Latest Technology News & Updates

On Friday, the darkly comedic card game Cards Against Humanity posted an update to its social media and e-mail list followers, which fans assumed might tie into the company's usual holiday-related online promotions. Instead of unveiling a limited-edition holiday-themed set of cards, however, the game maker shut down its online store—with one very, very odd exception. "To help you experience the ultimate savings on Cards Against Humanity this Black Friday, we’ve removed the game from our store, making it impossible to purchase," the card maker's update read. After that, the company linked to its online store, where, for one day only, it's selling one thing: bullshit. Literally. Though the page link only showed a typical Cards Against Humanity-styled box, complete with Helvetica Bold font and a cartoon version of a poo drawn on the side, the purchase page assured shoppers that the box contained "literal feces, from an actual bull." The site advised s...

I’ve been writing about tech for nearly a decade now, and in that time, one thing has always seemed perpetually promising, and yet also ultimately unsatisfying: remote streaming consumer computing. I’m not talking about remotely connecting to your work PC to grab a couple of files, but actually using programs interchangeably with your own local apps, despite some being hosted and run entirely on a server in some data farm nearby. Inevitably, however, this idea has been met with the harsh truths of reality, which has led to situations like the original OnLive flameout, for instance. Remotely streaming software has huge advantages – it means users don’t have to worry too much about their operating system, hardware specifications, or even necessarily device form factor when they’re choosing software, and that could be very good news for the future of low-cost, modestly specced devices like Google’s Chromebooks. In the past, any of these solutions that I’ve tried have come with serio...

Hiring is going high tech thanks to a crop of new venture investments. Recruiting can be a nightmare for companies of all stages and sizes – it’s a time suck for current employees, often a shot in the dark in terms of candidate search and interview logistics, and if done haphazardly it can really screw up a company. It’s an issue that has spawned a new class of startups tackling a variety of recruiting obstacles. With over $400 million raised in 120 venture rounds this year, investors are finally directing their attention and cash toward one of the largest pain points for any company – hiring. As companies like Hired, Jibe and ZipRecruiter secured sizable rounds in the past few quarters, total capital committed this year has already surpassed 2013’s total of $275 million by a long shot. “I think what’s happening right now is the realization that bringing top talent is critical to the success of every company, and the competition for talent is fiercer than ever. So there’s a l...

Did you ever play Maniac Mansion? Of course you did. Because if you hadn’t, the geek police (a real thing) would have already taken away your geek card (also real.) Like pretty much anything Lucasfilm Games (RIP) released throughout the 80s and 90s, Maniac Mansion is just one of those games you have to play. Seriously, go bootleg it if you have to. Maniac Mansion creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are back with a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and the many such LucasArts games of yesteryear: Thimbleweed Park. The wonderfully clunky interface? The oh-so-pixely pixel art? It’s all there. As they put it: It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before. That’s literally all they would’ve had to say before I started throwing money at my screen, but they’ve shared some more details about the project: It’s a modern engine, but it looks oh-so-very SCUMM like. You’ll play one of f...

With 1.35 billion active monthly users, Facebook continues to be the world’s largest social network by some margin, but  when it comes to picking up new users, it appears to have reached a saturation point. Research out today from the Global Web Index notes that Tumblr’s active user base in the last six months grew by 120%, while Facebook’s grew by only 2%. And in overall member growth, Pinterest took the lead with 57% growth while Facebook’s member base grew by 6%. Instagram, LinkedIn,Twitter, YouTube and even Google+ all grew faster than Facebook. In mobile apps specifically, while Facebook is the largest app today, Snapchat — with an emphasis on teen and 20-something users — is the fastest growing of them all, up 56% this year. It is however followed closely by Facebook Messenger and Instagram — a sign of not just how Facebook’s mobile apps continue to represent the company’s growth drivers, but also how its push to drive more users to the standalone app by cutting out M...

Remember the last time you went to the same coffee shop or bar because the staff tends to play music you like and you don’t have to pick the next song? Prizm is a neat little pyramid add-on for your sound system to transform your living room into this coffee shop you like. The French startup is just beginning the last week of its Kickstarter campaign of its $129 smart music player for your home. If you want to use Prizm to play music, you just have to press the play button and that’s it. Prizm will stream music directly from Spotify, Deezer and SoundCloud based on your favorite genres and tracks. You don’t have to launch anything on your phone or computer. It’s like a physical Pandora-like service for your home. “The key advantage compared to existing solution is that Prizm is both instant and context-aware,” co-founder Pierre Gochgarian told me. “Our device automates what every music service tries to do with their playlists — ‘Wake Up’, ‘Dinner Party’, etc.” Behind the scene, P...

