Facebook today filled the biggest hole in its chatbot platform. Messenger bots can accept payments natively without sending users to an external website, Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus announced today onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016. Finally, the credit card info people already have stored in Facebook or Messenger can be used to instantly make purchases in bots that are… Read More
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In what has to be characterized as huge win for Microsoft, it announced this morning it had secured a 6-year deal with HP, Inc to run Microsoft Dynamics’ customer relationship management (CRM) and service software. What’s more, it grabbed this deal at the expense of its rivals. HP, Inc. had been a Salesforce CRM customer, while Oracle had been its service software provider.… Read More
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As LinkedIn continues to wait for the close of its $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft, it continues to build out its business, with the latest developments on the international front. Last week, LinkedIn announced that it had hit 100 million users in Asia Pacific (around one-quarter of its total), and today at an event in Bengaluru, India, it unveiled three new products it’s rolling… Read More
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A startup based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, Phononic, wants to make refrigeration and temperature control far more efficient, and steadier, than is possible with traditional systems. Instead of relying on vapor compressors, fans, chillers or passive heat sinks, Phononic makes semiconductors that are smaller than a dime, and actively remove heat from the places or… Read More
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Toyota’s Prius Prime is an updated take on the company’s popular hybrid, with more emphasis on the EV aspects of the vehicle, including a battery with double the driving capacity, and a few other tweaks that push the car closer toward the EV end of its dual identity, including an acceleration feature that lets the electric motor handle much of the pick-up when you first put your… Read More
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Application development has long been fraught with peril: Projects become bloated, expensive and never ship. The “micro” trend in application development is focused on delivering bottoms-up, simple solutions to complex problems. Micro services, apps and flows offer a new way to weave existing systems in novel, organic ways in order to deliver solutions immediately. Read More
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When friends Eli Byers, Chad Fegley, Amrita Chawla, and Mari Lliguicota fly they’re usually bored. They spend a lot of time in the air and they wanted something that would make the miles go by faster.
Their solution? TheHighFlyers.club. This clever Disrupt hackathon hack lets you see when you’re passing cool stuff outside of the plane and even chat with other people on the flight. Read More
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Malaria is treatable and preventable. And yet, the World Health Organization reports that almost half the world’s population — 3.2 billion people — are still at risk of contracting the life-threatening disease. At the Disrupt SF Hackathon, a group of teenage girls is gamifying malaria prevention to help halt the spread of the disease. They’re Aruna Prasad, 16,… Read More
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BMW plans to accelerate its electric vehicle plans, in the wake of an executive shake-up and leading into a vote planned for the end of this month. The new BMW expanded electric lineup will kindle fully battery-powered versions of the Mini, the BMW 3 Series and the X4 SUV. The company has previously discussed plans to electrify the 3 Series and other vehicles, but German’s… Read More
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There’s plenty of information online to help people figure out whether their plants are healthy and what they need to do to make them better. But they can be distributed far across the Internet and sometimes hard to find, and aren’t necessarily available on demand, according to Martín Capeletto. That’s why the team, a bunch of plant nuts (though they wouldn’t tell… Read More
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