Latest Technology News & Updates

Microsoft dropped an interesting piece of information today amid its confirmation that Windows 10 will go on sale this summer. Near the end of its announcement, the Redmond-based company casually revealed that it is testing Windows 10 with “power users” of Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 4 Android smartphone. The initiative, which Xiaomi stressed is not a partnership but merely assistance with the trial, is an interesting one because it again shows Microsoft’s new ‘platform agnostic’ approach. Neither Microsoft nor Xiaomi provided specific details of the Windows 10 software being trialled, but TechCrunch understands from sources that it effectively overrides Android, turning the Xiaomi phone into a Windows 10 device complete with Microsoft services. (Which the company hopes will dazzle Android owners into making the switch.) That’s to say that the software doesn’t offer a dual boot option, which Microsoft has pushed in the past in India. This is a ROM, based on Windows, that operates muc...

Microsoft confirmed today that Windows 10 will launch this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages. Frustratingly, though, the company isn’t dishing an actual launch date for its hotly-anticipated new platform, but an interesting new nugget of information was let out today. The company previously voiced its intention to offer free upgrades to “millions” of customers on Windows 7 or earlier, and China — a market synonymous with piracy — is a key focus of that initiative. Speaking at an event in Shenzhen, China, Terry Myerson — Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Operating Systems — revealed that the Redmond firm will work with three of China’s most prominent software companies — Lenovo, Tencent and Qihoo 360 — to offer free upgrades to their collective customer base. That doubtless spans a huge number of potential users. But, there’s more, Microsoft is also working Xiaomi — yes, the fast-growing Android phone company — in a partnership that will give selected owners of its...

Your next Android Wear watch could be a TAG Heuer. Intel and Google are today announcing a partnership with the iconic watch brand that will result in a TAG-branded Swiss watch powered by Android Wear. The announcement came at the start of Baselworld, the world-famous watch show in Basel, Switzerland where companies like TAG and Swatch are looking to retain market share. The partnership is very much from the same vein as Intel’s partnership with Fossil and Luxottica Group. Details about the watch are unavailable at press time and there is no indication that there is any product to speak of right now. So what does all this mean? Intel clearly knows it needs help from top consumer brands to bring wearable products to market. TAG, part of the LVMH Group, is also looking at the Apple Watch as an oncoming threat. By creating a higher end smartwatch for luxury-loving Android users – an audience obviously underserved by the current Android Wear crop – Hauer, Intel, and Google can try t...

As the new wave of virtual reality headsets barrel ever closer to consumer reality, the effects of "simulator sickness" on a significant portion of the population remain a concern. A group of researchers at Purdue University say they've found an easy way to mitigate this effect by adding one bit of reality that most VR simulations leave out: a virtual nose sitting persistently at the corners of your vision. Offering a fixed object that doesn't shift as you move around a virtual world has been shown to help anchor many VR users, reducing the apparent difference between visual and sensorimotor stimuli that can lead to simulation sickness. That's useful for VR experiences that can insert a virtual cockpit or vehicular frame around the user. A virtual nose, though, has the potential to be much more generalizable to any VR experience that takes place from a first-person perspective. The Purdue study divided 43 undergraduate volunteers into two groups. The first g...

Dextromethorphan (DXM) is a cough suppressant found in Vick's NyQuil Cold & Flu Relief, Triaminic Multi-Symptom Fever, Dimetapp Children's Multi-Symptom Cold & Flu, Tylenol Cold Multi-Symptom Nighttime, and similar over-the-counter cold medicines that make life so much more bearable when you're coughing your lungs out. It's not good for everyone though; the American Academy of Pediatricians has recommended that it not be given to children under the age of four, because it is completely ineffective for them and may even cause them harm. But although it may be bad for kids, it may be good for type 2 diabetics; a recent report in Nature Medicine suggests that it increases glucose tolerance and does so in a way that is more effective than existing drugs. Antidiabetic drugs currently on the market increase what's called the basal levels of insulin secretion—it goes up all the time, whether it's needed or not. This basal insulin secretion is a major ca...

Y Combinator unveiled one of its most impressive startup batches to date yesterday, featuring big ideas in medicine, finance, and marketplaces. After carefully watching the demos, speaking with founders in the class, and querying prestigious investors about their favorites, TechCrunch has compiled this list of the top 10 startups of the 47 that launched at Winter 2015 YC Demo Day 2. Here they are, in no particular order: Campus Job – Helps college students find part-time jobs and internships. Students fill out a profile, see jobs they’re qualified for, and can quickly apply. 1300 companies are already paying Campus Job to connect them to its 100,000 students across 2200 colleges. Why we picked it: College kids don’t just want another public profile to maintain, they want results — in this case a job. Campus Jobs fills an obvious need, already has strong traction. LinkedIn’s sign-up-and-pray-for-a-job-offer isn’t Seed – An online bank for small businesses. Seed uses your data...

