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Valve CEO Gabe Newell Says Linux Is The Future Of Gaming, Hints At SteamBox Announcement
Sep 17, 12:07AM
In his keynote today at Linuxcon, Valve CEO and Founder Gabe Newell said Linux is the future of gaming and hinted about the announcement next week of a gaming box built on the open-source operating environment. As proof of Linux bright future Newell pointed to Steam, the company's online platform. Since it launched last Spring, developers have created 198 games on the platform.Facebook And Internet.org Detail "1000X" Technologies They Hope Will Bring Earth Online
Sep 16, 10:16PM
Air Traffic Control, HipHop, WebP, and Supplemental Downlink are some of the futuristic technologies that will bring the Internet to the five billion people still disconnected. A 70-page whitepaper released today by Internet.org partners Facebook, Qualcomm, and Ericsson details how spectrum must change to accommodate 1000X more web traffic, and Facebook Home's role as a data efficiency experiment.Reddit Bans Search For Navy Yard Gunman
Sep 16, 10:16PM
Reddit has kept its promise to ban amateur manhunts. The site has banned a community forum, known as a subreddit, which attempted to crowdsource the search for the gunman who opened fire at the Washington Naval Yard on Monday (the gunman has recently been identified as Aaron Alexis).Secure Cellphone Maker GSMK Talks Cryptography In A Post-Snowden World
Sep 16, 9:50PM
In a world where your every move is tracked, what would you pay for a secure cellphone? Dr. Björn Rupp is willing to bet it's about $3,500. His company, GSMK Cryptophone builds cellphones that are secure from the ground up. Running a home-brew version of Android, they allow for completely secure, end-to-end communication with most, if not all, of the smartphone features the security-conscious crave. The trick? Both parties in the conversation have to have their own Cryptophones, making them like a sort of James Bondian walkie-talkie.Splunk Acquires BugSense, A Platform For Analyzing Mobile Data
Sep 16, 9:20PM
Splunk has acquired BugSense, a mobile analytics platform used by developers to improve app performance and improve quality. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close during Splunk's 2014 fiscal third quarter which ends in October.iStoryTime Debuts A "Netflix For Ebooks" For Kids
Sep 16, 8:27PM
If a startup called Oyster is the Netflix for e-books, then iStoryTime is the children's alternative. One of the oldest players in the kids' interactive e-books app market is zuuka (aka iStoryTime), a company founded in 2009 and backed by $2 million in Series A funding. The company has been steadily growing its collection of digital, interactive e-books and apps, now reaching some 200 different applications across all the major mobile app stores and digital book marketplaces. Recently, it made a move to consolidate access to its collection of stories in a flagship application where parents can buy books a la carte, or, as of this month's version 2.0 update, choose to engage with advertisers to earn book credits, or even subscribe to the entire collection.The Uber App Now Lets You Tell Friends When You'll Get There With A Live ETA Map
Sep 16, 7:39PM
The Uber app for iOS and, presumably, Android is today getting a couple of new features centered around estimated times of arrival. The app now lets you share your ETA with contacts from the app, letting them know exactly when you’ll arrive. The app also lets you text a live map of your trip to your contacts, letting them check in on you to see where you are in relation to your destination. Another new option lets you plug in your destination to get an estimate of how long it will take Uber to get you where you need to go. The convenience factors here are nice, for sure, but there are some interesting things to consider about the data being gathered and how it might be used. One intriguing possibility here is that if Uber has no doubt been gathering data on ETAs and such from one location to another in a city. Obviously, the company knows exactly when a trip begins and ends. Doing so may be able to help it generate a strong map of inner-city traffic, data that would parallel that which is collected by Waze, the mapping company recently purchased for a bundle by Google. This update is the first time that Uber is making an effort to expose that data to users directly by telling them how long it will take them to get to a location and sharing that data out to others. That data could also be used to create overall maps of how city traffic and cab traffic ebb and flow. If you factor in thousands of rides a month over a year, that’s a lot of data with a very unique collection vector. The flow of traffic from point-to-point in urban centers follows a completely different pattern than those of cars coming from outside the city or even those going from one location to another. This isn’t “garage to parking spot” traffic, in other words; this is “place to place.” In fact, Uber already does do some other things with this data, including mapping a detailed network of routes and neighborhoods in cities including San Francisco. Perhaps that’s why they have a professor of Neuroscience on staff. Anyhow, the app updates are rolling out today, but the data part of it is more interesting. We’ll have to stay tuned to see how Uber or its partners use the information down the road. And, ofWith New File Preview And Mobile Experiences, Box Highlights Recent Acquisitions
Sep 16, 7:08PM
Box showed off new versions of its file preview feature and iOS apps at its BoxWorks conference this morning. In doing so, it was also highlighting what recent acquisitions have brought to the company. The new preview, for example, was built on HTML5 document viewing technology from Crocodoc, which Box acquired earlier this year, and it was demonstrated by Crocodoc's Ryan Damico, who is now Box's director of platform.Keen On… The NSA: Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Our Secrets?
