a big change in the way it conceives, markets and sells its desktop OS. Other companies have already fu

Key officials at the FTC aren’t mincing words in a new post defending the right of manufacturers to sell directly to consumers: Part of the U.S. regulatory trade organization’s executive team detailed its wider position following the publication of a letter of comment specific to new legislation in Michigan that would ease that state’s blanket ban on manufacturer-direct sales, but only for a unique new category of vehicle dubbed “autocycles.” Tesla has long borne the brunt of these kinds of state laws, which were ostensibly first put in place to protect consumers, but which now serve largely to protect third-party dealer interests. Tesla has been fighting an uphill battle against these outdated regulations, most visibly in New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie first forebode direct sales, bowing to powerful dealer local interests, then had to go back on that move following a decision by the New Jersey Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee, which resulted in a new law just passed

It was always kind of shady that Facebook let you volunteer your friends’ status updates, check-ins, location, interests and more to third-party apps. While this let developers build powerful, personalized products, the privacy concerns led Facebook to announce at F8 2014 that it would shut down the Friends data API in a year. Now that time has come, with the forced migration to Graph API v2.0 leading to the friends’ data API shutting down, and a few other changes happening on April 30. Today Facebook assembled journalists in San Francisco to discuss the rhetoric behind the change. All apps created since April 20, 2014, already have the new systems, so you’ve probably seen them in the wild. But all new developers must comply with updated APIs, or their connection to Facebook will stop working.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced the launch of Visual Studio Code, a lightweight cross-platform code editor for writing modern web and cloud applications that will run on OS X, Linux and Windows. The application is still officially in preview, but you can now download it here. This marks the first time that Microsoft offers developers a true cross-platform code editor. The full Visual Studio is still Windows-only, but today’s announcement shows the company’s commitment to supporting other platforms. “A lot of people use Windows as their development environment, but we are also seeing a lot of people on Linux and Mac,” S. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate VP of its developer division, told me earlier this week. “Instead of making them go to Windows, we want to meet them where they are.” Developers on these platforms are also often perfectly happy with using a regular code editor like Sublime Text instead of a full IDE like Visual Studio. Visual

Last November, Microsoft said that it would bring some of the core features of its .NET platform — which has traditionally been Windows-only — to Linux and Mac. Today, at its Build developer conference, the company announced its first full preview of the .NET Core runtime for Linux and Mac OS X. In addition, Microsoft is making the release candidate of the full .NET framework for Windows available to developers today. The highlight here, though, is obviously the release of .NET Core for platforms other than Windows. As Microsoft VP of its developer division S. “Soma” Somasegar told me earlier this week, the company now aims to meet developers where they are — instead of necessarily making them use Windows — and .NET Core is clearly part of this move. Microsoft says it is taking .NET cross-platform in order to build and leverage a bigger ecosystem for it. As the company also noted shortly after the original announcement, it decided that, to take .NET cross-platform, it had to d

The absolute worst part of traveling, whether it’s for business or for pleasure, is packing and unpacking a suitcase. The work it takes to pack a bag is negligible, but having a clean inventory of clothes each time you pack takes far more planning. Dufl, a service that launches today, is looking to change all that. The idea behind Dufl is that frequent travelers waste a lot of time trying to clean and prep their clothes for each trip, especially when those trips are pretty much back-to-back. With Dufl, the user never has to pack a bag or clean their travel clothes ever again. Here’s how it works: An interested user downloads the Dufl app and signs up. Soon after, a Dufl-branded suitcase will appear at that user’s door, ready and waiting to be filled with the clothes that user most commonly travels in. Dufl then picks up the bag through its partner FedEx, takes inventory of all the clothes in your suitcase and takes professional photographs, and repacks the bag with the preci