At Nvidia's GTC conference in California, Tesla's Elon Musk has given us yet another glimpse into his view of the future. Talking to Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Musk said that, in the future, driving cars might be outlawed. "[It's too] dangerous," he said. "You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine." Huang and Musk were on stage during the GTC 2015 keynote, ostensibly chatting about the computational challenges of computer vision and deep learning. Then, Huang decided to ask Musk, in fairly general terms, how the whole self-driving car thing will actually go down in practice. "I don't think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that's sort of like a narrow form of AI," Musk replied. "It's not something that I think is very difficult, actually, to do autonomous driving, to a degree that's much safer than a person, is much easier than people think." The difficulty arises, though, w...

Those of you with long memories will recall a barrage of complaints in the run up to Windows 8's launch that concerned the ability to install other operating systems—whether they be older versions of Windows, or alternatives such as Linux or FreeBSD—on hardware that sported a "Designed for Windows 8" logo. To get that logo, hardware manufacturers had to fulfil a range of requirements for the systems they built, and one of those requirements had people worried. Windows 8 required machines to support a feature called UEFI Secure Boot. Secure Boot protects against malware that interferes with the boot process in order to inject itself into the operating system at a low level. When Secure Boot is enabled, the core components used to boot the machine must have correct cryptographic signatures, and the UEFI firmware verifies this before it lets the machine start. If any files have been tampered with, breaking their signature, the system won't boot. This is a desirabl...

Ever spend more time looking for something to watch on Netflix than actually watching something on Netflix? That’s because of the site’s addiction to brevity. Titles are hidden by sliding bars that requires clicking to reveal more titles. This bookmarklet fixes the issue. It’s called God Mode and I love it. Just pop the bookmarklet into your bookmark bar and load Netflix. Once logged in, click the bookmark button to expand all the sliding bars into grids of movies. It’s not as pretty, but damn is easier to use. Suddenly you can see all the movies and TV shows at once. There’s no need to click around on the interface to reveal hidden titles. It’s beautiful in a purely functional way. Netflix has a wonderful problem. It simply has too much content, and the streaming service is constantly testing new interfaces to address it. I’ve found that the best Netflix user interface is found in the Windows 8 app where a ton of content is visible at once. Want to see more? Swipe left or rig...

Last summer, Apple surprised almost everyone at WWDC with the announcement of Swift, a new programming language for iOS and Mac development. The language feels like something Apple would invent. Like several of the languages currently popular in web development, it has a concise, readable syntax that’s easier to pick up than Apple’s older language, Objective-C. It was engineered by Apple’s compiler experts, so in addition to being compatible with existing code and Cocoa libraries, it’s also faster by some metrics. But even though Apple’s tagline for the language is that it “lets everyone build amazing apps,” no novice is going to pick up Swift and get to coding full-on iOS or Mac apps without some guidance. To that end, Apple and its developer community have done a heck of a job getting lessons out there. The same week Swift was announced, Apple released a version of Xcode with support for the language, released a free book detailing the syntax and launched a blog with posts d...

In May 2014, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received an aggressive patent demand letter. The letter, from lawyers representing a company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS), told him he needed to pay for a "royalty-bearing license" to its four patents, or Life360 and its customers would have to "cease and desist" from infringement. In other words: pay up, or shut down your company. The letter demanded a response within three days. Hulls wrote back: Dear Piece of Shit, We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response. I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient, Chris On that Friday, Life360 got sued. The lawyers attached Hulls' "Dear Piece of Shit" letter as an exhibit. What AGIS' lawyers could not have known is that...

If you were looking for love in Austin this weekend, you might have run into Ava — a chatbot on Tinder created to promote the South by Southwest premiere of a new science fiction film called Ex Machina. Regardless of what you think about the campaign (I didn’t have a problem with it, but then I’ve always found Tinder chats to be awkward and slightly surreal), it certainly fit with the film’s plot. In Ex Machina, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an employee at a large, Google-esque company, wins a contest and gets to spend a week with the company’s reclusive founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Turns out, however, that Nathan has something specific in mind — he wants Caleb to interview Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificial intelligence housed in a female, humanoid body, and determine whether or not she’s achieved true consciousness. Of course, there’s more going on than Nathan will admit, and tense, sexually fraught hijinks ensue. Ex Machina is also the directorial debut of Alex Garland, who ...

