Android Wear, Google’s new smartwatch platform powering wrist-computers like the LG G, Samsung Gear Live, and Moto 360, now has its own companion application. The app, also called Android Wear for simplicity’s sake (?), is available from the Google Play app store, allowing watch owners to configure various settings and voice actions on their device. The app today offers some… Read More
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Publications like The Times of London, the FT and the New York Times have been hammering away at paywall-based business models that let them make money not just from traffic-based advertising but getting users to pay for the content they read, while newspapers like The Guardian have eschewed the idea on their website but opted for apps where payments are in place. While the basic… Read More
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Prepare another entry into your File Of No Surprise: Microsoft is moving ahead with its efforts to bring the highly lucrative Office franchise to Android tablets.
According to The Verge, Microsoft is currently prepping a private beta of the new software. A sign-up page has been mostly taken offline since the news broke.
A full Office suite for Android tablets is roughly as surprising as San… Read More
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A pair of ex-Microsoft engineers, Robert Mao and Haitao Li, have launched what they describe as a new social network based around photos and videos with Pixotale, an app that aims to re-imagine long-form storytelling for the mobile era. Mao, previously having spent five years with Microsoft Research, says that to create Pixotale, the two had to basically “unlearn everything”… Read More
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Microsoft today announced that it has acquired SyntaxTree, the France-based company behind UnityVS, a popular Visual Studio plugin for developers that use the cross-platform Unity framework to write their games. As S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Developer Division, notes, the company plans to integrate UnityVS into Visual Studio “and… Read More
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Facebook has just bought video ad tech startup LiveRail, which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. A source tells us Facebook paid between $400 million and $500 million for LiveRail, but Facebook refused to comment on the terms. [Update 3:30pm PST: Another source now tells us LiveRail sold for $500 million, matching the… Read More
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Today, the cloud infrastructure market is dominated by several big companies – Amazon, Google and Microsoft — but a public/business/academia partnership called the Massachusetts Open Cloud project is hoping to change that by creating an open computing marketplace where you can negotiate whatever services you need from multiple infrastructure vendors. Peter Desnoyers, a professor… Read More
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A new mobile messaging app called Hipe, which lets users share GIFs, videos, or image overlays and a short amount of text, has introduced a twist on ephemeral messaging which turns replying to conversations into something of a game. In Hipe, friends only have 99 seconds to respond to a message after reading it, or otherwise the content disappears and the conversation is gone. The company says… Read More
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Tetris. Since its debut in 1984, it’s found its way onto nearly every possible platform. Game consoles. Graphing calculators. Lab equipment. Buildings.
Scan, a company that’s trying to link physical businesses to users with the use of QR codes, is stepping into the identity and payments space.