Sep 16, 7:00PM
Best-selling author James Bamford is one of the world's leading authorities on the NSA. At Disrupt SF 2013, he spoke on a great panel about online security and afterwards I had the good fortune to interview him.SlideIdea Adds Interactivity, Polls & Feedback To Boring Presentations
Sep 16, 6:32PM
A small, Shanghai-based startup called SlideIdea made its official debut at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Alley this past week, with a new take on presentation tools built for iPad first. Though this space is rife with competitors, including not only Apple's own Keynote app, as well as Prezi, Haiku Deck, Flowboard, and others, what makes SlideIdea interesting is its "smart widget" platform, which lets users add interactive elements to presentations in order to better engage and solicit feedback from the audience.Box Will Add Metadata To Give More Context To Cloud Documents
Sep 16, 6:25PM
Box announced on-stage at its BoxWorks conference that it will be making the documents stored in its cloud storage system smarter, thanks to upcoming support for metadata. At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal (at least if you're like me and find the word "metadata" to be inherently off-putting) but Chris Yeh, the company's senior vice president of product and platform, said this is actually "the most important change" to the Box platform in quite some time. That's because Box documents can now include more context than just a file name and date stamp. It will also allow companies and products using Box documents to create workflows around that metadata.Ginger Software Adds Sentence Rephraser To Android Proofreading Keyboard To Reword Your Written English
Sep 16, 5:55PM
If you're already worried that journalists are writing for robots, it's time to press the panic button: here's an algorithm that can apparently rewrite journalists. Israeli natural language processing (NLP) technology startup Ginger Software, which makes a cross-app proofreading keyboard for Android, has added a new feature to its software that rewords entire sentences.Hands-On With The botObjects ProDesk3D
Sep 16, 5:47PM
After months of speculation and quite a bit of skepticism, we're pleased to report that the ProDesk3D is real, it works, and it really does print in color. How, exactly, is still under question - we weren't given direct access to the innards of the machine - but we saw it working with our own eyes.Google Analytics To End Support For IE8 By Year's End
Sep 16, 5:30PM
Internet Explorer 8, which launched in 2009, isn't exactly a modern browser by any standards and it's slowly turning into the new Internet Explorer 6. Google stopped supporting Google Apps on IE8 last year, and today, the company announced that Google Analytics will also stop supporting it by the end of the year.Luma For iPad Is A Personalized TV Guide For Streaming Video…With A Few New Tricks
Sep 16, 4:32PM
Movie and TV recommendations app Luma.tv has been working to solve the "what to watch" problem for years. The company first launched as Inveni.com, a free web service backed by nearly $2 million in founder and angel funding, which helped users create their own "taste profiles" in order to serve up streaming video recommendations. Now the same technology that Inveni once used forms the basis for Luma, a newly launched iPad app that connects users to their favorite shows on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Max Go, iTunes, Crackle, and other TV channels.Wearable Baby Monitor Developer Sproutling Raises $2.6M From First Round And Others To Raise Parenting IQ
Sep 16, 4:15PM
Wearables aren't just for adults anymore. There's a new crop of startups hoping to give parents peace of mind and deliver more insights about young children and their sleeping patterns through wearable devices for babies. Sproutling, a new startup coming out of stealth today, is hoping to raise parenting IQs through a new wearable baby monitor that not only answers the question: "Is my baby okay?" but also leverages the multitude of sensor data to deliver insights about babies' sleep patterns and more.Box Gets A Little More Palatable With Some Added Encryption From CipherCloud
Sep 16, 4:00PM