Image recognition has come a long way over the last few years and maybe more so than anybody else, Google has brought some of those advances to end users. To see how far we’ve come, just try searching through your own images on Google Photos, for example. But recognizing objects (and maybe basic scenes) is only a first step. In September, Google showed how its approach, using the currently popular deep learning methodology, could not just recognize images of single objects but also classify different objects in a single image (think different kinds of fruits in a fruit basket, for example). Once you can do that, you can also try to create a full natural language description of the image and that’s what Google is doing now. According to a new Google Research paper, the company has now developed a system that can teach itself how to describe a photo like the one below with a very high degree of accuracy. As Google’s researchers note, the typical approach to this problem would b...

Want to visit London, Paris, and Berlin, then blow off steam in Amsterdam? Expect a logistical nightmare trying to find the optimal route with the cheapest fights, trains, and hotels. Unless you use Vamo, a new multi-stop travel booking service from long-time Facebook engineer Ari Steinberg that launches in private beta today. Its hardcore algorithms crunch near-infinite trip permutations to solve the classic “traveling salesman problem” in a real-life context, finding you the most convenient route for the least money. Vamo wants to help people escape boring, cookie-cutter package tours, and instead customize their own dream vacation. A year and a half of development since it raised $1.6 million, Vamo is offering TechCrunch readers a spot in its private beta to test out its first market: multi-stop trips through Europe. Vamo is free to use, with the startup making money purely from hotel referral fees. Steinberg admits that growth will be Vamo’s biggest challenge. “We hope the to...

Another year, another Nexus phone. Google's flagship devices are the fast track for the newest software, but they've typically been devices of compromise. A bad camera, no LTE, or a poor battery—there's always something. The compromises were usually easy to forgive thanks to the incredible—probably subsidized—pricing scheme that Google has used in the past. This year, Google has tapped the newly Lenovo owned Motorola to build a massive, 6-inch monster of a phone with a 1440p screen. It has nearly doubled the price up from $350 for the Nexus 5 to a whopping $650 for an unlocked Nexus 6. Google says they're aiming for more "premium" devices this year, and the company is working with all four big US carriers to offer the phone with a two-year contract. The price is well into the range of flagship devices from other companies, and it makes us less forgiving of any faults we might come across. The Nexus 6 is still not really expensive for what it is, though. ...

Uber may be in the midst of a major PR crisis in the U.S., but it continues to ramp up its efforts in India — its second largest market — where it launched a low-cost service aimed at beating the country’s icon auto rickshaws. The company said Uber Go, its new service that includes small vehicles like the Tata Indica Vista (image below) and Maruti Suzuki Swift, is now available in all ten cities that it services in the country. The company believes it is now in a position to challenge India’s near ubiquitous fleets of auto rickshaws for cheap travel. Uber is in a constant state of price reductions and offers across its markets in Asia as it aims to accelerate mainstream adoption of taxi booking services across the region. It’s no surprise, then, that it is giving all Uber Go passengers an immediate and ongoing 35 percent discount on their rides. An Uber Go journey has a $0.65 base rate, with a minimum fare of around $1.20 – the service is priced at $0.17 per kilometer or less th...

Prezi, the cloud presentation platform that has been gradually eating away at Microsoft’s Powerpoint market share for the last few years, is poised to become a far more mainstream product than some might have previously thought. It’s making two major announcements today. The first — announced today on stage at Slush in Helsinki — is that it has secured a $57 million growth investment from Spectrum Equity, a growth equity firm, with participation from existing investor, Accel Partners, to accelerate its growth. That growth is evident in the second piece of news it announces today, which is that it’s passed the 50 million users mark, nearly doubling its user base in the past twelve months, and is attracting roughly 55,000 new users every day. Those users have now created 160 million ‘Prezis’ to date, allowing it to justifiably call itself the world’s largest publicly available database of presentations. By contrast Slideshare has only 15 million uploads (according to their site). C...

