Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant competes against the likes of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the unnamed mystery voice behind Google Now. It’s part of a new wave of services slowly making talking to computers mainstream, but because of Microsoft’s weak position on mobile, it hasn’t quite had the same impact as some of its competitors. Cortana is front-and-center at Build […]
The battle between headsets you strap to your heads is being brought to a rolling boil this week, as Microsoft’s HoloLens Dev Kit and Oculus Rift both start shipping to customers. Being the lover of cutting-edge tech that I am, you’d expect I’d be in lust with both technologies, but it turns out that isn’t the case. […]
Sometimes you just hit a dead end in troubleshooting what’s going on with your phone. You’ve tried everything you can think of, but no dice. For tech-savvy users this may be messing with carrier settings or navigating file menus, for the less-digitally inclined it might be connecting a pair of bluetooth headphones. Samsung is updating […]
500 Startups is moving north of the border for its next micro-fund. The fund, called 500CAN, is targeting a $30 million size that will be focused on checking out what investments in Canada are all aboot. 500 is specifically looking to build presences in Toronto and Waterloo where some of the nation’s top engineering talent reside. […]
When a new category of gadget appears, it’s understandable when the vanguard devices aren’t the most well designed, or are resistant to disassembly and repair. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the first production VR headset from Oculus — in its teardown, iFixit found the device to be an elegant piece of […]
It’s easy to get caught up in the new, cool thing aspect of transportation tech and apps, but there’s some real social benefit and freedom to be found here. Take, for instance, Moovit’s latest upgrade. The public transportation app recently added features to make it easier for blind users to take transit using VoiceOver (iOS) […]
I know that this isn’t going to be any comfort to those suffering from iOS 9.3 bugs, but according to mobile app analytics firm Apteligent, the new release a has a crash rate of only 2.2 percent. This is a far lower crash rate than experienced by earlier releases of iOS. Apteligent It’s interesting to […]
Safari Technology Preview lets devs test upcoming HTML, JavaScript, and CSS features — and report bugs. Image: Apple Apple has launched the Safari Technology Preview to give developers an early look at web technologies in the pipeline for iOS and OS X. Although the preview version of Safari is only for OS X, Apple says […]
A lot of professional photographers have a growing frustration about losing jobs to part-time “photographers” doing horrible work for $30, or having clients tell them that another “photographer” will do the same job for $25. So, I got to thinking: what if other professions were treated like photography? EgyptAir Flight 181 was hijacked yesterday by […]
The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports. TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment […]