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Making Sense Of The Internet Of Things
Editor’s note: Matt Turck is a managing director of FirstMark Capital. Follow him on Twitter @mattturck. The emerging Internet of Things — essentially, the world of physical devices connected to the network/Internet, from your Fitbit or Nest to industrial machines — is experiencing a burst of activity and creativity that is getting entrepreneurs, VCs and the press equally excited. The space looks like a boisterous hodgepodge of smart hobbyists, new startups and large corporatio... |
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CrunchWeek: Yahoo’s $1.1B Tumblr Purchase, Lyft’s Big Raise, And Microsoft’s Xbox One
It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days. Ryan Lawler, Greg Kumparak, and I chatted about Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr (and the reports that the company is eyeing a purchase of Hulu); Lyft’s $60 million raise from Andreessen Horowitz and the big reveal of Microsoft’s next generation gaming console, the Xbox 1. Tune in above for more! |
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Misfit Wearables Drops Android Support For Its Shine Activity Tracker Ahead Of Summer Launch
Heads up, Android fans. If you took the plunge and backed the rather sleek Shine wearable activity tracker from Misfit Wearables, you may want to get your money back. According to a recent update posted to the project’s Indiegogo listing, the Founders Fund-backed company has decided to drop Android support from the final version in a bid to better focus on polishing the experience for iOS users. Seriously, that’s the only reason they gave, which is likely little consolation to the ba... |
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Will The Xbox One Rule The Living Room? Price Will Determine The Size Of Its Kingdom
The Xbox One is more or less a known quantity now, but its price has yet to be revealed by Microsoft. Price and ship date are always the biggest concerns when new gadgets or hardware hits the market, but in the case of the Xbox One, it’s likely to help determine whether the “home entertainment system,” as Microsoft is characterizing it, becomes the category-busting, revolutionary, multipurpose living room command center it’s being billed as, or ends up just another consol... |
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What Games Are: Xbox One Is Microsoft’s Spruce Goose
Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here. During the 1940s Howard Hughes spent millions developing and building a plane with the largest wingspan in history and a huge carrying capacity. The Spruce Goose was meant to solve a problem of moving troops and material for the second world war effort, but by the time it was tested, the war was already over a... |
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Gillmor Gang: Parlor Games & Metaphones
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — neatly sidestepped the Yahoo Tumblr acquisition and segued into the wonderful world of messaging. As Facebook Home settles into a cot at the homeless shelter, Google is revving up for an all-out assault on the service suite. Google Glass is just the tip of the iceberg; below the waterline, the search giant is sucking image, location, traffic, and advertising data in realtime. It may seem like the G... |
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Google Buzz, the social service that Google launched way back in 2010 and then killed in 2011, reminded former users that their data still lives in and will be moved over to your Google Drive accounts in July. That’s lovely. The email describes exactly what will happen with your data, which won’t count against your Drive storage limits, thankfully. If you don’t delete the data and let Google move your stuff to Drive, it says that the public Buzz posts you shared in the past ... |
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Although 3D printing technology has existed for some time, it’s only now beginning to cross over into mainstream awareness, thanks to increasingly affordable access to the printers themselves, as well as attention-grabbing headlines about 3D printed guns and life-saving medical applications. While less eye-catching, perhaps, the innovation is also powering a new class of creatives, who are using 3D printers to produce art instead. Their “handmade” goods, including jewelry, home... |
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Is The FBI Dumb, Evil, Or Just Incompetent?
Your government is worried. The world is “going dark.” Once upon a time, telephones were the only way to talk to someone far away, and the authorities could wiretap any phone they wanted. Nowadays, though, suspects might be communicating via Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype, Viber. And so, inevitably: “Today, if you’re a tech company that’s created a new and popular way to communicate, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI shows up with a court order t... |
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The First Six Months Developing For The Computer On My Face
Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, Co-Founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor. Follow him on Twitter @jonmarkgo. Being one of the first cyborgs in the world, I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences that have led to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology. At Glass Foundry SF, among the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, the New York Times and Hearst, was a rag-tag group of... |