Box appears on the verge of becoming a publicly traded company. It may not happen until next year but the file storage and collaboration company has as much momentum as any enterprise startup looking to trade on the public exchanges. But the company still needs to prove to the markets that its technology is secure. That’s why the integration with companies like CipherCloud will get a lot of attention this week from Box at its annual conference, BoxWorks. CipherCloud secures data and applications for the cloud. Its platform works across multiple cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Office 365 and Salesforce. Today the company is bolstering its service with AES 256-bit encryption to its existing Box offering. With the new capability, encryption keys are retained by the customer and accessed and decrypted by authorized users on personal computers or mobile devices. The CipherCloud service connects to Box in the background through Box Event APIs. When new files are uploaded, CipherCloud automatically scans content to enforce corporate policies and block file-borne malware. It also performs encryption driven by policy at user and content levels. CipherCloud is typically deployed within a corporate network or private cloud. The solution is deployed as software that can be run on physical servers, virtual servers, or on private cloud instances. The added complexity needed to secure files changes the fluidity of services like Box by creating a layer that has to be navigated when using the service. Customers need the security, as it is not inherently baked in to the degree that customers demand but with it goes some usability. It’s a challenge that Box and all of its competitors face, be it Dropbox, Google Drive or the Microsoft security Office 365.Bump Mobile Contact Sharing App Acquired By Google, Will Stay Alive For Now
Sep 16, 4:00PM
After raising nearly $20 million and becoming one of the most downloaded mobile apps but failing to find real revenue, Bump Technologies has been acquired by Google. Its namesake app Bump lets you physically tap phones together to share contact info and more, and it will stay open for download. Congratulations might not be the right word, but Bump could have a bright future at the Googleplex.PushPage Raises $1.7 Million For Its Q&A-Style Personal Homepage Platform
Sep 16, 2:11PM
Cambridge-based PushPage is launching its personal homepage and Q&A platform today, backed by $1.7 million in seed funding. The product, live now on both web and mobile, offers users an online presence where they can publicize their likes and interests through a series of interview-like questions PushPage provides, as opposed to the sorts of community-based questions you would see over on a site like Ask.fm, for example.OLSET Matches Business Travelers With The Right Hotel In Less Than 10 Seconds
Sep 16, 2:00PM
A new travel platform called OLSET is launching its public beta to streamline the hotel booking process, with an algorithm for matching user preferences to reviews from TripAdvisor. Instead of providing a long list of potential hotels in the area, OLSET finds your three best matches based on how you prioritize location, price, ratings and other amenities. OLSET was created specifically for the busy business traveler who doesn’t have time to scour the web for the right hotel. Co-founder Gadi Bashvitz tells me about 78 percent of travelers drop off after starting a hotel search online. OLSET speeds up the process by making recommendations based on your specific profile. Unlike other hotel booking sites, OLSET really digs into what users are looking for, and provides a percentage match with a couple different options. To use OLSET, users first create a profile and outline what they are looking for in a hotel: minimum star rating, minimum user rating, price and max distance from their meeting location. Users can also list a preferred hotel chain. And that’s just the beginning. Then come the amenities, such as a fitness center, Wi-Fi, continental breakfast and more. Each of these can be ranked from unimportant to mandatory. Throw in travel options, bed and room size, a couple more options and you’ve got a complete OLSET profile. You can also import your travel profile from sites like Expedia or Orbitz in order to consider past hotels you’ve stayed in. You can then either book from the site by giving a location and date, or through meeting invites on a calendar. OLSET works with Outlook, Google Calendar, iPhone, iPad and Android. The service is also partnering with companies GetGoing and Any.do, so you can book a hotel straight from other apps. After that, the platform gives three of the best vetted options and takes you through exactly why they match your preferences. According to Bashvitz, OLSET has processed about 1 million TripAdvisor reviews across 120,000 hotels, with has turned out about 4 million sentiments. The platform then takes these sentiments into account when matching users with potential hotels. For example, if a traveler marks “pool” as a mandatory feature, OLSET will include not only whether the hotel has a pool, but also whether the sentiments were good or bad overall, which will result in a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The service sends a review to fill out once its user arrivesIf at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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