Thanks to the release of Windows 10 for multiple single-board computers, tinkerers are now waking up to the possibility of running Windows as a usable and surprisingly polished alternative open source operating systems like Raspbian. But how do you run Windows on a RaspPi? And why? First, I invite you to check out Microsoft’s refreshingly complete GitHub page where they offer instructions for installing Windows 10 onto Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Galileo, and MinnowBoard. The page offers instructions for getting the official “Windows Embedded IoT” image for use with these devices. You can also just download it here. A note to OSX users: I originally hoped to include instructions on how to flash an SD card for RaspPi2 using OS X or Linux but, sadly, Microsoft’s FFU image files require specific Windows file handling software. I tried converting this to an image file using obvious methods (changing the extension) and unobvious methods (looking hither and yon for an answer) but generally

We knew that Internet Explorer was dead. We knew a successor was coming. We just didn’t know the official name, beyond the “Project Spartan” placeholder. Now we do: Microsoft’s new browser is called Microsoft Edge. Just announced at the company’s build conference, Edge will be the primary/default browser built into Windows 10. Details are still light on of what’s unique to Edge, but here’s what we know: It has built-in Cortana support. It has built-in reader, note-taking and sharing features. The design focuses on simplicity and minimalism. The rendering engine is called EdgeHTML. While no full-size screenshots have been released yet, here’s what we could grab from the demo screen as it debuted:

Microsoft just demonstrated one of the intriguing possibilities from its single platform/multiple form factors approach for Windows 10: the ability to use your phone as your desktop computer. In contrast to Apple’s “Continuity,” which aims to make moving between phone, tablet and desktop seamless, Microsoft’s Continuum instead has the phone you’re using adapt its interface depending on the context you’re using it. In an on-stage demo, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore connected a phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and instantly the UI he was using adapted to the new inputs and outputs. While the operating system interface we saw on screen didn’t look exactly like Windows 10 on a laptop or desktop computer, the applications shown (especially PowerPoint) did. Instead of making minor adjustments to a presentation using a 5-inch screen, you can simply connect to an HDMI-compatible monitor and have all the space and tools you would on a full PC. Belfiore pointed out that the feature re

How old do you look? Old for your years? Young enough that you get carded every time you try to buy a beer? Now, how old do you look… to a computer that does nothing but guess ages? As something of an experiment, Microsoft’s machine-learning team has built a site that takes any photo you throw at it and tries (with varying success) to guess the ages of those it portrays. They say they put it up in hopes of “perhaps 50 users” trying it out; within hours, it was getting hammered by tens of thousands of people. After a quick demonstration today at the BUILD conference, it’s popular enough that they’re having trouble keeping the servers up. You can upload any photo under 3 MB, which has people trying out all sorts of silly stuff. How old does your dog look? Or that weird stain on your wall that kind of looks like a face? 37? Okay! Give it a few well-lit photos, and it’ll generally get your age right within a year or two. If it gets your age terribly wrong, though, fret not —

Anonymous sharing app Secret will shut down soon, according to sources close to the company. The announcement could be made as soon as today or tomorrow, and there’s some talk of current employees receiving modest severance packages. Having raised $35 million, it’s unlikely that the company is out of money. But after a major redesign sterilized the app’s identity and made it look just like its much more popular competitor Yik Yak, and its co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler left, Secret may see shutting down as the best outcome. Many employees, including top talent like Sarah Haider, Safeer Jiwan, and Amol Jain have left the company over the past month or so. One source says the company has been whittled down to under 10 employees from over 20 several months ago and has been in “maintenance mode.” Requests for comment to Secret’s employees and CEO have gone unreturned. It’s probable that Secret will hand its remaining cash back to investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield

Microsoft today announced a new service in its Azure database lineup during its Build developer conference keynote today. The Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which will go into public preview in June, is meant to give businesses access to an elastic petabyte-scale, data warehouse-as-a-service offering that can scale according to their needs. With SQL Data Warehouse, enterprises can ensure that they only pay for the usage they need and when they need it, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its data platform T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan told me earlier this week. Customers are billed for their Azure blob storage, as well as the hourly compute rates they incur while working with the data. Because it separates compute and storage, users only pay for the queries they need. This means a business can aggregate all of its data and only pays for storage until it needs to run a quarterly report over this information, for example. Via

