Bay Area biotechnology company Bolt Threads has launched its second consumer-focused garment, taking the form of a Best Made-branded hat that combines bioengineered spider silk with wool fibers. Costing $198, the head-warmer is limited to just 100 units and goes on sale today thr … | Continue reading
Fledgling French robotics startup Exotec Solutions (“Exotec”) has debuted a new industrial robot today, one it touts as the world’s “top performing” robot, with an ability to move 4X faster and 5X higher than the industry standard. The Skypod robots and accompanying system use mo … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — A 20-year-old Florida man was responsible for the large data breach at Uber last year and was paid by Uber to destroy the data through a so-called “bug bounty” program normally used to identify small code vulnerabilities, three people familiar with the events have tol … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Yomob Video ad format has increasingly become the top performer in mobile ads for games and applications — but alongside that, the cost for developers of managing video ads is also on the rise. With the application of machine learning and AI, Yomob offers … | Continue reading
Online language learning platform Duolingo is expanding into podcasting, with the launch of its first season in Spanish today. The podcast represents the company’s first consumer product that exists outside the main Duolingo app, as it’s available through all the usual podcasting … | Continue reading
It may not have been the best of years for Snap, but Snapchat’s parent company has at least a couple of reasons to celebrate today after it grabbed the top two positions on Apple’s 2017 “most popular apps” list in the U.S. Snapchat took pole position in the most downloaded apps o … | Continue reading
London-based fintech startup WorldRemit has raised $40 million in a series C round of funding led by LeapFrog Investments, with “significant participation” from existing investors Accel Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). This takes the company’s total funding to $2 … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Quanterix Corporation, a company with a next generation, ultra-sensitive digital platform that advances precision health, today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 4,275,200 shares of its common stock at a public... | Continue reading
The Oculus Touch controllers debuted a year ago today, enabling players to eschew a traditional gamepad while using the Rift headset. In VR, this has become an expected way of interaction, whether you’re using the Touch or HTC Vive controllers. To mark the occasion, Oculus has re … | Continue reading
Hollywood studio Legendary has hired Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds to play the lead role in its upcoming Detective Pikachu film, according to Hollywood Reporter. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company released a Detective Pikachu game for the 3DS last year, and Legendary announced it is … | Continue reading
Building a modern, distributed application can be a tough problem to tackle, especially for new users. They have to learn how to program, then learn the syntax for all of the tools necessary, which is often different. Brendan Burns, the cofounder of Kubernetes, introduced a new p … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Two years ago, Alan Gertner was head of Google’s Asia-Pacific sales team in Singapore, handling more than $100 million in business. Now, he begins his day in a small Toronto office, building a cannabis brand that sells fancy smoking accessories such as vaporizers and … | Continue reading
GUEST: “Hey, Siri. What is the capital of New York?” We all know what happens next — Siri provides the answer. How Siri knows the correct answer is not a mystery (we have the internet to thank for that), but what is more interesting is the fact that Siri is able to understand the … | Continue reading
Bitcoin is causing too many complications for Valve, so the company has announced that it will no longer accept the digital cryptocurrency. Valve runs Steam, which is the the biggest PC-gaming distribution platform outside of China, and it started taking Bitcoin as a payment in A … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA), the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, today announced that new Q3 FY2018 customers CBRE, City of Las Vegas, Nordstrom and State of Arizona have chosen the Okta Identity Cloud... | Continue reading
Google has launched Chrome 63 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additions in this release include dynamic module imports, async iterators and generators, Device Memory API, among other developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser’s built-in silent upd … | Continue reading
Spry Fox has been making a new kind of bullet hell game for the past five years, and the indie game studio is finally ready to show off Steambirds Alliance. And unlike other games in the genre, it’s pretty hard to grief other players. It’s a beautiful PC and Mac title where every … | Continue reading
Crossing rivers with suspension bridges or steel rebar is folksy and quaint, but those methods are too old fashioned for Aperture Science. And in the upcoming Bridge Constructor Portal, due out December 20 on Steam and mobile devices, you’ll get the chance to use the space-time-b … | Continue reading
The Game Awards takes place on at 5:30 pm Pacific time Thursday. Now in its fourth year, the event gives gamers their chance to beat their chests about their favorite games, and it lets the industry honor those who created them. It also features revelations from some of the bigge … | Continue reading
GUEST: Companies that have successfully managed crisis realize that how they behave in the minutes, days, and weeks following a crisis is even more important than what actually happened. A company’s ability to successfully manage a challenging news cycle is paramount to maintaini … | Continue reading
The various Google brands are looking back on 2017, and YouTube is revealing its most viewed videos of the year. In the gaming category, familiar blockbusters filled out the top 10, but it is mobile games that dominated the top of the chart, with Clash of Clans and Despicable Me: … | Continue reading
Where Thoughts Go is a social network that takes the form of an ethereal virtual reality world. Visitors leave anonymous voice logs that appear in the dreamy environment as little creatures that flit around in the air. It’s the latest VR project from indie developer Lucas Rizzott … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: CrossCut Ventures is announcing it has raised $125 million for its fourth seed fund. The Los Angeles fund will invest in a wide variety of startups, ranging from software-as-a-service to games and esports companies. Brian Garrett, cofounder and managing director, said … | Continue reading
Microsoft continued its support for the Kubernetes open source project today, with the unveiling of several enhancements to systems that are designed to make it easier for developers to connect that system with the tech titan’s Azure cloud platform. Kubernetes is an open source s … | Continue reading