Nintendo is finally bringing its games and characters to mobile after the company surprised the tech world with an alliance with Japanese mobile gaming firm DeNA. The duo announced a collaboration that will see them jointly develop games for “smart devices.” Secondly, a service that lets users play games across a variety of devices, including mobile devices, PCs and Nintendo’s own consoles like the 3DS and Wii U is slated to launch “in the fall of 2015″. Nintendo said that it will create new titles from the ground up, rather than porting existing games from its consoles so as to “ensure the quality of game experience that consumers expect” from the coming together. In what may be music to Nintendo fans — like this one — the companies said that “all Nintendo IP will be eligible for development and exploration by the alliance.” That said, the duo will not flood the market with vast numbers of games, the approach appears to be qualitative rather than quantitative. At a joint-pr...

As the nation's policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren't captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology. There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor's report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video. Among the monitor's findings: (PDF) "We identified several causes of this issue. First, BWCs were not assigned to supervisors or officers working off-duty during the pilot project, leaving 35 of the 80 uses of force unrecorded. Second, 45 of the incidents involved patrol officers to whom BWCs were assigned, and who were on-duty at the time they were involved in uses of force. ...

The new MacBook has been… lets say, divisive. Even within TechCrunch, we’ve got one side suggesting it’s “a betrayal” while the other declares it “nothing short of the future”. But there’s one thing we can all agree on: oh man, this parody video is fantastic. Watch on, as an “Apple Engineer” explains the design process of the 2015 MacBook: It’s even better if your high school Spanish is juuuust rusty enough to pluck out some of the words, but not good enough that you’re distracted by the actual story. Every once in a while, the subtitles and the actual words being said match up a little and everything just falls into place.

Of all the complications that will worry the outer rim of Apple Watch buyers’ minds, the question of whether they need to purchase a case to protectively encase their expensive wrist-wear is perhaps the most frivolous. On the surface it sounds ludicrous. Who keeps a watch inside a case when it’s attached to their person? And yet the Apple Watch is really a very small wrist computer, with a price-tag that ranges right up to the luxury end of the market. To $10,000, or even $17,000. It’s also intended as a multipurpose device, with fitness tracking functionality rubbing up against notifications and comms, with some ostentatious bling thrown in (at least if you’re shelling out for 18-karat gold). So it’s supposed to track you when you sweat through a half marathon and then remain on your wrist during that fancy dinner. Same device, different aspects. Add to that, given that keeping your smartphone in a protective case is well-established behavior, the notion of similarly encasing...

Google’s plan to deliver Internet service from balloons in the stratosphere has come a long way since being unveiled in June 2013. A single “Project Loon” balloon can now remain in the air for more than six months and provide 4G LTE cellular service to an area the size of Rhode Island, according to Google. Company officials have taken to calling Loon balloons “cell towers in the sky.” While there’s no announced date for a widespread service launch, Google has provided Internet to a school in Brazil and is partnering with cellular operators Vodafone New Zealand, Telstra in Australia, and Telefónica in Latin America. The US probably won’t be the first place Loon powers a commercial service. Google is aiming to get more people in developing countries on the Internet (and that’s good for Google’s business, since a lot of those people will use Google services). “For some countries, having Internet once a day for an hour is a huge deal,” Google software engineer Johan Mathe, who p...

While health-conscious nerds might like to play around with quantifying their activity and lifestyle for kicks, people with diabetes have no choice but to track their blood sugar if they want to stay well. It’s a key part of managing this chronic disease, which requires regular insulin shots to replace what the body can’t produce. Vienna, Austria-based mySugr was founded back in 2012 (although the team also won a TC pitch off back in 2011) with a mission to make managing diabetes “suck less”, as co-founder Fredrik Debong puts it — one of two of the four co-founders himself living with type 1 diabetes. It’s doing this via building digital products that take the strain out of aggregating diabetes-related health data and simplify management of the chronic condition. Thus far, mySugr has amassed more than 230,000 registered users of its diabetes management apps and web-based educational tools, which use gamification elements and daily goals, to help users stay engaged and motivated ...