Microsoft’s HoloLens is no joke. We’ve now tried the company’s latest revision of its unreleased augmented reality headset and even built an app for it. The new hardware, which Microsoft also showcased during its Build developer conference keynote yesterday, feels very solid and the user experience (mostly) delivers on the company’s promises. Earlier today, Microsoft gave developers and some of us media pundits a chance to spend some quality time with HoloLens by building our own “holographic application” using the Unity engine and Visual Studio. HoloLens is all about augmented reality. It’s about placing objects into the real world, which you can still see while you’re wearing the headset. It’s not a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift, so it’s not about total immersion. Instead, it lets you see objects on a table in front of you that aren’t there in the real world, for example, and it lets you interact with them as if they were real objects. When you first see someb

Apple has just released its fiscal Q2 2015 earnings, reporting $58 billion in revenue, $13.6 billion in net profit representing $2.33 per share. Compared to the year-ago quarter, it corresponds to a growth of 27.2 percent in revenue, and an impressive 40.4 percent jump in EPS (adjusted for the 7-for-1 split). Expectations were pretty high following Apple’s blockbuster quarter three months ago — the company reported the largest corporate quarterly earnings of all time. And it turns out that this quarter was Apple’s second-largest earnings of all time. In particular, services are now a $5 billion business, and Apple reported a gross margin of 40.8 compared to 39.9 for Q1 2015. Apple is increasing its share buyback program with an authorization of $140 billion compared to $90 billion last year. Stockholders will also get a 11 percent higher dividend of $0.52 per share. Fortune’s consensus among analysts was for Apple to report earnings of $2.21 per share on $56.85 billion in reve

IBM researchers say they’ve solved a big piece of the quantum computing puzzle with a new system for protecting against errors that can crop up among quantum bits, or ‘qubits.’ The issue the team is addressing is similar to an error that can crop up among the bits storing data in traditional computing. Sometimes, a bit that ought to be a 0 turns up as a 1 (or vice-versa), resulting in inaccurate or broken data. To deal with this, an extra bit is added whose state indicates whether or not the other bits are all correct. Jerry Chow, Manager of Experimental Quantum Computing at IBM Research, told TechCrunch his team is looking for those same bit-flip errors, but also something a bit gnarlier that’s unique to qubits. Given their quantum nature, qubits can be 0 or 1, but the “phase” of the relationship between 0 and 1 can change between negative and positive. In the system designed at IBM Research, there are two qubits that hold data, and another two “checking” for errors — their s

Today as expected, Microsoft announced that developers will be able to more easily bring their Android applications to Windows devices. The company said developers will be able to “reuse nearly all the Java and C++ code from an Android phone app to create apps for phones running Windows 10.” Developers will also be able to recycle their Objective-C apps for iOS using new tools in Visual Studio. King, for example, used these tools to bring Candy Crush Saga to Windows Phone. During today’s demo, Microsoft was relatively light on the details of how this will work. Tomorrow’s Build keynote, which is traditionally heavy on on-stage coding, will likely provide us with more details. Microsoft has suffered from a chronic shortage of applications on its Windows Phone and Windows 8.x platforms. The issue has been built by negative reinforcement: A lack of apps in the early days of Windows 8 likely dissuaded users from frequenting the store, limiting downloads and, thus, developer attent

