At its WWDC keynote today, Apple announced an update to Siri that brings a number of new features to Apple’s voice-driven personal assistant for iOS. Not only is Siri getting a number of new high-quality male and female voices and support for multiple languages (English, German and French, for example), but it’s also getting quite a bit smarter. In this version, Apple has integrated Twitter… → Read More
At its WWDC developer conference today, Apple announced the next version of Safari which will launch with OS X Mavericks. The new version, Apple’s Craig Federighi, will feature significantly improved JavaScript performance which Apple says will beat Chrome and Firefox. Safari will now also support OS X’s new Power Nap feature, which will significantly reduce the browser’s power… → Read More
The Google Art Project got a major redesign today that includes a much improved and faster navigation and new search features. The improved search tools now makes it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. → Read More
It’s time for Apple to treat us like adults. The company revolutionized the smartphone with iOS, no doubt. But as iOS gets older, its users are, too, and fewer and fewer of them are first-time smartphone owners. It made sense to hold everybody’s hands when this whole idea of a computer in your pocket was new. But just as Apple will probably move from skeuomorphic design to a more… → Read More
The fog of confusion is slowly lifting and the facts surrounding the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program are becoming a little bit clearer. According to a new report by the New York Time’s Claire Cain Miller, the tech companies that allegedly helped the government to spy on their people did indeed not provide a direct access back door to their servers. Instead, the New York Times report claims, they… → Read More
All of the companies that are allegedly involved in the PRISM surveillance program have now issued short statements saying that they are not participating in this program and that they are not allowing the government “direct access” to their servers. Among these, of course, is Google. The company, however, also just issued a longer statement penned by its CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer… → Read More
PRISM is real. Even the U.S. government now acknowledges its existence. The question that remains unanswered, though, is how involved Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Paltalk and Facebook were. These companies are all named as “providers” on the original slides, including the dates the NSA started collecting data from them. The reporter with the most direct access to these documents, Glenn Greenwald… → Read More
Prism already looked like a pretty far-reaching program, but a new report claims the NSA also gave at least one foreign security agency access to this system. According to a report in the Guardian, the NSA provided the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with access to Prism since at least June 2010. → Read More
After the flurry of reports about the NSA’s alleged PRISM surveillance program earlier today, the U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper just released an official statement. According to Clapper, “The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to a collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous… → Read More
The Washington Post today reported that Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company) and Yahoo participated in the so-called PRISM program which provided the NSA with what looks like virtually direct access to their servers and their users’ data. We have now reached out to all of these companies and so far, Facebook, Google and Apple have denied that they… → Read More
Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don’t usually write all that much about Windows apps and translation apps aren’t exactly new, either, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which… → Read More
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) today officially hit general availability and now offers a Service Level Agreement with a 99.95 percent uptime promise for multi-availability zone deployments.
RDS has already been on the market for three and a half years, but Amazon never considered it to be “generally available” because the company continued to add new features and hadn’t provided a… → Read More
If everybody switched from Chrome and Firefox to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8, we could save enough energy to power 10,000 U.S. households, a new study (PDF) commissioned by Microsoft says. The reason for this, Microsoft says, is its focus on making IE fast and the fact that IE taps into modern PC hardware like native graphics cards to speed up its rendering performance. → Read More
All Google wants to talk about this week are APIs, it seems, but today’s announcement that it is not making the CalDAV API partner-only, as it announced during one of its latest “spring cleaning” purges earlier this year, definitely comes as a bit of a surprise. Later this year, the CalDav API, which allows developers to access calendar data, was scheduled to become unavailable for developers who… → Read More
Google’s Maps Engine, its enterprise-focused service for developers who need to be able to create their own maps based on custom data, launched about two years ago and has been available commercially since last year. Today, Google is adding more functionality to the platform by launching an API for Maps Engine that allows developers to take their custom data, import it into Maps Engine and… → Read More
