Samsung is entering the voice-powered virtual assistant game a bit later than its competitors, but it says that its forthcoming “Bixby” agent will be “fundamentally different” from what’s already available, thanks to features that reduce confusion around when and where it can be used, and a general knowledge of what’s going on with your device whenever… Read More
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Farmers work to feed the world. Yet somehow, corn, wheat and rice sales are still happening at a local level through antiquated paperwork and phone negotiations. Now, an Ottawa-based startup called FarmLead has raised $6.5 million in venture funding to connect grain producers and buyers automatically online, and help farmers get fair prices for what they grow. Read More
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IBM unveiled its “Blockchain as a Service” today, which is based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, version 1.0 from The Linux Foundation. IBM Blockchain is a public cloud service that customers can use to build secure blockchain networks. The company introduced the idea last year, but this is the first ready-for-primetime implementation built using that technology.… Read More
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As part of IBM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis. Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM… Read More
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Things just seemingly keep getting worse at Uber, which now is reportedly losing its president Jeff Jones according to Recode. The departure comes amid a series of sexual harassment allegations as well as being hit by a lawsuit from Waymo — Alphabet’s self-driving car unit — that threatens to potentially kneecap its autonomous driving efforts. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick… Read More
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That’s why over the past few years, Spotify has been pushing five different paths to putting pressure on the labels to cut it a better royalties deal. They all hinge around the idea of making the labels need Spotify as much as it’s historically needed them. When Spotify launched in 2008, it had no power in the relationship since it had so few listeners. It needed to raise over… Read More
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The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.” What Slack does isn’t actually all that original as startup ideas go. It merely provides an environment for teams to share information inside a chat client. Yet… Read More
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Humans, especially Americans, are kind of slobs. We mess up the Earth by throwing out about 4.5 pounds of garbage per person on average every day. Two-thirds of that waste could be composted, but isn’t. And half of the rest of it could be recycled, according to research from the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment, corroborated by studies from the Global Footprint Network and… Read More
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The League, a dating app that users have to apply to join, has a new feature that could help with one of the most agonizing parts of the online dating process — wondering if someone’s deliberately ignoring you or if they just haven’t opened the app in a while. Specifically, The League is importing an idea from other messaging services — read receipts, which tell you… Read More
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Super Mario Run is officially making its way to Android, as Nintendo promised what seems like so long ago. The company has now revealed an exact date for Mario’s Android debut: March 23. That’s this Thursday, in case you’re bad at math or don’t have a calendar handy.