Amazon has quietly ended its price protection policy on all products except for televisions. The change to the company’s policy comes at a time when a handful of startups have launched to help consumers automate the process of requesting refunds when prices change on online sites, including Amazon as well as dozens of other e-commerce stores. For example, newcomer […]
Live mobile video is evolving beyond selfie-stream rants and citizen journalism. Facebook will now allow non-stop, long-form broadcasting as long as the creators don’t mind that they won’t be able to permanently save and share the video. The new Continuous Live Video API enables persistent streams like nature feeds, 24-hour windows into major landmarks, or […]
File it under ‘it seemed great on paper’… but Google’s project Ara modular smartphone concept is — for all intents and purposes — dead. If you want to be a little more generous, you can say Google has pivoted away from attempting to engineer the impossible — i.e. total smartphone modularity — to strip it back to a few swappable […]
For years, the media industry has speculated, somewhat worriedly, that big tech companies wanted to branch out, to take on the TV companies – to acquire rights to premium content. By and large, Silicon Valley firms’ coy response has typically been a demure: “We are a platform company, not a content company.” Now that the […]
Let’s face it. Some tech conferences have lost their way. While TechCrunch Disrupt remains a firmly curated, media-driven, event, with hundreds of journalists attending, a couple of other conferences have really gone for scale. A minimum of 15,000 people, thousands of companies, echoing halls — and a lot of investors (and journalists) turning their badges […]
What if the apps on your phone knew where you were, what you were doing, what’s nearby, and even what the weather was like outside, and then combined this information to react intelligently to your current situation? Would that be creepy or amazing? We will soon find out, it seems. At this week’s Google I/O conference, […]
Cameras record a ton of information about the exposure settings of your camera, and these have been standardized into EXIF metadata fields. What few people realize is that metadata is not limited to these standard fields, and your camera is recording far more information than you ever thought possible. Much of this extra data is […]
In the world of kitchen appliances, everyone wants to be the next Keurig, it seems. First, there were single-cup coffee brewers that followed and claimed to be better than Keurig, from Nespresso, Mr. Coffee and Lavazza to name a few. Later came cold drink machines like the Bartesian for cocktails, or PicoBrew for craft beer. […]
As we witness what may be the final days of Yahoo as an independent business, consider how just a decade ago it was running neck-and-neck with Google, now one of the world’s largest companies by market value. It would be silly for anyone to claim they could have predicted how these two businesses would compare […]
It’s been almost five years since we heard that “software is eating the world.” The number of SaaS applications has exploded and there is a rising wave of software innovation in the area of APIs that provide critical connective tissue and increasingly important functionality. There has been a proliferation of third-party API companies, which is fundamentally […]