Year: 2018

 Super Bowl Sunday. The day we switch from being annoyed by commercials to being annoyed by all the stuff between the commercials. Football? Bah! We’re here for talking babies and beer frogs. Looking to tap into this, TiVo is flipping its tagging system upside down for a feature they’re calling “GameSkip” — behind the scenes, they’ll be marking the football… Read More

 Here’s a pretty good way to help spark sales in the post-holiday doldrums of early February. This week, Microsoft rolled a handful of new configurations that drop the entry level pricing on a few of its Surface products, in an effort to help drum up some sales during a particularly  slow time of year. The updates were spotted by Windows Central — after all, Microsoft’s… Read More

 Ever since Eraser, everyone wants a railgun. Turns out China is no exception. Some photos posted by Dafeng Cao, a Twitter user who keeps close tabs on Chinese military developments, show a ship-mounted gun that could very well be the country’s very own homegrown electromagnetically propelled mass driver. Read More

 Thirty-nine million Americans now own a smart speaker device, but the voice app ecosystem is still developing. While Alexa today has over 25,000 skills available, a number of companies haven’t yet built a skill for the platform, or offer only a very basic skill that doesn’t work that well. That’s where the startup Storyline comes in. The company is offering an easy to use… Read More

 Remember the iced tea company that changed its name to Long Blockchain and immediately shot up by 500 percent on the stock market? Well, it turns out it may not be getting into the blockchain after all. The company has decided to backoff from its pledge to buy 1,000 bitcoin mining machines — just six weeks after it said it would be doing so. Of course, six weeks ago bitcoin was worth a… Read More

 Die With Me is a (paid) app that can only be used for chatting when your phone (and your interlocutors’ phones) are at 5% or less battery left… Read More

 This morning, Dell confirmed previously published reports in an SEC filing, that it is considering various options to possibly reorganize itself. Reports emerged last week suggesting the Dell board was planning a meeting to discuss options for dealing with the enormous debt it took on when it acquired EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. The SEC filing confirmed earlier reports that it was… Read More

 YouTube CEO  Susan Wojcicki took to the service’s Creator Blog last night to issue some broad goals for the year forward. The plans largely revolve around increased transparency on the company’s part and tightening enforcement — a pretty clearly reaction to multiple creator controversies over the past year and change, including, most recently, the suicide video posted by… Read More

 When is a bike light not a bike light? When it turns itself off automatically and can signal that you’re braking even before you stop. The Lucnt SRL1 is just that kind of light. Created by a pair of SF-area brothers, the light is hand-made and is rechargeable via USB. It connects to your bike with powerful magnets and can change from blinking to solid simply by flipping the position of… Read More

 A group of students from the Warsaw University of Technology and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow built an indoor location system for disabled students. They’re rolling out the app, created during a local Campus App Challenge/hackathon, at the Warsaw University of Technology. The creators, Łukasz Ławniczak, Jakub Kmiotek, Tomasz Urbaszek, Miron Marczuk, and Szymon Stankiewicz, used… Read More