Noah Lang’s health insurance startup is at the center of a debate about the future of work.
As Uber drivers go, Noah Lang fits the basic profile. He’s male, over 30, college-educated, and drives to earn a little extra income. There’s one crucial factor that makes him different, though: His startup has $15 million in funding to help Uber drivers and other gig economy workers find an affordable health plan.
OpenBCI, a project originally funded by DARPA, offers an EEG headset starting at $449 allowing DIYers to peer inside their brains.
Sci-fi is full of tales about people controlling machines with their minds, but sci-fi is already here, sorta. For example, earlier this year, during the Cognitive Technology exhibit at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum, visitors could don electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets that read brainwave patterns to move a robotic arm. They could also create images based on their brainwave activity. There are many other examples of scientists or just DIY “neurohackers,” jacking in to starting figuring out how the electric energy in their skulls can be deciphered.
The acquisition of King Digital Entertainment by Activision Blizzard marries a mobile gaming giant with a behemoth video game publisher.
Activision Blizzard, the company behind video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, just inked a deal to acquire King Digital Entertainment, the maker of wildly popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga. The acquisition will cost Activision a whopping $5.9 billion, and could cement the company’s position as a leading game creator—one that has yet to make its mark on the mobile front.
Peer-to-peer car renting company RelayRides wants you to pick its cars for the driving experience.
Sure, you might use Airbnb because it’s the cheapest option in the city where you’re traveling. But Airbnb has taken great efforts to brand itself as an option for finding unique travel options (1,400 castles and counting!) and connecting with locals.
Despite providing a level playing field for apps, the new Apple TV will thrive on video, indulge in games, and dabble in everything else.
Apple held off on putting apps on Apple TV as it watched Amazon enter the streaming TV box market and Google bounce back from the disastrous Google TV with Chromecast. But it didn’t completely sit out the opportunity for TV-based apps. It had learned a number of lessons from consumers projecting apps to previous Apple TVs via AirPlay. Meanwhile, while Apple TV didn’t offer a developer-accessible OS, the device’s interface to many popular streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Pandora lived in the blur between channels and apps.
Amazon, which put scores of bookstores out of business, is now opening a 5,500-square-foot bookstore in Seattle.
Amazon, the company that helped put so many brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business, is… opening a new brick-and-mortar bookstore. The new storefront, Amazon Books at University Village, will stock approximately 6,000 titles and is located in an upscale shopping center between branches of Banana Republic and Restoration Hardware.
Amazon’s new extended paid leave policy is generous, but putting a policy in place doesn’t guarantee that staff will be encouraged to use it.
Amazon made a big announcement yesterday about parental leave. This comes after the firestorm following the New York Times article on Amazon’s office culture (including how unfriendly it was to new parents).
An Internet-connected lamp, now on Kickstarter, automatically changes brightness and light color depending on the time of day.
Ario, a company founded by a former Microsoft employee and a Large Hadron Collider engineer, is launching its first product, a smart lamp, on Kickstarter today. While it looks like any other sleek industrial lamp, the smart lamp connects to the Internet, so its LED bulbs can mimic the sunlight exactly as it should be shining at your time of day, in your location. Exposure to this natural hue and time-appropriate serving of sunlight will, Ario alleges, make you healthier and more energetic.
Slack’s new and improved slash commands make it easy to integrate third-party apps like Foursquare and Lyft.
Over the last several months, team messaging app Slack has focused more and more on becoming a platform. Rather than building a million standalone features, the company has aimed to make it simpler for developers to build bots and third-party integrations within the Slack interface. Today, Slack announced the latest update to serve that purpose: easy-to-install slash commands.
My fav will go on.
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