Medical research is plagued by small sample sizes and inconsistent data collection. So Apple is stepping up to help health innovation with Research Kit, a new iOS software framework that lets people volunteer to join medical research studies. ResearchKit lets people take tests like saying “ahhh” to detect vocal variations, walking in a line, or tapping in rhythm to test for Parkinson’s Disease. Users will decide how to share their data and Apple won’t see it. And to advance its evolution, ResearchKit will be open source. ResearchKit will be available next month, and the first five tests built with it will become available today. They help people participate in tests for Parkinson’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and breast cancer. Apple’s Jeff Williams came out on stage today at the Apple Watch event to show off ResearchKit. He explained how Apple worked with 12 research institutions to build out the app, including University Of Oxford and Stanford. Apple learned...

Apple has launched a new beta program for iOS (via 9to5Mac), with the latest build of iOS 8.3 (which includes advanced Message filtration features) acting as the first seed. The expanded program allows non-developers to opt-in to receiving pre-release software builds on their device, and in exchange, Apple expects both patience with bugs and feedback regarding what needs fixing. The public beta program for OS X launched last July, offering up to 1 million users (per Apple’s own program cap) early versions of Yosemite or OS X 10.10 prior to its official release. The program offers pre-launch builds ahead of their general release on the App Store, but on a more intermittent pace compared to the developer-only seeds, meaning they are likely more generally stable than those releases. Apple’s test program for OS X was designed as a way to help the company get feedback and usage testing from a group of users who more closely resembled the broad spectrum of average consumers who would ma...

With the Federal Communications Commission scheduled to vote on net neutrality rules Thursday, the commission's two Republicans want to delay the vote by at least 30 days. Republican Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly want the commission to break with past practice by releasing the entire proposal before the vote. Typically, the FCC releases a summary of the proposal but not the entire document until after it votes on it. "We respectfully request that FCC leadership immediately release the 332-page Internet regulation plan publicly and allow the American people a reasonable period of not less than 30 days to carefully study it," Pai and O'Rielly wrote today. "Then, after the Commission reviews the specific input it receives from the American public and makes any modifications to the plan as appropriate, we could proceed to a final vote." Read More

This week at the 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel will provide an update on its new 10nm manufacturing process and new research on how it's maintaining the march of Moore's law to 7nm and beyond. The first chips based on Intel's new 10nm process are expected in late 2016/early 2017, and the company says it's hoping to avoid the delays that haunted the belabored release of 14nm Broadwell. To hit 7nm, Intel says new materials will be required—as in, it looks like 10nm will finally be the end of the road for silicon. The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet. ISSCC 2015, being held in San Francisco this week, is where all the big players in silicon (Intel, Samsung, TSMC, IBM, etc.) meet to talk about their latest manufacturing processes and how they might go about overcoming the current barriers to smaller, faster,...

Okay, this is the last quadcopter-to-“Star Wars Universe”-thing we (or at least I) will post*, I promise. BUT SERIOUSLY, LOOK AT THIS THING. It is perfection. About 30 seconds into the video, I actually stood up and whooped. We’ve seen the Millenium Falcon quadcopter. We’ve seen a TIE Interceptor quadcopter. But a Speeder Bike? WITH a Scout trooper on top? This… this is perfect. It brings one of the best scenes from Return Of The Jedi to life in an straight up magical way. By gutting a 1999 Hasbro POTF Speederbike and strapping its bits to a low-flying quadcopter, Adam Woodworth has made a toy that would have made 12 year old Greg throw every penny of his allowance at the screen. Hahah, who am I kidding; Now-28 year old Greg would throw all his money at this, too. You can read about Adam’s full build process, including figuring out how to get that relatively-heavy frame up in the air, right over here. If only there was a camera in the helmet for first-person tree-dodgin...

As anyone who has popped into a watch store can tell you, high-end watches are expensive. Amazingly expensive. Cheaper Rolexes cost about $7,500 in stainless steel and a Panerai or Patek can’t be had for anything less than $12,000. And that’s exactly where the Apple Watch Edition lands – smack in the middle of the rarefied air of Haute Horology. Before you grumble about how ridiculous Apple is being in pricing the “Edition” model of its watch at over $10,000, we must understand why this number makes sense. First, the $10,000 model isn’t for us. It’s for folks who are either watch obsessives and/or amazingly rich. To them $10,000 is the low-end. And so Apple enters the luxury market where the strangest stuff is wildly expensive. And they’re doing this for good reason. While everyone will be sporting an Apple Watch over the next few months, there will be little social signaling as to the difference between a steel sport model and a more expensive Edition model. Sure, the gold case...

