Latest Technology News & Updates

Everyone has noticed Salesforce.com’s new website, unveiled at its Dreamforce event last week, and logo, which is in line with the new flat and clear-cut design trends popularized by Apple and Windows. Beyond aesthetics, the new layout crystallizes the efforts of the company to communicate that, outside of its core CRM and B2B business, it has cemented its growth into customer analytics, digital marketing and social media. Contrasting with its previous CRM-focused communication, Salesforce is now talking about “connecting with customers in a whole new way.” Salesforce is not CRM anymore but a “customer success platform.” Recognizing the value of the consumer market, Salesforce is not B2B anymore and wants to help its users talk to all customers one on one. These changes make it evident that Salesforce wants to morph itself into a marketing solutions powerhouse and grow its client base beyond the stronghold that it has with a significant portion of the world’s corporate sales tea...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing AT&T for having “misled” millions of customers who purchase “unlimited” data plans for their phones, only to have the carrier later drastically reduce the amount of information they could access. According to the FTC’s complaint, AT&T throttled millions of customers tens of millions of times, sometimes after the consumer had used a mere 2 gigabytes of data in a payment period. The throttling could reach as high as 80 or 90 percent, in terms of speed reduction. In short, AT&T sold unlimited plans, and then whacked the living crap out of them. AT&T no longer sells unlimited data plans. Users were grandfathered in from the time when the mobile carrier did in fact sell such plans. Even though the plans are no longer generally available, the company is responsible for its contractual promises. The FTC’s Chairwoman Edith Ramirez was blunt: “AT&T promised its customers ‘unlimited’ data, and in many instances, it has fail...

Amazon’s connected TV plans don’t end with the Fire TV, an Apple TV-like device it launched last year – the company announced the Fire TV Stick today, a $39 dongle that resembles the Chromecast, which is only $19 for the next two days if you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber or if you sign up as a new one. Before the Fire TV launched, we received credible reports that Amazon was working on a device with a dongle form-factor, and this appears to confirm Amazon’s development team was working on more than one type of approach to a connected TV strategy. The press material for the launch of the Fire TV Stick actually calls out the Chromecast by name, noting that Amazon’s hardware actually has two times the memory of Google’s streaming stick, along with a dual-core processor, MIMO Wi-Fi for better connectivity and a dedicated hardware remote. It has 1 GB of RAM on board, 8 GB of local storage and Amazon’s ASAP streaming tech, to launch streaming videos without the buffer delay you’...

Arist wants to turn your kitchen into a cafe by brewing almost any coffee drink. Arist grinds beans and pour shots at the right time, and its smartphone app can remember your favorite drink recipes, find new ones, and finetune things like water temperature and syrup quantity. Arist can even remember certain coffee cups with the aid of an NFC sticker. The coffeemaker has already raised more than $200,000 on Kickstarter, surpassing its $120,000 goal, and is scheduled to ship in August 2015. Funds raised will be used to finalize and manufacture hardware, further develop Arist’s mobile apps and software cloud platform, and to apply for licensing and patents. The Arist team tells TechCrunch it is confident that it will meet its shipment date goal because they have received support from the Hong Kong government and are currently being mentored by the government-run Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. Furthermore, Arist’s engineering team is located in Hong Kong, near suppliers and ...

This evening at a Wall Street Journal technology conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that in its first 72 hours, Apple Pay activated 1 million cards. That figure indicates that Apple Pay is picking up traction outside of the technology, early-adopter set. Apple Pay competes with rival offerings from Google, among others, alongside traditional payment methods. Paying for goods with your smartphone, still nascent in the Western market, could grow quickly: Given smartphone penetration in the United States and other developed nations where this sort of transaction system remains new, Apple has the potential to quickly scale its new product. The possible revenue for Apple is not trivial. The company picks up 0.15 percent of transactions, or 15 cents per $100 dollars in payments. That isn’t much on a per-transaction basis, but it could quickly add up for the company worth more than $600 billion. If its smartphone userbase adopts its Pay technology, the product could bring in fresh t...

MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange), the coalition of retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, Gap and others, who are backing a mobile payments solution CurrentC meant to rival newcomer Apple Pay, has been hacked. The data breach involves the theft of email addresses, but the CurrentC mobile application was not affected, the company confirms to TechCrunch. Within the last 36 hours, MCX says it learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the email addresses of some of its CurrentC pilot program participants and other individuals who had expressed interest in the app. The group has now notified its merchant partners about the incident and is communicating directly with those individuals whose email addresses were involved, a company spokesperson tells us. At this time, it appears that only the emails of these early mobile app testers have been stolen, which is not as significant a data breach as having payment data or other personal information taken, like home addresses or pho...

Ever since Apple announced the Apple Watch, it’s been easy to let the imagination wander a bit. It’s the first product out of Apple in a long time, perhaps since the iPhone, that feels truly exciting and new. Much of that is thanks to the user interface, which has a very distinct look from the UIs of the iPhone, iPad or even Macs. YouTuber Lucas Menge has also been inspired to exercise his imagination, building a prototype of the Apple Watch UI as it would appear on an iPhone. Rather than having horizontal pages of static, equally spaced icons, the prototype shows an infinite, multidimensional scroll throughout apps, with automatic centering and the ability to zoom in and out. Whether or not it’s more practical than static drawers and pages is yet to be determined. However, Lucas Menge says that an article on 9to5mac, written by Michael Steeber, arguing why the Apple Watch interface actually makes more sense for the multi-sized displays of the iPhone and iPad, was the inspiratio...

The Federal Trade Commission has sued AT&T for promising unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttling their speeds by as much as 90 percent, the FTC announced Tuesday. All major carriers throttle certain customers during times and places of congestion, as we've reported previously. AT&T seems to have earned the FTC's wrath by throttling customers regardless of whether they were trying to use their phones in congested areas, however. As we've also written, AT&T was throttling unlimited subscribers regardless of network conditions until July, when it changed its policy. Throttling was enforced once users hit 3GB or 5GB of data per month. The FTC's lawsuit in US District Court in San Francisco alleges that AT&T hit unlimited data customers with an "unfair mobile data throttling program" and that AT&T committed a "deceptive failure to disclose [the] mobile data throttling program." AT&T denied the allegations, ...

Because she is co-creator of one of the most popular apps of 2014. Because she is poised to make $200 million in cold hard cash from a mobile app this year. Because at $700K a day in earnings just from the app, she is still more successful than most startup founders, at least from a revenue standpoint. Yesterday, Kim Kardashian was interviewed onstage at the Re/Code conference, and aside from professing her love for BlackBerry, she did not reveal much about her game “Kim Kardashian Hollywood,” which is why we want to hear from her. We covered her talk, because we’ve covered the game in the past. And the portal to hell opened up in our comments section. Like most commenting systems, Facebook comments suck: Either you get zero comments on a story because no startup employee wants to put their real name on articles about competitors, etc., or if a post does blow up you get this poetry from Jack Carmody, “Correctional Officer at California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation...

Vintage gaming specialists GOG have outdone themselves this time, with the launch of LucasArts classics including the Star Wars X-Wing and Tie Fighter games. These dog-fighting ‘simulators’ (in so far as it’s actually possible to simulate an experience that can’t be had in real life) occupied so much of my youth that they probably legally qualify as my parents, or at least would have a solid claim on guardianship in court, if it came to that. The graphics are the same as they’ve always been, this ain’t no fancy HD remake, but that’s all part of the charm. The magic is that they require no special modification or adjustment to run on our modern computers, which would typically be unable to process the primitive software that made up these once state-of-the-art beauties. All the LucasArts games, which also include Knights of the Old Republic, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam & Max Hit The Road, are DRM-free. They only appear on the p...

In an interesting turn of events, the WSJ is reporting that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are outselling the Galaxy Note 4 in Korea, a bit of news that should give Samsung pause. Pre-orders for the new phones hit 100,000 on the first day of pre-orders compared to 30,000 units for the Galaxy Note 4. Analyst Lee Seung-woo, an analyst with IBK Securities said that he expected the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to outsell the Galaxy S5 and Note 4 by a factor of five. The Note 4 is Samsung’s latest large phablet and I found it quite pleasant to use. Sadly it was plagued by a minor manufacturing issue in Korea that could have turned off the average consumer. We will know more as the iPhone begins rolling out around the world but it is interesting see Cupertino beat Samsung in Seoul, at least at this early date.

