June 2014

If you’re looking for an easier way to turn the content in your head into a beautiful presentation, Slidebean has launched to give users presentation tools right on the web.…

When I moved to Silicon Valley over a decade ago, I thought “venture” meant looking for smart people with great ideas. I’ve learned that’s not true; they’re looking for smart…

Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, a possible IPO from Spotify and a review of music licensing rules by the Justice Department are some of the big developments that have put the streaming music industry into…

Gild, the startup that has built a service that helps companies find and hire software engineers, has closed on $13.5 million in a new round of funding. The new round,…

While you wait for a circular smartwatch to land on the market — or indeed, any smartwatch worth the wearing — this watch-face app offers a taster of the coming…

Canadian digital design agency smashLAB is having a go at building a new topic-based chat platform which emulates some of the functionality of IRC but makes it more accessible to…

Sequoia Capital has invested $15 million in Series A funding in Indian mobile multiplayer gaming company Octro, which makes digital versions of popular local classics, such as card game Indian…

WritePath, an editing company that serves college applicants, technical writers, and academic researchers, has raised $525,000 in seed funding led by B Dash Ventures. The Singapore-based startup will use the…

When Disney shut down LucasArts just 154 days after acquiring it as part of their $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm last year, four members of the studio’s Singapore team were determined to…

Apple has a new feature in iOS 8 that will surface app suggestions on the bottom left screen of your locked iPhone depending on your location, according to developers posting…

Watch out, Oculus. Here comes Valve. The gaming giant recently demonstrated a prototype VR headset with wearers reporting impressive results. The odd-looking headset is speckled with dots, allowing a table-top…

Apple has made some changes to its core inter-device sharing protocols in iOS 8, including AirPlay and AirDrop. AirDrop, the simple file sharing mechanism introduced in OS X Lion and…

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today.

MediaMath, which offers tools for ad-buying, data management, and other aspects of digital marketing, announced today that it has raised more than $175 million in additional funding, including a $73.5…

Among the many announcements made during the two-hour keynote at WWDC yesterday, three were targeted specifically at game developers: SceneKit, new functions in SpriteKit, and Metal, a new framework that…

Forget for just a moment that e-cigarettes mostly contain propylene glycol — a substance used in antifreeze and known to cause cancer. Smokio claims to be the first connected e-cig…

Apple’s keynote for WWDC 2014 happened Monday morning, and there was a lot to digest, both for attendees and those watching at home. Apple didn’t announce any new gadgets at…

Here’s a little factoid that has pretty much nothing to do with the broader significance of Swift, Apple’s new programming language for developing iOS and OS X apps. But it…

While the tech industry has long aspired to be inclusive, the numbers are dismal. Hardly a week passes by without media outlets highlighting concerns about sexism, ageism or “founder profiling”…

Earlier today, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reported that the tablet-touch build of Office for Android will land before the touch-ready build for Windows. Yes, this is the real world. Microsoft…

Google today announced that it will soon release a Chrome plug-in that will enable end-to-end encryption for web-based email services. The plug-in is based on the OpenPGP email encryption standard. Google’s plan…

Android Wear is going to be a big part of Google I/O 2014 this year, and Google helps developers acclimate to the idea of wrist-borne apps. Already, internal developers working…

Despite Congressional bloviation, the NSA doesn’t think that Edward Snowden is a foreign spy. NSA Chief Michael Rogers doesn’t think it likely that Snowden is working for Russia, or any…

Consumer Physics, the Tel Aviv-based startup behind the handheld molecular food scanner dubbed “SCiO,” has now topped $2 million in crowdfunding via its Kickstarter campaign, with 11 days still remaining.…

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, has just posted a blog post announcing the Board of Overseers at the world’s most successful accelerator. The list includes Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky,…

Apple’s WWDC keynote had a message for cloud service providers. Apple knows it has the devices inside the enterprise, whether iPhone, iPad and even Macs, and it wants more than…

50 Cent’s new album isn’t doing too well critically, but commercially the rapper is trying to take all comers and is even accepting bitcoin as payment for the record.

Dinner Lab, an exclusive supper club that lets up-and-coming chefs test their recipes by preparing multi-course meals for a private audience, has just raised its first outside funding. The previously…

As developers poke and prod their way around the brand new Beta builds of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, all kinds of little unannounced features continue to spill out.…

Unfortunately, there is no app or API that can solve San Francisco’s housing and commercial real estate crunch. It’s rather complicated. But there is this other retro, 2,500-year-old technology that might work. It’s…