Smartflash LLC is a company that operates out of a tiny office suite in Tyler, Texas. It has no employees or products and no assets except for a handful of patents—but it may be getting a whole lot of cash. A jury verdict (PDF) that came out late yesterday orders Apple to pay the company $533 million for infringing three of its patents. The company is no "patent troll," its lawyer insisted in e-mail and telephone discussions with Ars. He says that term doesn't apply because the company is part-owned by founder Patrick Racz, who's the named inventor on the three patents found to be infringed, numbered 7,334,720, 8,118,221, and 8,336,772. All three are related to downloading digital content. "You have the inventor who came up with the idea, disclosed it to the public in a patent application to advance the state of the art, and spent 15 years staying involved as the main figure who always believed in his idea," said Smartflash attorney Brad Caldwell, who...

The list of software known to use the same HTTPS-breaking technology recently found preinstalled on Lenovo laptops has risen dramatically with the discovery of at least 12 new titles, including one that's categorized as a malicious trojan by a major antivirus provider. Trojan.Nurjax, a malicious program Symantec discovered in December, hijacks the Web browsers of compromised computers and may download additional threats. According to a blog post published Friday by a security researcher from Facebook, Nurjax is one such example of newly found software that incorporates HTTPS-defeating code from an Israeli company called Komodia. Combined with the Superfish ad-injecting software preinstalled on some Lenovo computers and three additional applications that came to light shortly after that revelation, there are now 14 known apps that use Komodia technology. "What all these applications have in common is that they make people less secure through their use of an easily obtain...

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It’s the driving force behind the continued existence of ‘50s radio stations, drive-ins, and other monuments to Baby Boomers. But as Gen Xers like me find ourselves locking eyes with the unblinking gaze of middle age, nostalgia has an ever-growing hold on us as well. Some of that I could live without—I'd rather not hear Human League's "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" while I'm grocery shopping. But nostalgia does have one upside: the revival of the arcade. I spent much of the early ‘80s dropping quarter after quarter into the likes of Gorf, Crazy Climber, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man, Moon Cresta, and many others. And today in the mid-2010s of Chicagoland, I can revisit my misspent youth by dropping by Wicker Park barcade Emporium or Brookfield’s massive Galloping Ghost Arcade. And now there’s a third arcade-themed destination around these parts: Namco’s Level 257. Namco describes Level 257 as “a brand new restaurant and entertainment de...

Security experts have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw that for more than a decade has made it possible for attackers to decrypt HTTPS-protected traffic passing between Android or Apple devices and hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, including AmericanExpress.com, Bloomberg.com, NSA.gov, and FBI.gov. In recent days, a scan of more than 14 million websites that support the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols found that more than 36 percent of them were vulnerable to the decryption attacks. The exploit takes about seven hours to carry out and costs as little as $100 per site. The so-called FREAK attack—short for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys—is possible when an end user with a vulnerable device—currently known to include Android smartphones, iPhones, and Macs running Apple's OS X operating system—connects to a vulnerable HTTPS-protected website. Vulnerable sites are those configured to use a weak cipher that many had presumed had...

Apple’s stock will be listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) beginning this month, bumping U.S. carrier AT&T from the list, reports the WSJ. The move has been discussed and anticipated for a while now, and results from a trend begun with the addition of other tech giants including Microsoft and Intel back at the turn of the millennium. Apple will join the DJIA, also known as the Dow 30, at the end of trading on March 18. The addition reflects Apple’s longtime dominance in the tech sector, as well as a coming split for credit card giant Visa’s stock, which would affect the way the DJIA price-weights among its 30 member companies. Apple’s high stock prices will help counter the reduction coming from the Visa split. It’s been a long time coming, but Apple’s recent performance in its quarterly earnings has helped push its stock value and market capitalization even higher, with a lot of analysts even making the argument that compared to other companies in its sector, i...

The last year has been full of security breaches that have shown the importance of having strong safeguards for our data. As we put more personal and private information in the cloud, there are ever more avenues of attack to reach the things we’d like to keep to ourselves. One popular defense you can use to bolster data security on most services is two-factor authentication. Basically, it lets you force an app accessed on a PC to verify that it’s actually you trying to sign in by reaching out on the computer that’s always on you: your smartphone. Most major implementations of two-factor authentication send you a randomly generated six-digit code to enter in the app on your PC, with some “device-specific passwords” to deal with when using a service from one company in an app from someone else (something Google Apps for Business users on Apple laptops are likely familiar with). Oakland-based Clef has designed a two-factor authentication system that cuts out the codes and the time ...