Ideally, every time you visit a website, that connection should happen over a secure HTTPS connection so nobody can snoop on your surfing habits when you are using a public network at a coffee shop or at the airport. But in reality, most smaller websites don’t offer these kind of secure connections because getting the kind of digital public-key certificate that makes HTTPS connections work involves a rather annoying and manual process. They also typically don’t come cheap. It doesn’t have to be like that, though. Starting soon, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust and researchers at the University of Michigan are working through the Internet Security Research Group to create a new certificate authority to offer these digital certificates for free to anybody who owns a web domain. The “Let’s Encrypt” group will launch this service next summer. Currently, the EFF writes today, “HTTPS (and other uses of TLS/SSL) is dependent on a horrifyingly complex...

Good news for people who love privacy and security, bad news for black-hat hackers and government surveillance agencies. WhatsApp, the wildly popular messaging app, has partnered with the crypto gurus at Open WhisperSystems to implement strong end-to-end encryption on all WhatsApp text messages–meaning not even Zuck himself can pry into your conversations, even if a court order demands it1. WhatsApp, of course, has hundreds of millions of daily users worldwide, and was purchased by Facebook earlier this year for an eye-popping $19 billion. Open WhisperSystems creates state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption systems such as Signal, for voice, and TextSecure, for text. (They have nothing to do with the messaging app Whisper.) As per the EFF’s Secure Messaging Scorecard, TextSecure is a huge upgrade from WhatsApp’s previous encryption. And I do mean huge. Right now the TextSecure protocol has only rolled out to WhatsApp for Android–other clients, and group/media messaging, are coming ...

Samsung has been in a pretty tough spot lately. After several quarters of record profits in 2012 and 2013, the company has crashed back down to Earth. The low point for Samsung came last quarter, when it reported a 49 percent drop in profits. At the high end of the market, the company currently has to fight off Apple, which just released a phablet of its own. At the low end, it's going up against a flood of cheaper Chinese OEMs, led by Xiaomi and Huawei. To try to get out of this slump, Samsung is taking a "less is more" approach. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company said it would cut its 2015 smartphone lineup by 25-30 percent. The company will work on the internals, too, saying during its last earnings call that it will "increase the number of components shared across mid- to low-end models, so that we can further leverage economies of scale." The belt-tightening might seem like a big change for Samsung, but the company has so fully flooded ...

Turns out you weren’t the only one that thought the new iPhone 6 Plus is just too big to carry around as a normal phone. A new study suggests [PDF] that the sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are largely driven by the 4.7-inch model. However, while forming less of the sales figures, the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus has still captured a sizeable market share in Apple’s sales. On the flip side, these larger phones from Apple may also be less popular with Android users planning to switch to Apple than analysts had predicted. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) found that the iPhone 6 accounted for 68 percent of all iPhone sales, while the iPhone 6 Plus took between 23 and 24 percent. It also found that fewer iPhone buyers came from the Google Android platform in 2014 (12 percent) compared to those who switched from Android to an iPhone in 2013 (23 percent). Previously, the iPhone 5s had attracted customers away from BlackBerry and Windows devices. Now? Not so much – almost cert...

Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole. In southwest Utah, geologists had noticed some pretty cool “trees.” The area had been volcanically active between 21 and 31 million years ago, building up a host of steep, volcanic peaks. A number of huge blocks of rock from these peaks, up to 2.5 square kilometers in area and 200 meters thick, are obviously out of place—they've been interpreted by geologists as the result of many landslides around the volcanoes. In a recent paper in Geology, David Hacker, Robert Biek, and Peter Rowley show that rather than being the result of many individual landslides, these are actually all part of one jaw-droppingly large event. The deposit, called the Markagunt gravity slide, covers an area...

Any serious Bitcoin user will preach the benefits of cold storage: keeping the bulk of your bitcoins offline somewhere, like on an encrypted USB stick, or even printed on a piece of paper. The idea is that by keeping that data offline, it’s far less susceptible to being hacked. So, the theory goes: what could be safer than keeping it inside your own body? For the last 10 days, Martijn Wismeijer, a Dutch entrepreneur and Bitcoin enthusiast, has lived with an NFC chip embedded in each hand. One has data that he’s constantly overwriting; he can put his contact details in simply by having another person scan his hand with an NFC-enabled phone. But the other contains the encrypted private key to his wallet. "I use it for cold storage, but it's not cold because it's 37 degrees Celsius inside my body!" he told Ars over Skype on Friday. Specifically, he has an "NFC Type 2 compliant NTAG216 RFID chipset" embedded in a tiny glass capsule (2 millimeters by 1...

