It’s hard to think of a single product that’s had a bigger impact on the design world than Adobe Photoshop. Ubiquitous with photo editing and image manipulation, the application turned 25 years old last week.
Researchers have achieved the fastest mobile wireless speed to date, managing to reach 1 terabit per second over a 5G connection—about 65,000 times faster than the average 4G download speed.
Now that Apple’s a major player in mobile payments, everyone else is scrambling to play catch-up. In the past week, Samsung acquired digital wallet LoopPay to power payment transactions on its smartphones, and on Monday, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile agreed to preload Google’s mobile payments system on their phones, while also selling it some technology and intellectual property from their joint mobile wallet venture, Softcard.
As part of a class-action lawsuit settlement, LinkedIn has agreed to compensate $1.25 million to approximately 800,000 users who paid for its premium service between March, 15, 2006 and June, 7, 2012. After legal fees, the amount comes to about $1 per user.
Space travel is hard. It’s been seven and a half years since Google and the X Prize Foundation announced a $20 million grand prize to the first team that successfully lands and maneuvers a robot on the moon. But slow progress pushed the Google Lunar XPRIZE deadline (originally slated for 2012) several times—most recently to the end of 2016.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is banking on mobile to turn the company around. Since she joined, the company has ramped up its mobile team from 50 to 500 people and refreshed a number of its apps—Weather, Sports, and Games—to rave reviews. But now the focus is on courting app developers to build on its platform.
I used to obsessively check into venues on Foursquare until I realized how dumb the whole process was. I’d routinely miss parts of conversations while my phone searched for reception, or worse, I’d interrupt to ask, “What’s the name of this place?” And all this so my behavior could be tracked and sold. Eventually, I decided virtual badges and mayorships weren’t worth it, so I stopped.
There is a certain elegance to apps that boil down to a single button. With one click, you can get a pizza delivered to the door, for example, or quickly identify a what song is playing.
According to a patent it was granted this week, Apple has been thinking about creating an Oculus-like virtual reality headset since at least 2008, the year it filed its application. But recent comments by the company’s design boss, Jony Ive, suggest that this is one device the company has no intention of releasing—for now at least.
Is Apple chilling out about weed? It just approved a social network called MassRoots—”a platform for discovering cannabis”—that it previously banned.
Google Helpouts never really had a fighting chance.
Slack turns one year old today. In its short but fascinating history, the startup has managed the remarkable feat of actually getting people excited about enterprise communication software. The company has more than 500,000 daily active users, and it’s adding tens of thousands more every each week.
The tech and science capital of the world—where self-driving cars and futuristic goggles are a regular part of the landscape—also seems to be a hotbed of anti-vaxxers.
The user-review-driven local listings company Yelp said today that it gobbled up the US food-delivery startup Eat24 for $134 million in stock and cash.
When Apple finally released two larger-screen iPhones in the fall, the market responded with so much enthusiasm that the company ended up posting the biggest earnings in corporate history.
With the enterprise market getting more crowded, Microsoft is courting startups to choose its software and services from the get-go. The company said today that it will offer $500,000 in credit to its cloud storage service, Azure, as well as three years of Office 365 and direct support from Microsoft’s engineering teams, to startups in the winter 2015 class of Y Combinator, the accelerator that incubated the likes of Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitch.
It’s no fun playing catchup. In the fall Under Armour overtook Adidas for the first time in sportswear sales, but the athletic apparel and gear company is still far behind Nike. Under Armour is now trying to get up to speed in the digital space, accelerated by its recent acquisitions of the fitness and nutrition-tracking tools MyFitnessPal and Endomondo. In 2013, the sportswear maker also acquired MapMyFitness.
The search engine war over Safari is heating up. Google has long served as the default search engine on the Apple web browser, but with that arrangement reportedly set to expire in early 2015, Yahoo and Microsoft are jockeying for the role.
Investors haven’t been too keen on Twitter lately. This time last year, the stock hit a peak of $67, but it’s more recently been floating at around $40. Shareholders have been particularly worried about slowing user growth as well as recent management shuffles that brought in a new chief financial officer and other executives.
HoloLens was so two weeks ago. Microsoft has just released its newest product, and it’s a lock-screen customization app for Android.
Facebook’s not convinced you always mean it when you hit “like.”
Amazon will begin breaking out the results of its cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, starting with the first quarter of 2015.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s been under fire lately, but today, Jack Dorsey, the social network’s cofounder and chairman, made a public show of rallying around him.
San Francisco is a town full of snobs. People who live here expect restaurants to accommodate their local, organic, sustainable, vegan, gluten-free, no-MSG, Paleo diets. And when they go shopping for weed at posh dispensaries, they also expect variety: prerolled joints, flowers, concentrates, brownies, cookies, caramel corn, cheese crackers, pretzels, you name it.
