YouTube today announced several new features designed to improve the live streaming experience for both creators and viewers. The most notable additions include the ability to play back a live chat after the live stream ends, and the launch of live automatic captions on videos. YouTube began offering automatic captioning back in 2009, and has […]
Huawei didn’t have a new phone to show at MWC this year, so it did what any good smartphone maker would: it put the Mate 10 Pro in an autonomous car and drove it directly at a dog. Of course, the promotional video was a lot more dramatic than what the company was actually demoing […]
Autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai has become the first company to operate an autonomous ride-hailing service on public roads for public users in China. The company, just over a year-old, recently raised $112 million in a Series A round to help it accelerate its efforts, and its fleet is running a nearly two-mile route in […]
500px, the photo-sharing site that once proposed to take on Flickr and Getty, has been acquired by Visual China Group (VCG), a strategic investor in 500px via previous financings. A publicly-traded image licensing company – and China’s Getty, so to speak – bought Corbis in 2016, and is now the world’s third-largest visual content provider. […]
Actions on Google, the Google Assistant’s version of what Amazon calls ‘skills,’ have been around for a while, but Google today announced that is expanding the platform to support a wider group of international developers, in addition to a number of other features for the platform. Maybe the most important update here is that Actions […]
Amazon has renewed Lore for a second season, bringing on Sean Crouch (from The Exorcist and Numb3rs) as showrunner. Lore is an anthology series focused on the supernatural, adopted from the Lore podcast by Aaron Mahnke. The first season of Lore came out last year, using dramatic scenes, animation, narration and docu-style scenes to root […]
Circle just announced that it is acquiring U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. According to Fortune, Circle is paying $400 million for the acquisition. Poloniex has been around for years and used to be one of the biggest exchanges out there — there are now many exchanges competing with Poloniex. Circle is an interesting startup because it’s […]
PhishMe, a seven-year-old startup that helps companies train employees to avoid phishing scams, announced today that it has been purchased by a consortium of private equity firms at a valuation of $400 million. That wording doesn’t give the exact price and a company spokesperson was careful in her response when we requested clarification. “This is […]
As promised last year, CBS today launched its own sports news network, CBS Sports HQ, which will offer 24-hour streaming coverage of news, highlights and analysis for free online, via connected devices, and within the company’s over-the-top streaming service, CBS All Access. The network had originally said its plan for the sports streaming service was […]
Facebook, the social network giant with over 2 billion monthly users, has made a big effort to expand its business by doubling down on one of the big bottlenecks in the world of data: expensive and bad connectivity. And today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company unveiled a slate of updates about the […]