Facebook is hosting its F8 developer conference in San Jose this week. Yesterday, it kicked off with a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who addressed the company’s latest scandals, including Cambridge Analytica, election meddling, and fake news. But he also spoke of his commitment to Facebook’s mission of connecting the world, and his optimism for the future. The company then introduced a number of new products across its platform, as well as on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. We saw things like Facebook Dating, Instagram video calling, Oculus Go’s launch, a new Messenger, VR memories, 3D Photos, and more. Today, live coverage of…
Author: geekfenceblogger
The venture investment arm of massive meat manufacturer Tyson Foods is continuing its push into potential alternative methods of poultry production with a new investment in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies. The backer of companies like the plant-based protein-maker Beyond Meat, and cultured-meat company Memphis Meats, Tyson Ventures’ latest investment is also tackling technology development to create mass produced meat in a lab — instead of on the farm. Future Meat Technologies is working to commercialize a manufacturing technology for fat and muscle cells that was first developed in the laboratories of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It is difficult to imagine cultured…
Lyft is committing $1.5 million to its Relief Rides program. The idea has historically been to better support people during times of crisis, such as natural disasters or other emergency situations. Now, Lyft is expanding its reach to help people who many need rides to job interviews or medical appointments. One of the partners Lyft is looking to continue working with is Caritas of Austin, an organization that seeks to prevent and end homelessness. Already, Lyft has partnered with New Orleans-based Youth Empowerment Project to help people get to appointments and job interviews. Lyft has been riding the do-good train…
Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, does a great job of managing a single cluster, but Upbound, a new Seattle-based startup wants to extend this ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud environment. It’s a growing requirement as companies deploy ever-larger numbers of clusters and choose a multi-vendor approach to cloud infrastructure services. Today, the company announced a $9 million Series A investment led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with numerous unnamed angel investors from the cloud-native community. As part of the deal, GV’s Dave Munichiello will be joining the company board of directors. It’s important to…
Consumer spending in global app stores will total $106.4 billion by the end of the year and $156.5 billion by 2022, according to a new report from App Annie out this morning. The 2018 figure is down a bit from the $110 billion the firm was estimating back in December. Much of the growth continues to come from the Asia-Pacific region, where China is easily maintaining its position as the world’s largest app market, and accounts for 40 percent of worldwide spend. The report also found that consumer spending per device is on the rise, and will grow 23 percent…
Encrypted messaging service Signal received a curious email from Amazon Web Services. The representative at Amazon is saying that Signal is violating the terms of service by using domain fronting to avoid censorship. Signal isn’t necessarily the most popular messaging app. But chances are you’ve been using Signal technologies in the past. The organization behind it has partnered with WhatsApp to develop the end-to-end encryption protocol used in WhatsApp. While this is a great improvement over unencrypted communications, WhatsApp is blocked in China and owned by Facebook. And Facebook leverages WhatsApp user data in most of the world for its…
At Hulu’s Upfronts presentation this morning in New York, the company announced the launch of a new consumer-facing feature that lets you tell Hulu to stop suggesting content you don’t want to watch. The feature was teased previously at CES in January as something that was in the works. The option will appear in the user interface, underneath the content suggestion. From here, you can tap a button that says “Stop Suggesting.” “We want you to be in control of the experience. If you don’t like something, you should be able to tell us,” said Hulu’s Head of Experience, Ben…
The Xerox/Fujifilm deal was never a given for any number of reasons. Now the planned takeover has been thrown into even more doubt, as Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson and six board members are stepping down. The move is considered a huge win for Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who have been attempting to kill the Fujifilm deal, which they believe undervalues Xerox. As Reuters notes, pair of activist shareholders won a court ruling in New York last week, which found a judge referring to Jacobson as “hopelessly conflicted” in his role as CEO. “Following the court’s decision last week to…
Dish’s Sling TV service is expanding its Cloud DVR to a wide variety of new devices. Chrome browser, Chromecast, Xbox One, LG Smart TVs, and more recent models of Samsung Smart TVs (2016 and 2017 models) will all now support Sling TV’s Cloud DVR service. For those of you who don’t know, Sling TV DVR is a digital DVR service that lets users record up to 50 hours of content, with an unlimited amount of time for storing those devices. In other words, recorded content in the digital DVR will never expire. Of note: Sling TV’s DVR service costs an…
Hulu now has over 20 million U.S. subscribers – that’s up from the 17 million-plus it claimed in January. The news of its subscriber growth is being delivered alongside a series of pitches to advertisers at the company’s Upfronts presentation in New York this morning, where it’s also touting its upcoming original series and detailing its new ad products. One of those will be of particular interest to Hulu’s users, too – the company will at last allow subscribers to download shows to watch offline. This is a feature both Amazon and Netflix already support, the former as of fall…