Well-known Tweetstormer and investor Marc Andreessen has produced a list of his favorite people to follow on Twitter. He was prompted to do so by an article in The Information called “Silicon Valley’s Frontman Problem” by Jessica Lessin, who questioned if the industry leaders most often quoted by the media (she cited Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel) really “represent the views of the broader Silicon Valley community.” “The more media coverage Silicon Valley gets, the more important it is that other voices get heard,” Lessin wrote. (In addition to Lessin’s thought piece, New York magazine also just published an interview with Andreessen, in which he talked about the cultural changes in Silicon Valley since he arrived in 1994 and diversity in the tech industry, among other topics.) His list “only a highly abridged selection,” Andreessen (@pmarca) tweeted, but a helpful one because his public list of tech industry-related accounts has over 600 members. Since Andreessen’s ...

Starting November 2nd, the Xbox One’s starting price will be $350. That’s $50 off the current level. Thanks, PlayStation! The $50 discount is seemingly applicable to all the system-plus-game bundles. The Kinect-free Assassin’s Creed or Sunset Overdrive bundle will cost $350, with the Call of Duty: Advance Warfare running $450. Microsoft says the lower prices will be available until January 3rd, but chances are, if enough units are sold, the price will remain in place throughout 2015. Since its launch, the Xbox One has played second fiddle to the PlayStation 4 which has outsold Microsoft’s option since its launch. Microsoft clearly needed to better position its gaming system to have a chance against Sony this holiday season. This price cut puts the Xbox One MSRP under the PlayStation 4’s for the first time. The Xbox One launched at $499 where the Playstation 4 hit stores at $399. Later, Microsoft offered a bundle sans a Kinect controller for $399, matching the PlayStation 4’s...

It's been nearly one year since Rockstar Consortium, a patent holding company owned in part by Microsoft and Apple, launched a major patent assault against Google. Now, the issue of where the case will be heard has finally been resolved—in Google's favor. Google took the case to the nation's top patent court to get it out of East Texas and back to its home state, California. The matter of venue isn't a mere sideline skirmish. East Texas courts are generally considered tough on patent defendants, with few cases resolving on summary judgment, stringent discovery rules, and last-minute scheduling decisions. Google's Texas case was scheduled to be heard in front of US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who hears far more patent cases than any other district court judge in the nation. Rockstar v. Google: A brief history Nortel, a Canadian telecom company, went bankrupt in 2009. Two years later, the company's patents were auctioned off. Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Eri...

Apple Pay is now available for anyone to use, provided they’ve got all the prerequisites, both for physical stores and for online transactions. But you can’t just walk up to your local brick-and-mortar store and wave your iPhone and walk out with whatever you want – that would be theft. Instead, you’ll need the following to be in place to have a happy Apple Pay experience. Hardware: iPhone 6 or 6 Plus for retail; iPad Air 2 or mini 3, or iPhone 6 or 6 Plus for in-app transactions Software: iOS 8.1 (which just because available earlier today) Touch ID set up on your device with at least one stored fingerprint A credit or debit card from one of Apple’s launch payment partners An iCloud account After you’ve got all that in place, you can opt to either use the cards you’ve already got on file in iTunes to pay, or add a new one. Adding a new one is as easy as snapping a pic of your plastic, and then manually entering the security code around back. You can also manually enter all the...

The past year has been an eventful one for Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi. The company’s devices are now sold in seven countries in Asia, that’s a big step up from Xiaomi’s inception — when it retailed in China only — and, with big plans to be global, the company is finally migrating international user data to servers outside of China, as International VP Hugo Barra revealed today. This development is important for Xiaomi customers and future buyers of its phones for a couple of reasons. (While the migration will affect international users, those in China will continue to use local servers in the country.) Firstly, hosting data outside of Chinese services will quicken Xiaomi’s services, which include its iMessage-like MIUI Cloud Messaging service and other features in its company’s MIUI rom, which is basically its own, modified version of Android. “With this migration, we are expecting to cut network request latency for users in India by up to 350ms, and users in Malaysia to experi...