Travel discovery startup Gogobot has spent the last several years helping users to find places to go and things to do, but to date it’s mostly done that by word of mouth. Today the company is announcing that it’s received some strategic backing from HomeAway, which should help it expand its marketing and distribution efforts. Gogobot has a website and mobile apps focused on helping users discover things to do based on their interests and travel style. By letting the service know what they like to do — that is, what kind of Tribe they belong to — Gogobot hopes to provide personalized recommendations for interesting things nearby. To expand its business, Gogobot has raised $20 million in Series C financing led by HomeAway, and the vacation rental company’s CEO Brian Sharples will be joining Gogobot’s board of directors. Existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures also participated in the round. The new funding comes nearly three years since Gogobot last raised finan...

Uber is adding a new feature to its mobile app that could allow passengers to play DJ while they take a ride with one of its drivers. Thanks to an integration with Spotify, Uber will soon make music a central part of its ride-hailing service. Some screenshots obtained by TechCrunch show how the service will likely work. In the first screenshot, which began showing up on its driver app over the last few days, Uber has begun asking drivers to update their car information and select whether or not it has an AUX audio input. By connecting their Uber-provided mobile phone to the car stereo, the service could soon allow users to control the music during the ride and possibly play from their own playlists. Meanwhile the second screenshot, which a source tells us is hidden within the current version of Uber’s consumer app, shows a mockup of what it will look like for passengers as they select and listen to music while in transit. The user interface shows the song title and artist of the...

NEW YORK—Earlier this year, Microsoft open sourced a big chunk of .NET, publishing its new compiler, Roslyn, and many .NET libraries under the Apache license. Today, the company took that same open sourcing effort a great deal further. Microsoft announced that its full server .NET stack, including the just-in-time compiler and runtime and the core class libraries that all .NET software depends on, will all be open sourced. The code will be hosted on GitHub and published under a permissive MIT-style license. With this release, Microsoft wants to make sure that the .NET stack is fully functional and production quality on both Linux and OS X. The company is working with the Mono community to make sure that this platform is "enterprise-ready." Visual Studio is getting yet another SKU to add to its list of variants: Visual Studio 2013 Community. This is another zero-cost version of Visual Studio, sitting alongside the Express SKUs, but with a couple of important differences...

Android updates don't matter anymore—or at least that's what many people think. Back-to-back-to-back Jelly Bean releases and a KitKat release seemed to only polish what already existed. When Google took the wraps off of "Android L" at Google I/O, though, it was clear that this release was different. Android 5.0 Lollipop is at least the biggest update since Android 4.0, and it's probably the biggest Android release ever. The update brings a complete visual overhaul of every app, with a beautiful new design language called "Material Design." Animations are everywhere, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single pixel from 4.4 that was carried over into 5.0—Google even revamped the fonts. 5.0 also brings a ton of new features. Notifications are finally on the lock screen, the functionality of Recent Apps has been revamped to make multitasking a lot easier, and the voice recognition works everywhere—even when the screen is off. The under-the-hood re...

Apple will soon face a federal lawsuit brought on by a woman named Adrienne Moore, who, like many former iPhone users who have switched to Android, is upset that she did not receive text messages after switching from iPhone to Android. She is seeking unspecified damages, and to make the lawsuit a class action. Since the release of iOS 5, Apple has experienced issues with users not receiving text messages after switching from iMessage on an iPhone to an Android device. iMessage works by sending messages over the users data plan, theoretically saving that user money on text messages. If a message fails to go through on iMessage, it’s supposed to default back to text message. Moore is far from the only person to go through this issue. In fact, Apple recently released a web tool to help users switch from iOS to Android, and prevent this from happening to other users. The lawsuit was first filed back in May of 2014, and Apple has since moved to dismiss the case. Though Judge Lucy K...

While Microsoft has launched a number of Lumia phones since its purchase of Nokia's Devices division earlier this year, they have all retained the Nokia name. But we knew that had to end soon—the publicly announced terms of the sale told us that much—and today it does. The Microsoft Lumia 535 is adorned not with the Nokia name but with Microsoft's. Compared to the lacklustre Lumia 530, the Lumia 535 looks like a healthy step up. The screen is bigger, at five inches compared to four, and higher resolution, at 960×540 compared to 854×480. It's also better quality, using IPS technology and a Gorilla Glass 3 protective layer. The processor is the same, a 1.2 GHz quad core Snapdragon 200, but the RAM has been doubled to 1GB, thereby eliminating most or all compatibility issues with games. Internal storage is doubled, too, to 8GB. The biggest upgrade, though, is to the cameras. The rear camera retains the 5MP resolution, but it's now an autofocus unit instead of fixed fo...

Unemployment in the U.S. is declining, as demand for new jobs picks up across the country, and nowhere is the need more acutely felt than in tech industry. With its heady mix of Horatio Alger rags-to-riches success stories, its emphasis on individualism and privileging hard work and education, no industry is a better poster child for post-industrial American capitalism than the startup world of coders, marketers, and salesman. But underneath the headline-grabbing startup economy and its Silicon Valley billionaires are thousands of programming jobs at companies ranging from Avis to Winn-Dixie. It’s those jobs that are the backbone of the tech economy, and they need to be filled. That’s why hundreds of continuing education programs — startup bootcamps, general assemblies and codecademies — have cropped up across the country to train (or in some cases re-train) workers whose jobs had either been innovated or rationalized out of existence during the recession in 2008. For Jim McKe...

Nothing sells like “free.” Microsoft Word is now the number one free iPhone and iPad application on iTunes, closely followed by other Microsoft Office apps including Excel and PowerPoint. The apps have shot up to the top of Apple’s App Store after last week’s pricing changes. Before, Microsoft had required iPad users to subscribe to Office 365 in order to create new files, and had offered a limited feature set on iPhone. But that all changed on Thursday. Microsoft finally began to allow more of the public to use its Office apps for free, releasing new unified applications as a part of its Office for iOS suite. The updated apps included integration with Dropbox, and fewer restrictions on use as the company embraced the “freemium” strategy to achieve increased iOS market share. The company also last week said that 1 billion people use Office, and its Office for iPad product had been downloaded more than 40 million times. Those are decent numbers, of course. But the company had l...

President Barack Obama has come out in favor of net neutrality in a special website and video announcement wherein he lays out his plan for protecting the freedom and openness of the Internet. In a video and letter, he lays out in no uncertain terms that he believes no cable company or access provider should be able to put limits on access to the Internet. He says that he’s suggesting that the FCC recognizes access to the Internet as a basic utility, and something that Americans have a basic right to. This means no blocking, no throttling, more transparency and no paid prioritization, Obama writes in his letter, which is quoted in full below. An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known. “Net neutrality” has been built ...

Verizon is gearing up for a fight over the government's latest net neutrality plan, which could impose stricter rules on Internet service providers than a previous net neutrality order that Verizon also sued over. Verizon sued to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 Open Internet Order, forcing the FCC to try again. The commission tentatively approved rules in May that would prevent Internet service providers from blocking or degrading traffic from third-party Web services while allowing "fast lane" deals in which companies could pay for faster access to consumers. But after protest from consumer advocates, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is reportedly close to proposing rules in which ISPs would be treated as utilities. This wouldn't outlaw fast lane or "paid prioritization" deals but would make it easier for the government to block arrangements deemed harmful to consumers. In a blog post today, Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch said...

A few years back, when I got my first LED-based lightbulb, it seemed natural to stick it into a wattmeter to get a sense of its efficiency. At under 15 Watts of power drawn, it clearly beat any incandescent bulbs I'd ever put into the same lamp. But I was disappointed to find that it wasn't any better than a compact fluorescent bulb. Based on the graph shown above, my experience was hardly unique; in fact, it was decidedly average. Although the technology behind LEDs had the potential to be far more efficient than any other lighting source, the complete LED bulb package wasn't doing that much better at the time than the far more mature fluorescent bulbs, which output roughly 60 lumens for every Watt put in. After some small boosts in 2013, however, a new generation of more efficient LEDs hit the market this year, raising the typical efficiency to nearly 100 lumens per Watt. The increased efficiency is coming at a time when prices for the bulbs continue to drop; given ...