GinzaMetrics, the Y Combinator graduate and 500 Startups-funded SEO management and content marketing platform, today announced a major update and redesign of its service. With this update, the company is introducing this new design to highlight features like its competitor comparisons, recommendations and a white label solution for its dashboard. → Read More
Pandora today launched a new browser-based interface for TVs that it hopes will help set the standard for using the service in the living room. The first devices to support this new HTML5-based interface are the Xbox 360 and PS3, both of which will finally get their first semi-native implementations of Pandora thanks to this new version. → Read More
This has long been rumored, but Microsoft just announced that Windows RT, its operating system for ARM-based tablets and other small touch-enabled devices, will get Outlook 2013 once the free Windows 8.1 update arrives. Until now, Windows RT featured the desktop versions of Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint, but ever since it launched, business users have been complaining about the lack of… → Read More
Google today launched its new Content Experiments API, a tool that allows developers to easily test their sites’ content with programmatic optimization. The new API is deeply integrated with Google Analytics, so developers can use all of Analytics’ power to measure their different optimizations. Indeed, as Google describes it, “this API makes Google Analytics a full-blown A/B testing platform… → Read More
As promised, Google today launched the latest version of Gmail for iPhone. Just like the new Android version, which rolled out yesterday, the iOS version now offers support for Google’s new auto-categorized emails for updates, promotions, newsletters and messages from your social networks. If this new feature has already been enabled for your Gmail account, you will now be able to see a… → Read More
Google will soon launch Google Web Designer, an HTML5 development tool for “creative professionals.” The service, Google says, will launch within “the coming months” and is meant to “empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications – for free.” → Read More
Google’s Cloud Platform has long featured Cloud SQL, a zero-maintenance MySQL database that’s hosted on Google’s cloud platform. What it didn’t offer was an API to easily manage these databases without having to use Google’s admin interface. Today, however, Google is launching the Cloud SQL API. This new REST API will allow developers to programmatically manage their database instances and open up… → Read More
Microsoft has acquired InCycle’s release management solution InRelease, a tool for automatically deploying application components to target services in different environments. InCycle is a Canadian company that specializes in application lifecycle management (ALM) and release management solutions on Microsoft’s .NET platform. → Read More
Google today announced the launch of its Mobile Backend Starter that allows Android developers to deploy a basic cloud infrastructure for their apps that runs on Google’s App Engine. Mobile Backend Starter provides developers with a one-click deployable mobile backend and a client-side framework for Android that provides them with storage services, access to Google Cloud Messaging, continuous… → Read More
Google today updated Chrome for iOS to version 27, which introduces a couple of new features that should make using voice search on iOS a bit easier. Just like on the desktop and Android, as well as the Google Search app for iOS, Chrome for iOS now allows you to speak your search query and — assuming Google’s natural language algorithms understand it and its Knowledge Graph knows the answer — it… → Read More
If you’re using Google Analytics, chances are you have already customized a dashboard for your specific needs. But now, when you develop a new dashboard that may be useful to others, you can share both the dashboard itself or a template for it with others in your profile. Sharing templates was previously available in Google Analytics, but as Google notes, being able to share the dashboard itself… → Read More
Windows 8.1, which will launch in preview on June 26th, isn’t just about bringing the Start button back. For Microsoft, it’s also an opportunity to get businesses of all sizes to take another look at an operating system they mostly ignored so far. Today, at its TechEd conference in New Orleans, the company provided new details about the features it is adding to Windows 8.1 to make it more… → Read More
“Maybe we shouldn’t even call it a browser anymore,” Mozilla’s VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me a few days ago. “‘Browser’ is really an antiquated word. People don’t really browse all that much anymore.” Instead, he argues, we now mostly use our browsers to access sophisticated web apps, web-based productivity tools and social networks.
For browser developers, this means… → Read More
Thanks to an update to its Route 53 DNS web service, Amazon now makes it a bit easier to host sites that need high availability in multiple AWS regions. Route 53 has been offering DNS Failover since February, but that wasn’t really an option if your application was also running behind Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service. ELB allows you to automatically distribute traffic across EC2… → Read More
LinkedIn today announced that it has added optional two-step authentication to its sign-in process. With this move, LinkedIn joins Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and numerous other services who have recently enabled two-factor authentication to ensure that it’s harder for hackers to compromise user accounts. → Read More
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