It’s not polite to call someone out of the blue anymore. Best to text them first. That’s why Facebook thinks video calling will live naturally inside Messenger. Today, Messenger is launching free VOIP video calling over cellular and wifi connections on iOS and Android in the U.S., Canada, UK, and 15 other countries. Facebook’s goal is to connect people face to face no matter where they are or what mobile connection they have. With Messenger, someone on a new iPhone with strong LTE in San Francisco could video chat with someone on a low-end Android with a few bars of 3G in Nigeria. Here’s a quick video from Facebook showing Messenger video calls in action: Facebook first introduced desktop video calling in partnership with Skype in 2011, but eventually built its own video call infrastructure. Bringing it to mobile could Messenger a serious competitor to iOS-only FaceTime, clunky Skype, and less-ubiquitous Google Hangouts. With 600 million Messenger users and 1.44 billion on F

You almost certainly associate Tesla with cars — very cool cars — but the company has an even grander vision beyond that. Today, CEO and founder Elon Musk unveiled ‘Tesla Energy’ — a new business arm that is focused on ending our dependence on grid power and switching instead to solar energy. The first Tesla Energy product is ‘Powerwall Home Battery,’ a stationary battery that can power a household without requiring the grid. The battery is rechargeable lithium-ion — it uses Tesla’s existing battery tech — and can be fixed to a wall, removing much of the existing complexity around using a local power source. “The issue with existing batteries is that they suck,” Musk said in a press conference announcing Tesla Energy. “They are expensive, unreliable and bad in every way.” Tesla’s solution, he said, is different. For one thing, the company’s batteries cost $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh — add your snarky Apple Watch price comparison here. They are open for pre-orders in

Apple, the word’s most valuable corporation, has a new cash tally: $194 billion. That’s to say that if you add up its cash, cash equivalents, short-term marketable securities, and long-term marketable securities, it totals $194 billion. Cash is a loose term that is usually employed at the corporate scale to include accreted value that remains functionally liquid. Apple, which has more money than any other corporation that I know of, invests the majority of it in longer-term vehicles than many companies. That’s because Apple is so frakking rich that it can stash $160 billion in long-term securities, and still have plenty of cash around the globe to fund its operations and then some. While Apple has been stacking the cash in various vaults, the company is also growing its debt pool. Apple’s long-term debt rose from $28.99 billion at the end of its quarter concluding on September 27, to more than $40 billion today. Why would a company as wealthy as Apple hire debt when it has s

Loop Commerce, a company that has developed an alternative checkout technology for e-commerce sites that allows customers to more easily buy gifts for friends without having to worry with product details like size or color – or even recipient’s shipping address – is today announcing an additional $16 million in new funding. The round, led by Houzz, Chegg, and Audible investor Oren Zeev, comes largely from the company’s previous investors and brings the startup’s total raise to date to $30 million. As before, Loop Commerce focused on bringing in a number of strategic investors versus traditional venture capital. Others in the round included family office Wicklow Capital; PayPal; Don Katz (EVP at Amazon); Mark Carges (former CTO at eBay); Dan Rose (Facebook VP, partnerships and strategy); Ken Seiff (former EVP e-commerce at Brooks Brothers); Michael Scharff (former SVP at Toys R Us and Best Buy); Chuck Geiger (CTO of Chegg, former CTO of PayPal); Roy Rubin (founder at Magento); An

If you’re familiar with Gett, you probably know it as a service akin to Uber, enabling users to request rides via black cars on-demand. Pretty soon, however, it wants to be known as a platform for ordering all sorts of “essential” products and services via mobile app. Founded as GetTaxi in 2010, the company is rebranding as Gett in all markets as it expands into new verticals of on-demand and scheduled services. Today it operates in 32 cities throughout the U.K., Russia, and Israel, as well New York City in the U.S. Over the coming months, the company plans to enable customers in each of its markets to begin ordering new services beyond its initial car service. Just as it simplifies the process of ordering a car on mobile, with a flat, non-surge pricing structure for rides, the company hopes to make it ultra-simple to order products or services without having to do a whole lot of searching online. The hope is that it can reduce the friction and time it takes to order sushi or a