Google Search was not built for mobile. It’s all about lists of web pages, but the small screen is ruled by apps. That’s why if Google launched today, it might look a lot like Vurb…which did launch today. Vurb is a mobile search engine that pulls info from partnered apps like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, and deep-links you out to apps like Uber and Google Maps. Rather than send you clicking through links, it cobbles together critical content and contextual suggestions into saveable, shareable, actionable cards. You could plan a whole dinner-and-a-movie night without ever typing or going back to your homescreen. Whether challenging Google on search is brave or just delusional, only time will tell, but Vurb is surely one of the most audacious startups I’ve seen lately. And since investors love big, risky bets, Vurb has $10 million in firepower Redpoint Ventures and some A-List angels. What’s encouraging is that Vurb manifests in the West a trend that China is already demonstrating:...

We’ve still got nearly a week to go before HTC officially unveils their new top-tier Android phone at Mobile World Congress, but it looks like the details have already started dumping out. On an episode of Droidcast back in January, we were pretty confident that HTC’s next big device — which we tentatively called the HTC One M9 — would look a whole lot like its HTC’s last flagship, the One M8. Sure enough: if these latest leaks are legit, it’s pretty much a dead ringer. They’ve moved some buttons around, sure, and it looks like they’ve gone from two cameras on the rear to one — but unless you really know your stuff, a quick glance would leave you thinking the two devices were one in the same. Check out these spy shots, obtained by the guys at Phandroid: Note that third button below the pair of volume buttons on the right. That’s the power button, which on the One M8 was located on the top of the device. Given how damned big the One M8 is, having the power button up top ma...

Months after announcing its Y Combinator partnership and moving into a giant new Menlo Park facility, the robot-operated biolab startup Transcriptic has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. Data Collective led the round, with participation from IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, 500 Startups, MITS Fund, Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit and several other angel investors. This brings the total amount of funds to just over $14 million now, giving the cloud-based lab tests startup some room to purchase proprietary equipment and start moving into drug-screening tests. Currently, Transcriptic is the only cloud-based robotic bio lab in operation. The robotics lab arm of Emerald Therapeutics is a close competitor with a very similar end goal to run science experiments in the cloud. But it is still in the testing phase and not available to the mass public. Read More

Main Street Hub, a company that helps mom and pop businesses run social media marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation recently announced it has received $20M in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. The company has raised a total of $40M. The most recent funding before this announcement was $14M in Series B in January, 2014. It has 6000 subscribers who are paying an average of $350 per month using a tiered pricing model, according to company officials. Most small business owners are swamped just trying to keep their businesses running. They have little time to deal with modern online marketing or monitoring their Yelp page reviews. That’s where Main Street Hub comes in. For a monthly fee, Matt Stuart, co-CEO at Main Street Hub says his company does all the heavy lifting across online channels for these businesses. “We deliver a combined product using existing communication channels including marketing automation, CRM, social media, reputat...

If you didn’t know how easy it was for hackers to grab information off of your smartphone before, you should now. The Intercept reported earlier this week that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British equivalent spy agency GCHQ had allegedly hacked into and stole information from millions of SIM cards produced by the Dutch company Gemalto. This may have given both agencies access to phone communications around the world and should serve as a warning to all that we need to protect our smartphones. The good news is that the technology already exists to protect your text and phone messaging data. “Encrypted text messaging and phone systems are so easy to protect that we all have an obligation to secure ourselves,” American Civil Liberties Union senior policy analyst Chirs Soghoian told TechCrunch over the phone. Soghoian believes it would be irresponsible to tell people the government might be hacking into their private information and then not give them the tools to pr...

Linux has an intimidating image, making it seem like it would be difficult to start using it. But the switch from Windows and Mac is actually pretty easy, if you can ease yourself into it. If you’re a Windows user, you have probably slowly evolved from Windows 95 to XP to Windows 7 and now you are getting ready for Windows 10. This gradual progression has helped you deal with changes in how Windows is now, and is a major reason that you may think you should stick to Windows. However, if you’re switching to Linux, do yourself a favour and make it gradual, rather than a dramatic shift. Linux doesn’t have a single look and feel, as there are several operating systems based on Linux; these are called distributions (distro). The jury is out on which is the best Linux distro, but that’s just a technical comparison. The best distro for you is what matters, and when you are switching, that is usually the distro most akin to which OS you are coming from. The Best Distro to Switch to from...