After 24 hours of staring at their screens, the teams that participated in our Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon have now finished their projects and are currently presenting them onstage. With more than 160 hacks, there are far too many cool ones to write about, but one that stood out to me was NewsRel, an iPad-based news app that uses machine-learning techniques to understand how news stories relate… → Read More
The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon has been underway for a few hours now and we’re already seeing a bunch of cool projects. Team Geem is building what it calls a “Pandora for Exercise.” The service, which will hopefully be ready in time to be demoed tomorrow, will create exercise programs that are tailored for the individual user. The usual exercise DVDs, Geem believes, are just too… → Read More
Conscious Company, a Portland, OR-based retail startup that lets its users subscribe to variety of different sample boxes it delivers once per month, just announced that it has closed a $400,000 seed round led by Birchmere Ventures and an undisclosed angel investor. Similar to Birchbox and comparable “box” startups, Conscious Company also runs an online store where its subscribers can… → Read More
If you regularly need to open Microsoft Office documents in the browser, Google now offers you a new Chrome extension that renders Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly in the browser. Currently, these documents open in a Drive-based viewer, but after you install the new Chrome Office Viewer (which is officially still in beta), these documents will open directly in the browser. Until now, this… → Read More
The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today. The odd thing about this launch is that Bing previously offered a very similar feature called Bing Deals since 2011 – a service that now seems… → Read More
Google keeps integrating Google+ deeper into all of its products and today it’s Drive’s turn. When you open a file in Drive, you will now see the Google+ profile pictures of other viewers at the top of the document. Hovering over them brings up their Google+ card with their cover image and which Google+ circle you currently have them in. This, Google says, will make it easier to see… → Read More
Back in 2010, Google launched Instant Preview to provide users with a quick way to get a graphic preview of a webpage before you click on the actual link. Now, as first spotted by Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog, it looks like Google is thinking about removing this feature and replacing it with a new drop-down menu. Update: a Google spokesperson just responded to our… → Read More
Heroku, the popular cloud platform as a service company, today announced the public launch of its Europe region. Developers will now be able to deploy their services closer to their European customers, which should result in markedly reduced latency for them. The company says it has observed performance improvements of 100ms or more per request for European end users. Heroku is built on top of… → Read More
Telefonica’s TokBox announced a huge upgrade to its OpenTok on WebRTC service today. TokBox’s new cloud-based Mantis media distribution framework is designed to overcome some of WebRTC’s limits with regard to video distribution. By default, WebRTC is a peer-to-peer platform, but that makes it hard to scale video chats beyond two participants. With Mantis, TokBox essentially puts… → Read More
The U.S. real estate market is seeing a bit of a rebound right now and, with it, real estate-related online services like Zillow, Redfin and Trulia and newcomers like Houzz are also getting back in the groove of launching regular updates. Trulia today launched its redesigned iPad app, which now features new listing pages with large photos, a new navigation menu and an improved map view. The… → Read More
Earlier this week, Google launched its new Google+-powered commenting system for Blogger, but it’s not clear when the company plans to release it for the rest of the web. Now, however, intrepid developer Brandon Holtsclaw has managed to bring the Google+ commenting system to any WordPress blog. While Google’s code for the new commenting system isn’t optimized for WordPress or… → Read More
Akamai published its quarterly “State of the Internet” report for the last quarter of 2012 today. The report, as usual, looks at global Internet speeds, as well as the state of Internet security, the number if IPv4 numbers in use and other similar metrics. Internet speeds, of course, are the most interesting numbers for users in this report. South Korea has long been in the lead in… → Read More
Exadel’s Tiggzi online mobile app development service for iOS, Android and Windows Phone launched almost exactly a year ago and today, the company is officially rebranding it as Appery.io. The reason for this change, the company told me, is to “reflect the evolution of Appery.io as well as to support where [the] platform is headed. ” The service always stood out from its… → Read More
Gengo, an increasingly popular online translation service that uses a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide high-quality translations in 33 languages, announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from Iris Capital, Infocomm, NTT-IP and Saudi Telecom Ventures, as well as returning… → Read More
Google+ is finding its way into every Google product, and AdWords is no exception. Starting today, AdWords advertisers can easily highlight their Google+ follower counts in their enhanced campaigns. On average, Google says, ads with these follower counts have “a 5-10% higher click-through rate” than regular ads. The company, it seems, tested these new ads with the help of a number of… → Read More
WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties. For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar… → Read More
Just in time for Earth Day, Google just launched version 7.1 of Google Earth Pro, the professional version of Google’s desktop-based mapping tool. The new version adds a number of map-making and advanced printing tools that will make it easier for businesses to create legends and scales for their maps and to add titles to them. The new Viewshed tool now also allows users to identify and… → Read More
With “Don’t Get Scroogled,” Microsoft went for shock and awe in its fight against Google by arguing that the search giant can’t be trusted with your personal information. Today, Microsoft is launching a far more restrained campaign: an online safety and security resource center, a privacy quiz and a new TV ad that proclaims that “your privacy is [Microsoft's]… → Read More
Last week, Google finally released the developer guides and other necessary documents that will allow developers to write apps for Glass. In some respects, the so-called Mirror API may have been a disappointment to developers who were expecting to run full-blown augmented-reality apps, but even in its current form, it will allow developers to create new experiences for their new and existing apps… → Read More
Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing… → Read More
Google has long had an interest in renewable energy and has now invested more than $1 billion of its own money in alternative energy projects. However, as the company notes in a blog post and white paper today, it’s not always easy for companies that want to buy renewable energy to do so, given that most utilities don’t yet offer a renewable power option yet. In its white paper, Google… → Read More
Airbnb today announced that it is open sourcing Rendr, its library for running Backbone.js apps seamlessly on both the client and the server. After launching its Chronos cron replacement a few weeks ago, this marks the company’s second major contribution to the open source ecosystem this year. Airbnb originally developed Rendr for its mobile site. A few months ago, Airbnb talked about how it… → Read More
During its Q3 2013 earnings call today, Microsoft’s outgoing CFO Peter Klein noted that the company plans to bring Windows 8 to smaller devices. Until now, Windows 8 was mostly geared toward desktops and larger tablets, including Microsoft’s own Surface and RT machines. With the forthcoming Windows 8 Blue, rumor had it that Microsoft would enable its OEMs to run Windows 8 on smaller… → Read More
Microsoft just reported the results for its third financial quarter of 2013. The company’s revenue came in just under expectations at $20.49 billion but it beat expectation with an earnings per share of $0.72. Despite the muted response to Windows 8 and PC sales that continue to disappoint, the analyst consensus was that Microsoft’s revenue would increase 13 percent compared to last… → Read More
Google today announced that bloggers on its Blogger publishing platform can now enable a new Google+-powered commenting system for their sites. This means Blogger users can now use Google+ as a commenting platform for their blogs and comments from Google+ will automatically appear on their blogs, too. Google has already enabled this new system on all of its official blogs. This new commenting… → Read More
At at AWS Summit in New York today, Amazon announced that its S3 storage service now holds more than 2 trillion objects. That’s up from 1 trillion last June and 1.3 trillion in November, when the company last updated these numbers at its re:Invent conference. As Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for AWS Jeff Barr notes in a blog post today, it took Amazon six years to grow to get to 1 trillion… → Read More
Two weeks ago, Microsoft launched its Windows 8 Quickstart kits for web developers who want to test their web apps on Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8 on their Macs. That offer sold out very quickly, but today, Microsoft announced that it is making another 1,000 of these kits available on Swish, with 10,000 more coming throughout the rest of the year. The offer will go live at 2:30 p.m. PT… → Read More
Chrome will soon warn users when they are about to download software that could try to change how the browser handles extensions. Specifically, this extension to the company’s Safe Browsing system looks for binaries that could allow potentially malicious extensions to be installed in the browser without the user’s knowledge. This new feature will roll out within the next few days. Last… → Read More
Microsoft today announced that it has launched two-step authentication for its Microsoft accounts. This optional feature, which will roll out to all Microsoft accounts over the next few days, works pretty much exactly like the two-factor authentication schemes you are probably already familiar with. Besides your usual password, you will also need a second piece of information – a short… → Read More
I’m all for open source and freely sharing code, but there are also occasions when it’s necessary to hide some of the mechanics behind a web-based application. That’s where JScrambler comes in, a Portuguese startup that’s launching version 3 of its service today. JScrambler 3 allows developers to obfuscate their source code for mobile and desktop web apps so it’s… → Read More
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