Instagram shopping is about to get dangerously easy

Last year, Instagram revealed an upcoming appointment-booking feature, another step towards the company's larger plans of becoming a shopping service of sorts. Now TechCrunch reports that the photo-sharing service is quietly adding an electronic paym...

Toyota will test risky self-driving scenarios at a Michigan track

It's not enough to test self-driving cars in realistic conditions -- if they're going to avoid crashes, they need to handle nightmare scenarios. Toyota is about to address that. It's building a closed test facility at Michigan Technical Resource Pa...

Samsung’s new camera sensor plays nice with phones besides the Galaxy S

Today, Samsung announced that the 16-megapixel ISCOCELL Slim 3P9 image sensor is now available. This image sensor is designed for cameras on mobile devices; because of its Tetracell technology, this 1.0μm sensor can work as a 2.0μm in front-fac...

New 'Overwatch' map brings the battle to Italy's canals

Last month, players of Blizzard's hero shooter Overwatch took a trip into the game's fictional past with a new temporary game mode, Retribution. The brawl portrayed heroes escaping through the streets of Venice after a clandestine mission gone wrong....

Google adds more Assistant features to Wear OS

Google brought its AI assistant to Android Wear 2.0 last year, and has been adding features like Routines and Custom Device Actions ever since. Now the company is bringing a few new features to Assistant on Wear OS (as it's now called), including con...

Atmospheric harvesters will enable arid nations to drink from thin air

As climate change continues to wreak havoc upon the Earth's weather patterns, formerly lush locales like the American West are finding themselves increasingly parched. Perhaps nowhere is that abrupt arridization more pronounced than in Cape Town, Sou...

Microsoft is fixing a Windows 10 bug that causes Chrome to freeze

Since the Windows 10 April update, some users have been dealing with frozen systems when they're running apps including Chrome or using the "Hey, Cortana" command. The good news is Microsoft's working on a fix, which may be ready in time for next wee...

Instagram quietly launches payments for commerce

Get ready to shop the ‘Gram. Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit card as part of a profile, set up a security pin, then start buying things without ever leaving Instagram. Not having to leave for a separate website […]

Researchers are developing a brain editing device to give us read/write privileges to our minds

Neuroscientists at the University of California Berkely are building a device that’ll hack our brains so we can ‘edit’ what we feel and remember. It looks like we’ve drawn “Total Recall” in the ‘which horrifying Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie will scientists recreate today’ lottery. The researchers successfully activated and deactivated specific groups of neurons in the brains of mice by projecting holograms directly onto them through a “window” in the animals’ heads. This method allows the team to manipulate precise neuron groups, hundreds of times per second, in an imitation of the brain’s natural response to stimulus. And this research…

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Scaleway launches updated cloud servers for $2.40 per month

French cloud hosting company Scaleway announced new servers for its cloud offering. While the company’s offering was already quite cheap, Scaleway is going one step further with prices starting at €1.99 per month (around $2.40 per month). For this price, you get an x86 server with 1 core, 1GB of RAM, 25GB of SSD, 100Mbit/s […]

Facebook hired eHarmony’s chief scientist for its new dating feature

One of the bigger pieces of product news at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week was the announcement that Facebook will soon turn on a new dating feature. And it turns out that it quietly made significant hire to help build it. Dr Steve Carter, a data scientist who helped design and build the psychometric and […]

Freeda raises $10 million for its new media brand for women

Italian startup Freeda Media is raising a $10 million Series A round led by Alven Capital. U-Start and business angels are also participating in the round. Freeda Media runs the popular Freeda Facebook page. With nearly 1.4 million likes, the page has an impressive reach. 24 million unique users see Freeda content every month in […]

Sonos will announce an Alexa-powered home theater speaker on June 6

It feels like it wasn’t so long ago when Sonos announced the excellent Playbase, but the company already has a new home theater speaker on the way. Sonos today sent out press invites to an event on June 6, with a GIF that suggests the company wants to solve the perennial problem of having too many remotes. Recent rumors give us a solid idea of what to expect, and it’s probably not a universal remote. An FCC filing points to a speaker – codenamed ‘S14’ – with an HDMI port, a first for the company. While previous models used optical…

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NASA’s InSight Mars lander will gaze (and drill) into the depths of the Red Planet

NASA's latest mission to Mars, InSight, is set to launch early Saturday morning in pursuit of a number of historic firsts in space travel and planetology. The lander's instruments will probe the surface of the planet and monitor its seismic activity with unprecedented precision, while a pair of diminutive CubeSats riding shotgun will test the viability of tiny spacecraft for interplanetary travel.

Chrome on desktop now mutes annoying autoplays by learning from your behavior

There’s little that’s more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most part, those solutions relied on the user explicitly taking action. Now, following the launch […]

Twitter is moving a portion of its infrastructure to Google Cloud

Twitter today announced a new collaboration with Google that will see it moving a portion of infrastructure to Google’s Cloud Platform. The move is another high-profile win for Google in the cloud computing market, following its recent deal with Fitbit. Specifically, Twitter says it’s moving its cold data storage and its flexible compute Hadoop clusters – […]

Applications still open for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF ’18

Could your startup use $100,000? Then drop whatever you’re doing and apply to compete in Startup Battlefield while you still can. Applications are still open to qualifying companies — meaning you haven’t yet launched to the public and have received little to no press coverage. Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September […]

Amazon halts Seattle expansion over city tax proposal

Even as Amazon continues to grow at a staggering rate, it is pumping the brakes on its long-planned hometown expansion. The retail giant threw down the gauntlet this week when it announced that it would stop construction on a new building because of a proposed city tax. The new law is designed to address Seattle’s […]

Twitter is researching online abuse, but will it solve anything?

Twitter has been struggling with an online abuse problem for years. With more than 330 million monthly active users, the platform is still one of the most popular apps in the world, but its growth rate in the past 3 years has paled in comparison to its growth rate in its first few years of operation. Its contemporaries, from Facebook to Snapchat, are faring far better by comparison. Part of the problem here is online abuse, which all social media platforms must contend with, though Twitter seems to have a bigger problem with it than its contemporaries. Now, Twitter is…

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FTC puts the screws to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo over warranty language

The FTC have sent cease and desist letters to the three biggest video game console manufacturers, warning them their statements about warranty voiding may be in violation of the law. The details: The FTC sent out the notices earlier this year to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. The documents are now available thanks to Motherboard. In the letters, the FTC gives the companies 30 days to review their warranties. The warning “warranty void if…” is so ubiquitous on video game consoles as to be mundane, but according to the FTC, it could actually be illegal. According to a press release from the…

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The incredible search for a 180 year-old robot’s clarinet

A 180 year-old robot called “The Android Clarinettist,” is scheduled to participate in a museum exhibit called “Robots Love Music” in the Netherlands later this year. Unfortunately, nobody can find its instrument. The details: Built in 1838, the ‘self-playing’ robot was created to entertain people. For the time, it was an incredibly advanced automaton – it could play the clarinet and finish its performance with a bow to the audience. The robot was traveling the world with its creator by 1839. Sometime around 1855 it ended up in the US on loan. It’s known to have survived the Barnum Museum…

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