Making payments and sending money to friends and family in Nigeria can be cumbersome. Y Combinator-backed Kudi, which recently launched in Nigeria, is aiming to make it easier for people to pay bills and pay each other via messaging. At its core, Kudi is a chatbot, which lives inside Facebook Messenger and eventually Skype, that helps you transfer money, buy airtime for your phone, pay bills… Read More
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How can Facebook and Instagram make their amateur videos more interesting than those you see on Twitter or Snapchat? A killer soundtrack. That’s why Facebook is now pressing record labels even harder for a licensing deal.
Successful negotiations could allow users to either edit popular music into their creations or record clips with popular music in the background without their videos… Read More
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The Humble Bundle is a reliable source of good deals on games, usually organized around some theme or another. This week’s bundle, however, is not only one of the best gaming deals of all time, but all proceeds are going to support charities that work with immigrants and refugees. Read More
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MIT announced today that it’s developed a speech recognition chip capable of real world power savings of between 90 and 99 percent over existing technologies. Voice technology has, of course, become nearly ubiquitous in mobile devices, thanks to the exponential growth of smart assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home – but the new chip could help branch out in much simpler… Read More
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When you look at the size of the cloud market, it’s astonishing that AWS is the undisputed leader, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Considering the competition is the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle; AWS’s big lead is even more surprising. The question is how did AWS build such dominance? The simple answer is that it was first, but as Andy Jassy, the AWS… Read More
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Twitter continues to bleed cash and its advertising business has begun shrinking, so it’s time for a change. Twitter will pare down three areas of its ad product, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch. Twitter foreshadowed the shift during last week’s lackluster earnings report that showed a year-over-year decline in Q4 ad revenue. Meanwhile it saw little growth in… Read More
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As we look to the next evolution of our digital ecosystem, it seems certain that virtual goods will play a much larger role. From vanquishing new breeds of digital monsters to defining a modern asset class, virtual goods will enable new experiences and redefine traditional ones. Indeed, this new gold rush will create opportunities for the enterprising prospector and shovel-seller alike. Read More
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Yahoo may be a troubled company, with its multiple data breaches, SEC investigation, and delayed acquisition* proceedings, but its Yahoo Mail product still has 225 million monthly active users. Today, the company is rolling out a few changes to that service in an effort to boost adoption of the Yahoo Mail mobile app. Now, the app will do more than deliver your mail, it will also sync… Read More
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For better or worse, drones are about to become a lot more prevalent in US airspace. The FAA expects sales of drones to spike domestically from 2.5 million last year to 7 million by 2020. Now, a startup that detects drones and helps prevent unwanted aerial intrusions, Dedrone, has closed a $15 million Series B round of venture funding.
Investors in San Francisco-based Dedrone included Cisco… Read More
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a form of ransomware that can hit us where it really counts: the water supply. Their program installed itself in a model water plant and allowed the researchers to change chlorine levels, shut down water valves, and send false readings to monitoring systems.
“We are expecting ransomware to go one step farther, beyond the… Read More
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