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.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and wicked beyond compare. Who can understand it? (Please heart this)
Google’s honor is dubious. A new study shows the world’s largest tech and telecommunications firms are not protecting users enough.
No one enjoys reading the long, dense, and legalese-filled terms of services of large tech companies. However, research initiative Ranking Digital Rights did—and found that the world’s biggest tech companies are falling short when it comes to user privacy and freedom of speech. The nonprofit initiative surveyed companies including Google, Yahoo, Vodafone, and AT&T for the project.
The giant tech capital fund is investing in a free 4G service, Braille printers, GPS alternatives, and more.
Intel Capital just announced they are investing $22 million in 11 different startups, and that the venture capital arm of the tech company is on track to invest $500 million in startups this year.
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