Andy Rubin’s Essential has acquired CloudMagic, makers of the Newton email app, for an undisclosed sum. The news, first reported this morning, has since been confirmed by TechCrunch. An Essential spokesperson offered the following admittedly open-ended statement, “We are always on the lookout for companies with great technology and talent to help accelerate our product […]
Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app. […]
Google’s Project Fi wireless service is getting a major update today that introduces an optional always-on VPN service and a smarter way to switch between Wi-Fi and cellular connections. By default, Fi already uses a VPN service to protect users when they connect to the roughly two million supported Wi-Fi hotspots. Now, Google is expanding […]
Getting news in the morning has long been my most used feature on Google Assistant. Asking Home “what’s in the news” brings up a quick flash briefing from a handful of selected outlets. It’s quick, it’s easy and it helps fill me in on the way out the door. Google’s long promised to improve on […]
Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.” That policy felt pretty disingenuous given how aggressively Facebook has replicated everyone else’s […]
Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building mobile Android and iOS applications, hit its version 1.0 release today. In addition, Google also today announced a set of new third-party integrations with the likes of Square and others, as well as a couple of new features that make it easier to integrate Flutter with existing applications. The […]
A study of Google search results by anti-tracking rival DuckDuckGo has suggested that escaping the so-called ‘filter bubble’ of personalized online searches is a perniciously hard problem for the put upon Internet consumer who just wants to carve out a little unbiased space online, free from the suggestive taint of algorithmic fingers. DDG reckons it’s […]
Flutter, Google’s toolkit for building cross-platform applications, hit version 1.0 today. Traditionally, the project focused on iOS and Android apps, but as the company announced today, it’s now looking at bringing Flutter to the web, too. That project, currently called Hummingbird, is essentially an experimental web-based implementation of the Flutter runtime. “From the beginning, we […]
Zendesk has always been strongly focused on customer service in the cloud. They began to look at this more broadly in September when they purchased Base to move into sales automation and CRM. Today, the company announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset. All of this appears […]