Dan Fredinburg, a respected Google executive who headed privacy for Google X and lead its product management team, has died in the avalanche on Mount Everest which was triggered by the huge earthquake in Nepal. The natural disaster has already killed over 2,000 people in the region and devastated infrastructure. Some 18 other climbers have been killed in what is being described as the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in the last 80 years. By all accounts, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who had also co-founded Google Adventure, a company team that filmed Google Street View images in “extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.” Fredinburg’s sister Megan confirmed his death via his Instagram account, while Google’s privacy director Lawrence posted the following earlier today: “Dan Fredinburg, a long-time member of the Privacy organization in Mountain View, was in Nepal with three other Googlers, hiking Mount Everest. He h

Say goodbye to calls from unknown numbers. Facebook’s newest app Hello instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show you info about who you’re talking to, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call. Today, Hello is rolling out for public testing in the US, Brazil, and Nigeria, but the catch is that it’s Android-only since iOS won’t let apps interact with phone calls. Hello’s caller ID feature could clue you in to whether you want to pick up a call from a number you don’t have saved by showing their name and profile picture — as long as they haven’t changed the default privacy setting that lets people search from using their phone number. You’ll then see whatever info they share publicly or with you, like city, employer, website, and more. Technically, nothing is changing about Facebook privacy, though it does make personal info more readily visible. Hello essentially just runs an immediate Facebook

As rumored for months, Google has just announced plans to offer its own wireless cellular service. Here’s what we know so far: It’s called “Project Fi” It’s for Nexus 6 owners only, at first. It’s invite only right now. You can sign up for an invite here. It’s built on top of Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks No contracts Subscribers pay $20 for unlimited talk/text, and then pay $10 per gig of data. So a 3GB plan would be $30 on top of that $20, coming out to a total of $50. You only pay for what you use, but in sort of a strange way: if you pay for 3GB of data per month ($30) but only use 1.5GB, you’ll get $15 back at the end of the month. It’s all tied into Google Hangouts, which will allow you to place calls from your number on any Hangouts-enabled tablet or laptop in addition to your phone. WiFi Tethering is included. This is what their US Coverage map currently looks like (Montana gets basically no love):

As the world moves from web to mobile, we’ve been thinking deeply about how people will discover mobile products and services and how we will find and access all the things we need in our digital lives. Search (largely Google) has long been the access and discovery point for web services. This model was pull-driven (i.e. we proactively find information on websites as we need), and worked pretty well as large category killers (Facebook, Amazon) owned the lion’s share of traffic (and revenue). Google was happily profitable owning the distribution channel. The mobile world started out as a pull-driven model — discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the “grid of apps.” This model, however, is starting to break, as some significant trends are driving it to failure. Primary among these is the volume of information that’s now available and regularly accessed; we have hundreds of apps on our phone (though we only actively engage with a handful), and

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference happens June 8 through June 12 this year, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event is by invitation only, with tickets opening up for registration today, allowing developers to sign up for the random selection process. Registration ends on April 17, at 10 AM PT, with the lucky devs who win tickets notified by April 20 of their selection. To sign up, you need to currently be enrolled in either the iOS Developer Program, the iOS Enterprise Developer Program or the Mac Developer Program (as of April 14 at 5:30 AM PT) and you’ll be charged $1,599 US if you’re selected to attend. This is the 26th annual WWDC, and it will offer over 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers with information about using new and existing developer tools to maximum effect. Hands-on labs are also available to those who attend in person, and for those who don’t win a ticket in the random drawing, Apple is also live streaming select session

No one likes brands more than their friends, and there are plenty of ways to get their marketing updates. Facebook’s unique value is keeping you up to date on your real-life friends. So to “get this balance right” Facebook today announced it’s reconfiguring News Feed to show content from close friends higher up, which may push posts from business Pages further down. A few other tweaks include relaxing the limit on posts shown from a single friend to people with little content in the feed, and showing fewer stories about when a friend Liked or commented on a post so it can give more room to what you’re interested in. Combined, these updates, like several previous rounds of News Feed changes, could reduce visibility in the feed for Pages. While show more from friends might make the Facebook experience healthier in the long-run, it’s a tough pill to swallow for businesses who’ve built themselves up on Facebook referral traffic. As competition for limited attention grows, brands h

