Google has detailed a slew of updates over at its Developers Blog aimed at making Street View rendering less crummy, courtesy of some tweaks to the Maps JavaScript API. Among the resulting improvements are smoother transitions from place to place, thanks to more frames and better loading animations, as the system has switched from repeating old images, which resulted in a stuttering effect to… Read More
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Human’s team will join Mapbox and work on Mapbox’s mobile SDK and real-time maps. I’ve covered Human quite a few times over the years. It’s a well-designed fitness app that was ahead of the current trends in fitness tracking. Human turned the simple habit of moving around the city into human-readable data for yourself and your friends. Over time, Human started using… Read More
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Facebook may try to compete with Steam, or at least win back revenue lost when casual gaming shifted to mobile. Today Facebook formally announced it’s working with game engine Unity to build a dedicated, downloadable desktop gaming platform, plus it’s broadening the Facebook.com experience for gamers.
Both will allow publishers to offer their iOS and Android games on desktop in… Read More
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The internet is all about sharing information, but for the more than 285 million people around the world who are visually impaired, browsing the ‘net can be a less than fruitful experience. Braigo Labs is today launching a service to help blind and visually impaired people make sense of text on images. Read More
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In a blog post, Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller announced she is leaving the company to join Alphabet subsidiary Calico. Koller founded Coursera with Andrew Ng back in 2012 after working together on artificial intelligence research at Stanford. The two supported the company’s growth until Ng left to become chief scientist at Baidu’s research arm. Today Coursera has grown… Read More
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Part of YC’s Winter 2015 class, Instavest is a startup trying to turn investing — an activity most of us are used to doing privately — into a social activity.
The site launched about a year and a half ago with the goal of helping average retail investors learn from others who have more experience in investing and the stock market.
Today the startup announced… Read More
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Blockai is supposed to help photographers and artists defend their intellectual property. Now it’s launching a new feature to make that process easier — or at least better-integrated with Twitter.
Previously, Blockai users would go to the startup’s website to upload their work, creating a record in a public database (namely, the blockchain) stating that they’re the… Read More
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The most recent numbers out of analyst firm IDC show a major shakeup in the Chinese smartphone market for Q2. During an especially rough quarter, local handset maker Xiaomi’s shipment dipped significantly from 17.1 to 10.5 million year over year, according to the firm. The 38 percent drop was enough to knock the company down to the fourth position, as Huawei took over the top spot with… Read More
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Wannabe ad industry nemesis Shine has chalked up another telco to commit to deploying its mobile ad blocking technology which uses deep packet inspection to detect and eject ads at the network level — its third such telco deal. 
What growth there is left in the smartphone market continues to center on emerging markets where consumers are upgrading from feature phones.