Twitter announced Thursday that it will roll out new web notifications for its online platform slowly over the coming weeks. If a user is logged in on Twitter’s website and receives a follow, favorite, reply, retweet or direct message, an interactive pop-up window will appear in the lower right-hand corner. Users can opt out or adjust the notifications in the platform’s Settings section. By adding notifications to the newly revamped profile pages, Twitter is clearly interested in making its native platform the place to be in an attempt to lure users away from more efficient third-party systems.
Europeans who buy a new Samsung Galaxy S5 phone will get 6 months of free music with it, courtesy of Deezer. Its just the latest move to give premium music services away. Read more »
Google is expanding the Glass Explorer program to those who want in. For a limited time on April 15, anyone in the U.S. over the age of 18 and willing to spend $1,500 can get Google Glass. Read more »
In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos lists the company’s 2013 accomplishments and says Sunday delivery is coming to “a large portion of the U.S. population” in 2014. Read more »
The startup is using M-PESA and a partnership with Kenyan telecom Safaricom to get solar into the hands of rural Kenyans. And it’s about to hit a major growth phase. Read more »
The conditional rule setting service, If This Then That (IFTTT) is on a roll with some new channels for internet of things lovers. The site has new options for the connected Quirky products that use the Wink app. So now your connected egg tray, piggy bank, A/C unit or even your power supply can tie into your email or other web services. I haven’t shelled out (heehee) for the Egg minder yet, but if I did I’d set up a recipe connecting it to Evernote so when I’m close to empty I could add eggs to my grocery list.
Like many of its chipmaking competitors, Texas Instruments is really stoked about the promise of connected devices. It all boils down to more chips sold. So TI has built out a partner program for the internet of things to help manufacturers link together devices and services from different companies. Participants in TI’s ecosystem include 2lemetry, ARM, Arrayent, Exosite, IBM, LogMeIn (Xively), Spark, and Thingsquare. Basically if a company buys TI chips they’ll work with software, hardware or cloud offerings from the above vendors.
MapR is the latest Hadoop vendor to embrace Apache Spark, adding the entire Spark stack of technologies to its distribution. It’s a smart move by MapR, but just more validation that Spark might be the data-processing framework of the future. Read more »
Runscope, a startup providing API debugging tools for developers and enterprises, has raised $6M in first found funding led by General Catalyst Partners. Read more »
The value that social-media tools like Twitter bring to journalism becomes even more obvious when they are used in countries where the traditional media is failing to do its job, and Turkey’s @140journos group is a fascinating example of that at work Read more »
There are two big barriers to wider LTE tablet adoption: the higher cost of a slate with 4G radios and the monthly data fees necessary to connect it. T-Mobile is eliminating both obstacles. Read more »
As the threat from the Heartbleed flaw sinks in, before you start logging on to all of your online services and update your account information, it is a good idea to start practicing some password management best practices. Read more »
In an unusual letter, the FTC warned Facebook to respect existing privacy commitments by WhatsApp, the messaging service it acquired in February. Read more »
Italy’s VisLab has selected BlackBerry’s QNX OS to power its computer vision experiments in autonomous cars. The idea is to help the car to combine and process the information it gets from two-dozen different sensors. Read more »
I took a closer look at the Samsung Gear Fit and chatted with Samsung about its newest wearable product. So far, the device looks promising. Here are a few things you should know about the Gear Fit if you’re considering one for your wrist. Read more »
Gathering, tracking and analyzing customer metrics can be a challenge. Many of today’s tools only give a one-dimensional view of customer website interactions. Learn how SurveyMonkey, the world’s largest survey company, uses Splunk to gather business intelligence and in-depth metrics tracking well beyond typical analytics solutions. Read more »
A drugstore’s decision to tweet a photo of a famous actress leaving its store raises the question of where to draw the line between news and endorsement rights. Read more »
Another day, another crowdfunding campaign for a smart home hub. This one uses Android and has a cellular radio that makes it a more reliable home security choice. Read more »
The follow-up to last year’s iPad Air should arrive late in the third-quarter with both a new processor and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor Apple built for the iPhone 5s says one analyst with a pretty solid track record of product predictions. Read more »
Looking for “the best” Chromebook available? Two recent reviews of the Dell Chromebook 11 for education suggest that’s the model to get and you don’t have to be a student to buy one. Read more »
Third-party app support is coming to Sonos with the launch of Google Play Music: Users of Google’s music service can now cast directly to Sonos speakers. Read more »
For greater agility — and to meet the demanding needs of analytics and business intelligence consumers — cloud computing helps organizations tap into a technology delivery model that offers sophisticated platforms and solutions and reduces corporate capital expenditures. Read more »
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick plans to propose legislation that will curtail the use of non-compete agreements by high-tech companies trying to keep employees from joining rivals. The move has drawn fire from companies like Hopkinton-based EMC, which has used non-compete agreements and other legal tactics against employees who move to competitors. Patrick wants Massachusetts to join California and other states that have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which purports to prevent workers from taking employers’ intellectual property to other businesses.
TinkerBots sets include modules that snap together to form robots that move and interact with their environment. They are on sale on Indiegogo starting today. Read more »
Big, traditional enterprises that scoffed at cloud deployment a few years ago, aren’t laughing now. They’re fully aboard, as we’ll discuss at Structure 2014. Read more »
Rightscale keeps a sharp eye on business cloud usage. Kim Weins talks about some surprising findings from the company’s 2014 State of the Cloud Survey. Read more »
Founder Mark Armstrong started Longreads as a Twitter hashtag five years ago and built it into a global community focused on longform writing. The startup said Wednesday that it has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform. Read more »
Comcast is compounding its extensive Wi-Fi network with even more Wi-Fi. But these new hotspots aren’t coffee shop and outdoor access points. They’re inside its broadband customers’ homes. Read more »
A startup called Emerald Logic claims it uses an evolutionary process to discover the best algorithm for predicting outcomes from any dataset. It might sound to good to be true, but the company claims successes already and is one of several startups trying something similar. Read more »
A clash between Apple’s human interface VP Greg Christie and design chief Jony Ive has come to head and is leading to Christie’s departure from the company, 9to5Mac reports. Read more »
What happens if you install secret tracking software on the phones of tens of millions of people and sell their location to advertisers? Not much, if a new FTC order is anything to go by. Read more »
The Wi-Fi Alliance is certifying a new technology that uses an NFC tap to grant devices access to Wi-Fi networks. The technology is targeted at the internet of things, but it would be very useful for smartphones too. Read more »
In its quest to make Dropbox more enterprise-worthy, the company rebuilt the entire application, adding remote wipe, audit tracking, and content reassignment to the mix. Read more »