Docker, the company that kicked off the recent enthusiasm for containers two years ago, today announced that it has raised a $95 million Series D round led by Insight Venture Partners. New investors in this round include Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures also participated. As Docker’s VP of enterprise marketing David Messina noted when I talked to him earlier this week, it’s interesting to see the support from financial services companies in this round. This somewhat atypical investment, he believes, speaks to the support Docker has from developer teams in all kinds of organizations and how these companies now look at Docker as a key platform for their teams. “When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications,” Goldman Sachs global co-head of its Technology Divisi

Nokia has announced that it plans to move ahead with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, less than one day after confirming that the two companies were discussing a deal. Nokia will pay $16.6 billion in shares for the rival telecom equipment maker. The merger is expected to close in the first half of next year. The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent will strengthen its position against rivals like Ericsson, Samsung, and Huawei, though the consolidation means that carriers now have fewer options when purchasing equipment. On the other hand, the synergies between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent may allow it to cut research and development costs and deploy new services, including 5G infrastructure, more quickly. Despite concerns about antitrust concerns, the deal already has the backing of the French government. In a statement, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes said “This transaction comes at the right time to strengthen the European technology industry. We believe our customers will b

There’s an Uber for everything nowadays, so why not an Uber for weed? Eaze, a startup that enables medical marijuana patients to order cannabis products online and have those goodies delivered to their homes, today is announcing $10 million in Series A round funding led by DCM Ventures with participation from Fresh VC, 500 Startups, Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Ventures, and other strategic investors. The new funds come on top of $1.5 million in seed funding the company had raised last year. The cash will be used to help the company expand availability of its platform into new markets beyond just the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was founded. Launched last summer, Eaze is looking to take advantage of a few different trends. The first is just an acceptance that marijuana use — whether for recreational of medicinal purposes — is here to stay, and is likely to become more pervasive as more states legalize and/or decriminalize cannabis use. The second trend is the move to make eve

Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera tech company whose most recent offerings include multi-aperture camera models which can enable effects like background focus blur, parallax images and 3D picture capture. TechCrunch received the following from Apple, which is a statement the company provides in lieu of confirmation when it has, in fact, acquired a smaller company: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans. The LinX acquisition was valued at around $20 million according to the Wall Street Journal, according to sources familiar with discussions between the two. The Israeli startup’s hardware was targeted at tablets and smartphones specifically, and could not only offer the kinds of background defocus that’s popular on low aperture lenses paired with DSLRs, but could also help achieve better low-light performance, ideal for taking pictures indoors or at night without using flash. Apple’s plans could al

It’s been a good couple of months for grocery delivery startups in India, at least for funding. PepperTap announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A from SAIF Partners, as well as Sequoia Capital, which invested a $1.2 million seed round in the Gurgaon-based startup just last month. Other on-demand grocery startups that have recently received backing include ZopNow, which announced $10 million in new funding this week, and Grofers, which just received an additional $35 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia. (Grofers doesn’t focus exclusively on groceries, but it is one of its most important and fastest-growing verticals). Like its competitors, PepperTap is pouring its new capital into an ambitious expansion plan that will bring its services to 10 more cities by the end of this year. PepperTap launched its services in Gurgaon before expanding to Delhi and Noida last month. The new cities it plans to enter include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. While Pepp

