Apple is preparing an SDK that would allow developers much greater access to Siri — and the improved assistant will power a stationary hub device like Amazon’s Echo. A report from The Information tallies with things we’ve heard over the last few weeks; expect an announcement, if not the device itself, at WWDC in June. […]
Facebook plans to shut down FBX, the ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads using third-party tools like Criteo and AppNexus. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal and we’ve confirmed it with Facebook. In an emailed statement, Vice President of Monetization Product Marketing Matt Idema suggested that this […]
This story has been going on for years, but it looks like France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des finances) wants more proof. According to Le Monde and Le Parisien, Google’s office in Paris is being raided right now. According to the DGF, Google should be paying more taxes in France as the company […]
Following last week’s news of Microsoft selling off its feature phone business for $350 million, today Microsoft turned its attention to smartphones: the company announced it would lay off 1,850 staff and take a charge of $950 million, including $200 million in severance payments, as it “streamlines” the business to focus on enterprises and niche areas where […]
Mobile publishers need to work with at least a few different ad networks — that’s kind of the whole point of ad exchanges like Twitter-owned MoPub. Today the company is releasing a report that should give publishers a little more context when deciding which networks to work with. For starters, the report says that 53 percent […]
Samsung Electronics said today that it will partner with SK Telecom to build a LoRaWAN network for the Internet of Things that will cover all of South Korea. The two companies claim that this the world’s first nationwide IoT network. LoRaWAN stands for “long-range wide-area network,” and is specifically designed for Internet-connected, battery-operated objects. Backed […]
An experimental solar cell created by MIT researchers could massively increase the amount of power generated by a given area of panels, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste heat. Even better, it sounds super cool when scientists talk about it: “with our own unoptimized geometry, we in fact could break the Shockley-Queisser limit.” The […]
Funky physics and controls make mobile games fun. You tap against gravity in Flappy Bird, fling on a trajectory in Angry Birds and press to maintain momentum in Tiny Wings. So when two of Facebook’s top designers left to build their own apps, they wanted to bring a new gesture to gaming… and let worms, […]
Google’s plan to eliminate passwords in favor of systems that take into account a combination of signals – like your typing patterns, your walking patterns, your current location, and more – will be available to Android developers by year-end, assuming all goes well in testing this year. In an under-the-radar announcement Friday afternoon at the Google I/O developer […]
Are you ready for the Canon 5D Mark IV? Because it’s right around the corner. A new report reveals that photographers are already testing the camera out in the wild, getting the software ready for the expected August release. The lesson of the video below can be summed up in one very simple phrase: always […]