Google’s Sheets spreadsheet application gained a number of new features aimed at making pivot tables, a powerful data analysis tool, more accessible. Users will be able to get recommendations from Sheets’ Explore tab that aim to answer questions about the data fed into the progra … | Continue reading
PRESS RELEASE: Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA), the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, today announced the launch of Okta for Startups, a program offering the Okta Identity Cloud to entrepreneurs and small businesses for free... | Continue reading
Mega Man 11‘s announcement brought me a lot of joy. This is my favorite game series. I’ve loved Mega Man as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involved watching my brother play through the original side-scrollers on the NES. And Mega Man 11 looks great. The debu … | Continue reading
Brave Software, the startup that famously raised a $35 million ICO in 30 seconds back in June, is giving away 300,000 free crypto tokens starting today in a bid to lure new users to its ad-blocking browser. Recipients will each get about $5 worth of tokens on a first come, first … | Continue reading
SPONSORED: Presented by Spotify 2018 is creeping up quickly, which means that it’s time to start thinking about what the New Year has in store for you. Whether your goal is to learn a new language, find motivation to get fit, be less stressed and more mindful, improve your memor … | Continue reading
Superhot is expanding. Its first standalone expansion, Mind Control Delete, is entering Early Access on Steam later this month, with a full release coming in late 2018. Superhot is a unique first-person shooter where time only goes forward if you’re moving. This gives you the abi … | Continue reading
Lots of stuff to unpack from the myriad cultural insights offered by this year’s list of top videos from YouTube. Haha, no, I’m just kidding! This year’s list once again reminds us that not only have we developed terrible taste in music, but we spend inane amounts of time watchin … | Continue reading
Encrypted email service ProtonMail has come a long way since its global launch 18 months ago, having expanding into VPNs, started targeting small businesses, grown into multiple languages, and — most recently — launched an encrypted contacts manager. Now, the Swiss company is mak … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Kik, a chat app with 15 million monthly active users, is primarily used by teenagers and has been called a defacto app for child predators. Today, Kit announced that it has appointed a safety advisory board ahead of its plans to launch a cryptocurrency that will be use … | Continue reading
Niantic is adding 50 new creatures to Pokémon Go as well as dynamic weather in a major update for the mobile game. The dozens of new Pokémon come from the Hoenn region, and they will start rolling out this week for players to catch and collect in Pokémon Go, which has been enormo … | Continue reading
It looks like Mozilla is heading to court for a showdown with Yahoo Holdings and Oath over an alleged breach of contract. Yahoo Holdings and Oath, the company that runs the Yahoo search engine and which is owned by Verizon, filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1 at the S … | Continue reading
Fetch Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup that’s bringing robots and a supporting cloud-based software system to industrial enviroments, has raised $25 million in a series B round of funding led by Sway Ventures, with participation from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Shasta Ventures … | Continue reading
Social media in 2017 sucked. Liberal or conservative, places like Facebook were the frontline in a non-stop battle of anger over politics, sexual harassment, fake news, gun violence, and the general idiocy and despair of modern life. Naturally, this creates a bit of a quandary fo … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — Apple is optimistic that some of its popular apps removed from its China App Store this year to comply with government requests will be reinstated, the U.S. tech giant’s Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Wednesday. Cook, speaking at the Fortune Forum in the southern Ch … | Continue reading
GUEST: Most VR content is built on game engines like Unity. VR creators are placing all their chips on the premium engines such as Unity and Unreal, and that’s because they look to these platforms as their best bet for delivering high-octane experiences. There are, however, big d … | Continue reading
Career website Glassdoor today released its 10th annual Employees’ Choice Awards, a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the coming year. Facebook was crowned as not just the number one tech company to work for in 2018, but the best company to work for, period. This isn’ … | Continue reading
In a promising step toward transparency, the Eastern District of Texas (the court that sees many of the nation’s patent cases) recently announced an amendment to its Local Rules that would require parties to file redacted versions of documents that contain confidential informatio … | Continue reading
(Reuters) — A rare public spat in the technology industry escalated on Tuesday when Google said it would block its video streaming application YouTube from two Amazon.com Inc devices and criticized the online retailer for not selling Google hardware. The feud is the latest in Sil … | Continue reading
OPINION: Electronic Arts has an authenticity problem, and, in my opinion, it stems from how it talks to us about its games. Star Wars: Battlefront II’s launch was a calamity, and I think EA made it worse with how it communicated to angry fans. Maybe it’s corporate policy or cultu … | Continue reading
GUEST: Just before Thanksgiving, AdForm uncovered Hyphbot, the largest bot net ever discovered. The scariest part of the discovery for many brand advertisers was that the bot net spoofed billions of impressions of premium content from sites like the Economist and the Financial Ti … | Continue reading
GUEST: We’ve all seen the stories and allegations of Russian bots manipulating the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, hijacking the FCC debate on net neutrality. Yet far from such high stakes arenas, there’s good reason to believe these automated pests are also c … | Continue reading
Yesterday Google announced the final release of Android 8.1 Oreo, along with the new Android Oreo (Go edition) software experience for entry-level devices. Today the company pushed the latest source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and started rolling out Android 8. … | Continue reading
GUEST: It’s safe to say that 2017 was a flop for the chatbot. All the predictions made out that this was going to be the year that we saw enterprise-wide adoption of bots. That hasn’t been the case, primarily, because enterprise is not paying close attention to its own behavior. … | Continue reading
Felix the Reaper is out to end the lives of his unsuspecting victims, but he does so with style. On his way to setting up Final Destination-esque fates, he pirouettes, tiptoes, and leaps his way through the shadows. The 3D puzzle adventure is Danish indie studio Kong Orange‘s lat … | Continue reading