SpaceX is going to try to launch its CRS-6 International Space Station resupply mission again today at 4:10 PM ET, after having to scrub the launch yesterday due to adverse weather conditions. Weather today looks mostly favorable, with NASA reporting a “60 percent chance of acceptable conditions” for the target window at the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. The launch today, if it goes off, will feature the Falcon 9 rocket transporting the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to orbit, where it will rendezvous with the ISS to delivery a cargo of supplies (including an Arkyd 3 satellite). For SpaceX, it also represents a second chance to attempt recovery of the reusable first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, using their autonomous drone barge landing platform. We’ll have updates as they come in, and will keep our fingers crossed that weather conditions hold out for the launch this afternoon. Read More

Microsoft today launched Office Lens, a mobile document scanner app that works with OneNote, for iOS and Android smartphones. The app, which allows users to snap photos of paper documents, receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards, sticky notes and more, was first launched a year ago as an application designed only for Windows Phone devices. But in conjunction with the company’s newer strategy to embrace other platforms outside its own, the app has now arrived on Apple’s App Store and on Android phones, where it will sit alongside dozens of other Microsoft applications, including Office and Outlook. Office Lens’ core functionality itself is not all that different from a number of document-scanning applications on the mobile app stores today, like Scanner Pro, TinyScan Pro, Scanbot and more. And much like Evernote’s Scannable app, for example, it exists more as an add-on or complement to a larger, more prominent product – in Microsoft’s case, OneNote. Like most scanner apps,

It’s official – Hillary Clinton is running for president. Clinton announced her bid for the 2016 U.S. presidential race on Twitter this afternoon, ending years of conjecture over what many assumed was a sure thing. The tweet was sent after an email from Clinton aide John Podesta went out to supporters of Clinton from the 2008 campaign, “spoiling” what political reporters had been expecting since Thursday: This isn’t the first time Clinton’s been tripped up by email. Early last month, it came out that she had used a personal email server during her time at the State Department, rather than using a government account. While the wave of hot takes during that news cycle made it seem like it could become a real controversy for her then-theoretical presidential bid, the issue has left headlines of late. In addition to her tweet, Clinton’s team has already launched the official campaign site, which includes a bio page that gives us a look at the experience Clinton will emphasize as

Ever try to read a Facebook message on the web and get distracted by your News Feed and notifications? Well now Facebook has a way to let you use Messenger in peace from your web browser. Today it launched Messenger.com as a dedicated chat interface. It’s rolling out worldwide for English users, with support for more languages to come. You can still send messages from Facebook.com as always, but Messenger.com could become a favorite of busy users concerned with productivity, or those that use Facebook to chat with friends but don’t like the social content chaos of its main site. The company tells me the “dedicated desktop messaging experience” is “meant to be complimentary to the Messenger mobile app”. The Messenger site features a list of your threads on the left, with a big, clean, white chat window on the right. You can use most of the mobile app’s features from here, including audio and video calls, stickers, and photos. For now it lacks the ability to record and send a

Apple has secured a new patent (via AppleInsider) for a special three sensor camera designed for thin, wireless devices like the iPhone. The three sensors would each capture a separate color component, as divided by a special light-splitting cube that would divide up light entering the camera into red, green and blue (or other color set) wavelengths. Why? Better resolution and lower noise since they don’t need special filters or algorithms to separate out the color information of a captured image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Using this tech, Apple would potentially be able to boost the image quality of its mobile cameras, especially in video capture scenarios. This would be a much more expensive technology to implement vs. current iPhone camera arrays, and its component parts would likely also take up more space inside the case, something Apple typically wants to avoid. But more accurate colors and better low-light performance might balance out those downsides, depending on how mu

In the wake of the Thursday arrest of two women accused of attempting to build a bomb, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote on her website that the 1971 book on bomb making, which may have aided the terror suspects in some small way, should be "banned from the Internet.” The senator seems to fail to realize that not only has The Anarchist Cookbook been in print for decades (it’s sold on Amazon!), but also has openly circulated online for nearly the same period of time. In short, removing it from the Internet would be impossible. "I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine,” Feinstein wrote. "These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet." On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged the two American women living in New York City with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. The 29-page criminal complain