NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden caused a flurry of controversy when he advised consumers (twice) to “get rid of Dropbox” if they want to protect their privacy. Today, Drew Houston, CEO of the cloud storage startup, made a direct response to the accusations. People can do more to encrypt their data, he admitted, but It’s “a tradeoff between usability/convenience and… Read More
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Today Rockstar Games unveiled some new footage of Grand Theft Auto from the version set for release on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC on November 18. The biggest reveal: there’s now going to a mode where you play like a giant open-world first-person shooter. This mode will be customizable, so you can play from a first-person perspective while walking around on foot and while driving but not… Read More
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Breezometer was conceived because CEO Ran Korber wanted to buy a house. He knew that air pollution caused health problems and he knew that in his native Israel — as with most developed countries — pollution is measured in real time, often at a street-by-street level. Yet, while local school and tax information was available in exhaustive detail for property buyers, there was no… Read More
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The Droidcast is back, after a lengthy hiatus. It was summoned to life by the fact that there’s a lot to discuss this week, thanks to the release of the Nexus 9 and Android Lollipop, as well as the Nexus Player. We’ve got TC alum and current Engadget Associate Editor Chris Velazco back on board to help out, as both he and myself reviewed the Nexus 9 hardware from HTC. Though it… Read More
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Sing, yodel, or shred guitar into your phone, and get famous. That’s the idea behind performance competition platform Chosen, founded by former Gracenote, MOG, and Beats Music CEO David Hyman. The startup’s been in stealth since its formation late last year, but Hyman agreed to give me the first details about what Chosen’s actually up to. First off, Chosen’s just raised… Read More
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Android rollouts always have fans vying to see who gets a taste first; generally speaking, the Nexus faithful are rewarded for sticking to devices Google has committed to updating swiftly. Nvidia, which has begun making a fair number of Android devices beyond the scope of the smartphone category, has also been quick to offer its users a path to the next generation, and with Android 5.0… Read More
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Last summer, an article on Fast Company asked an important question related to the increasingly popular picture-based character set called emoji, now found on the majority of modern smartphones: Are emoji racist? The problem, the post pointed out, is that the people characters in the emoji set based on the Unicode standard tended to be overwhelmingly white. Where was the diversity? Where… Read More
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Google today announced the alpha launch of Google Container Engine, a new managed service for building and running Docker container-based applications on its cloud platform. Docker is probably the hottest technology in developer circles these days — it’s almost impossible to have a discussion with a developer without it coming up — and Google’s Cloud Platform team… Read More
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At its Cloud Platform Live event today, Google announced Google Cloud Interconnect, an interesting new service for businesses that want to make sure that they get the fastest possible connection to their customers. With Cloud Interconnect, Google Cloud Platform users can now choose among three new connectivity options: direct peering; carrier interconnect; and VPN connectivity. Google says… Read More
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Gigya, a company that helps online businesses and publishers manage customer logins, is announcing that it has raised $35 million in a funding round led by Intel Capital. CEO Patrick Salyer told me that this was a strategic investment from Intel. It’s too early to get specific about how the two companies plan to work together, he said, but on a broad level, Salyer argued that the idea… Read More
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