The situation was already bad when I first moved to San Francisco with my Jeep Cherokee three years ago. The hills were enough with the clutch, but one too many times spent looking for parking for more than an hour in my own neighborhood and my once useful Utah snow vehicle was sold to a nice old man in the East Bay. Circling round and round the block actually accounts for up to 30% of traffic congestion in SF. And then of course there are the parking tickets and the street sweeping. It’s nearly impossible to avoid getting a ticket. There’s even an app that specializes in fighting your parking ticket battles for you – that’s how bad it is! Luxe co-founders Curtis Lee, Craig Martin and Greg Zanghi are attempting to solve our parking hell with the launch of an on-demand iOS app that summons your own, personal valet wherever you happen to be within San Francisco city limits. It’s not just something that affects San Francisco, though it seems so much more painful here than other ci...

On Wednesday, Google revealed "Inbox," a Web- and app-based e-mail platform that strives to integrate your mailbox with your calendar and to-do list. "Inbox is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it’s not Gmail: it’s a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters," Android SVP Sundar Pichai wrote at Google's official blog. The Inbox interface screams "Material" redesign, and its sidebar comes with a much wider range of sub-categories, dubbed "bundles," to divide your mail between. There are so many, in fact, that the typical Hangout list in Gmail has been forced to the right side of the Web app. The mobile app—only shown today as an Android option, natch—appears to put a stress around such bundling by default, as opposed to presenting e-mails in a default time orientation. Inbox will automatically pick through message content to find dates and times to build tasks, or if a user makes the...

Ello, the notably stripped-down, ad-free social network, announced Thursday that it has taken $5.5 million in venture capital and re-incorporated as a “Public Benefit Corporation.” The company’s founders and investors also published a one-page document in which they declared: Ello must never make money from selling ads Ello must never make money from selling user data In the event that Ello is ever sold, the new owners would also have to comply by these terms So how is Ello going to make money? Even its investors don't know. “I’m confident the team will develop a profitable business model that supports our investment,” wrote Seth Levine, an investor with the Foundry Group in Colorado, in a Thursday blog post. Another investor, David Cohen, wrote on Ello last month, “We’ve always been willing to invest in people with great ideas who put their users first and are looking to make the world a better place.” We attempted to contact the investors via Twitter but have not ye...

Apple has pushed its TestFlight Beta testing service live for everyone, the company revealed on its developer news portal today. Registered developers can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers to try out their iOS apps, using emailed invitations sent via the iTunes Connect portal. TestFlight, the beta testing service Apple acquired sometime within the last year, allows developers to build teams to try out software before it launches, and report bugs in order to prepare apps for a public launch. TestFlight had still been usable by devs between Apple’s acquisition of the service and now, but this marks the completion of Apple’s transition of the service to a built-in part of its developer tools. Now, TestFlight invites are distributed via iTunes Connect, as mentioned, and a dedicated TestFlight app provides the central resource for testers in terms of providing feedback and getting new builds as they’re released by developers, instead of the web portal TestFlight used pre-acquisition. ...

Want to look more attractive on video? Or just different? Earlier this year, a company called Looksery popped up on Kickstarter to raise crowdfunding for a new kind of mobile video chat application that allows users to look more attractive on video using special effects that can remove blemishes, let you change your eye color, slim your face, and more. The app, which is live as of today on the iTunes App Store, also lets you transform your face into an avatar for a bit of fun, too. While there are several tools that allow you to add avatars on top of your face when chatting over webcams on the desktop, there are fewer that work on mobile. Meanwhile, those that do – like Tango’s – are focused mainly on being silly, not on truly modifying your image in a believable way. Of course, Looksery’s app lets you have fun, too – you can chat as a panda, a gecko, a grumpy cat, a zombie, a monster or even a flaming skull. (The kids might enjoy that one.) But for older users, Looksery’s bigger...

Back in August, Sony started teasing a new feature it calls “Share Play.” Though we’re still waiting to see just how well it works, the idea itself is wonderful: once enabled, you can let your friends play your games with you (or by themselves, even) from across the vast Interwebs without them actually owning a copy of the game. Up until now, Sony was pretty vague about when this feature would launch — noting only that it was coming “this fall.” Thanks to a quiet announcement on Twitter, however, we’ve now got a date: October 28th. As the tweet above mentions, an update that Sony expects to ship on October 28 will include Share Play, along with the ability to play music (MP3, MP4, M4A, and, for some crazy reason, 3GP) off of a USB drive while playing a game. As for the “and more” that leaves that tweet oh so open ended, the update also brings the long-awaited YouTube app, a better voice command system, and the ability to tweak the background color of your PS4’s home screen. ...