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
WebRTC allows developers to add real-time voice calls, video chats and file sharing to their web apps without the need for plug-ins. Chrome and Firefox now support this proposed standard, and there is a good chance others will follow suit at some point. Given the experimental nature of WebRTC and some of its implementations, though, most Internet users haven’t actually seen it in action, and… → Read More
Google today added a new feature to Google Apps for Business that could make its Chrome browser significantly more palatable for businesses. The company’s new cloud-based management tool for Google Apps for Business and Education customers now gives IT administrators the ability to customize more than 100 Chrome policies and preferences for their users right from the standard Google Admin… → Read More
Microsoft today launched the latest version of its Android app for Outlook.com. The app first launched last November, but as Microsoft admits, the “Android app has been behind” its web and mobile app for Windows Phone, so it was about time to give this version a refresh. The earlier version of the app did indeed look somewhat dated, so the new version now features a fully overhauled… → Read More
Xamarin, the company behind the cross-platform mobile development platform with the same name, today announced that it has recently acquired the Danish mobile testing startup LessPainful. LessPainful is the company behind the popular open source cross-platform functional test platform for Android and iOS, and Xamarin has already put this acquisition to use. The Xamarin Test Cloud, the automated… → Read More
After a slew of updates about Google Glass today, the company has now released some of the final pieces for the Glass launch: the MyGlass companion app for Android and a web-based Glass setup wizard. The companion app, which was first spotted by Android Police, will work on Android devices that run version 4.0.3+ of the operating system, enables Glass to handle SMS messages and also provides… → Read More
The news about Google Glass just keeps coming today. After announcing that Glass is about to ship and releasing the Glass Mirror API documentation, Google has now also posted the full spec sheet for the Glass hardware. There are no major surprises here, but it’s nice to finally get to see what those users who will be able to buy the Explorer editions will get for their $1,500. Glass will… → Read More
Earlier today, Google announced that it is about to ship its first Google Glass units and just in time for them to arrive, Google has now also posted the developer guidelines for its Glass Mirror API. Access to the API itself, it’s worth noting, is still in limited preview and only developers who have access to the Glass hardware will be able to work with the API. Everybody else can also… → Read More
Google just notified everybody on the Google Glass waiting list that it is “seeing the first few devices come off the production line right now.” Google says it wants to start shipping the devices as soon as possible and doesn’t want to wait until it has produced enough to fully satisfy demand. Because of this, Glass will ship out in batches to the 2,000 “Glass… → Read More
Mobile browsing got significantly faster over the last 12 months, according to a new report from Google, and the average page load times on mobile are now comparable to desktop page load times. On mobile, web pages now load about 30 percent faster than a year ago, but when it comes to desktops, Google only found some very minor speed-ups. That, however, is actually quite impressive, given that the… → Read More
Google’s announcement that it would fork WebKit to develop its own Blink browser engine was definitely a surprise and the repercussions of this move for the browser ecosystem as a whole are still unclear. Today, about two weeks after Google’s announcement, Vincent Hardy, Adobe’s director of engineering for the company’s Web Platform team, announced that, in addition to… → Read More
Microsoft today launched updates for five out of its six Bing Apps for Windows 8. With this update, the News, Finance, Sports, Travel and Maps apps – all of which are installed by default on Windows 8 systems – now all sport a number of new features and improvements that, as Microsoft puts it, “make it easier to customize and personalize them to best suit your needs.” The… → Read More
Google’s search results in Europe could soon look a bit different if a number of new reports about the company’s settlement with the European Union’s competition commission are correct. After a three-year investigation into its potentially anti-competitive practices, Google submitted its proposal for an agreement with the EU last week, but the details remained under wraps. → Read More
If you’re running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not “admin.” According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find… → Read More
The team behind the Knight Foundation-backed mobile sensor startup Behavio today announced that it is joining Google. We have learned that this is not an acquisition or an acqui-hire, however. The company, which was founded by a group of MIT Media Lab alums, was working on Funf, an open-source “extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices.” The project, the… → Read More
Bing users can now easily share the images they find with their friends on Pinterest. Starting today, Bing’s image search will feature the standard Pinterest ‘Pinit’ button on every photo details page, so the integration isn’t all that deep, but according to Microsoft, this will save avid Pinterest users “some of the hassles they face” when they try to… → Read More
LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been… → Read More
What will happen to your Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google+ accounts after you die? That’s probably not something you really want to think about, but as more and more of our data now lives online, that’s sadly a question that comes up with some regularity. Today, Google is launching its Inactive Account Manager on the Google Account settings page, which sets out to set up a… → Read More
Today during Google Venture’s “Glass Collective” event, Google told us that it hopes to get the Glass hardware into the hands of developers “within the next month.” The exact date for when Google plans to ship the first publicly available versions of Glass remains unknown, but Google has now confirmed to us that it is now very close to shipping the $1,500 devices to… → Read More
If it gets it, Google wants to turn .search into a “dotless domain,” the company told ICANN a few days ago. Last year, Google applied to manage the .app, .blog, .cloud and .search generic top-level domain (gTLD) names as part of a major expansion of the domain-name system. ICANN, which is managing this expansion, hasn’t awarded any of the gTLDs yet, and the whole program remains… → Read More
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, Firefox OS and other online tools, today announced that its CEO Gary Kovacs, who joined Mozilla in 2010, will step down “later this year.” The organization has already started a search for his replacement. Kovacs will remain a member of Mozilla’s board of directors. Previous to becoming Mozilla’s CEO, Kovacs was the senior… → Read More
Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. → Read More
The real estate market in the U.S. is quickly picking up pace again, and last month, Zillow‘s mobile traffic hit a new record with 89 homes viewed per second (up from 75 homes the month before). Today, almost exactly four years after it first launched its Zillow for iPhone app, the service is relaunching its iOS apps with an updated homescreen and restructured navigation. On the iPad, Zillow… → Read More
Desktop-based email clients aren’t exactly a hot topic these days, but millions of users still rely on their trusty Outlook client. To bridge the gap between Outlook on the desktop and the web, the popular online content-sharing and management service Box has long offered an add-on that allows Outlook users to use Box for managing email attachments. Until today, this add-on was only… → Read More
Earlier today, Google announced that it would bring its gigabit Google Fiber Internet service and Google Fiber TV with about 200 HD channels to Austin, Texas, by the middle of 2014. After the event, Google hosted a phone call with press and analysts to discuss the announcement in more detail. During the call, Austin’s Mayor Lee Leffingwell reiterated that the city reapplied for Fiber after… → Read More
Docstoc, the online store for high-quality professional and business documents that made its debut at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007, today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to sell its content directly to Microsoft Office users from within the Office applications. When Office users search for templates, they will now encounter Docstoc as a provider and can start the… → Read More
Mozilla today launched the second beta of its Persona authentication system, which now allows anybody with a Yahoo.com email address to sign up and log in to any Persona-enabled site without the need to create a new account for Persona or a new login or password for the site that uses it. Mozilla plans to add support for additional webmail providers in the coming month. With Persona, Mozilla wants… → Read More
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