Airbnb has become of the more popular ways of travelling around Europe, offering visitors to cities and regions home-based alternatives to staying in impersonal or expensive hotels when they are away from home. That hasn’t been without controversy, though, and so as it continues to grow — to an estimated 24 million stays by 2020
Ever since 8bitdo updated their NES30 Pro and other game controllers with Nintendo Switch support, I’ve been using them as the primary way to play on the console. Now at E3, 8bitdo has revealed a new model that might just become the best Switch controller of all time. The SNES30 Pro (and SFC30 Pro, as
Microsoft is rolling out an update to its AI-powered photo editing app, Microsoft Pix, that aims to give Prisma and others like it some new competition. While the app was originally designed to enhance your iPhone photos by tweaking things like color, exposure and other variables, the newly updated Microsoft Pix will now let you
With last fall’s formation of Group Nine Media, four digital media organizations (Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Discovery’s Seeker) came together under a single corporate umbrella. Now the company says it’s seeing real success connecting with readers and viewers, with 114 million social media engagements in May — up from 70 million in January. As
How should Facebook decide what’s allowed on its social network, and how to balance safety and truth with diverse opinions and cultural norms? Facebook wants your feedback on the toughest issues it’s grappling with, so today it published a list of seven “hard questions” and an email address — hardquestions@fb.com — where you can send feedback and
In today’s tech news, Uber continues its management shakeup as a board member resigns after an inappropriate comment. Meanwhile, Sprint does its best to …
The latest reworking of Microsoft’s tablet gives us deja vu all over again. Subscribe to CNET: http://cnet.co/2heRhep Check out our playlists: http://cnet.co/2g8kcf4 …
In an effort to better cater to newcomers, Twitter once again is redesigning its app across mobile, desktop and the web. The revamp isn’t a radical departure from its prior look-and-feel or user experience – unlike when it introduced its own stories-like feature called Moments, for example, or when began reordering the tweets in your
Sphero continues its partnership with Disney today, with the launch of a new toy based on the Marvel superhero Spider-Man. But where BB-8 and Lightning McQueen could move around the room, Spider-Man is more stationary — his real power involves holding conversations. The simplest thing this Spider-Man can do is tell jokes — he seems
Europeans traveling through the 28 Member State bloc are now able to use their mobile devices more freely, thanks to a top level abolition of mobile roaming charges across the region. In a joint statement yesterday from the Commission, European parliament and Council, the move is described as “a concrete, positive result for European citizens”. There are
Salespeople have a lot of things to sell and the latest technology can help them sell even more. Do you think you have the perfect pitch? Highspot will tell you if you’re wrong. Or at least that’s their pitch. Highspot’s software analyzes various communications with prospective clients, including presentations, case studies and training videos. Then it provides
With high-profile investments from Alibaba and SoftBank fueling an impressive growth story since demonetization last year, you could be forgiven for thinking that Paytm has India’s payments market sewn up. But at least one company will agree to differ on that. MobiKwik, the mobile payments startup that is number two to Paytm in India, is
E-book sales may be declining in the U.S. and U.K., but in South Korea, many people still enjoy swiping instead of leafing through their reading material. E-book sales there are growing steadily each year, driven in part by the popularity of web comics. Ridibooks, which claims to be Korea’s largest e-book provider, has raised a
500 Startups has announced the close of its fund for Japan, more than 18 months after it was first unveiled. The effort is backed by the Japanese government, which has chipped in as an LP via its Cool Japan Fund. (Yes, that really is the name of the fund, which is aiming to use about
Amid ongoing struggles at Uber, one of its stronger regional rivals in transportation on demand has raised a significant round of funding, picking up a significant strategic investor in the process. Careem, a transportation startup currently in 80 cities across the Middle East, has raised another $150 million — closing out a $500 million Series
Reply threads on Facebook are about to get a lot more animated. To mark the 30th anniversary of the GIF format, all users will get the new GIF comment button that Facebook began testing three months ago. Facebook also announced that almost 13 billion GIFs were sent on Messenger over the past year, with 400
HTC is back at E3 this year for its sophomore turn at the gaming expo, after its first show in 2016 following closely on the heels of the Vive VR headset’s consumer launch. I spoke to HTC VP of VR Dan O’Brien at this year’s E3, to find out a bit about how the company
Jaguar Land Rover has brought two new startups into its Portland Tech Incubator: LISNR and PILOT Automotive Labs. Previous cohorts at the incubator have ranged from parking apps to drones; these two continue to build on JLR’s creative approach to the automotive future. LISNR uses ultrasonic audio to transmit data. That’s right — it transmits
Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published a hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard — it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a
Facebook’s Safety Check feature was activated today, following news that a fire had engulfed a 24-storey block of flats in West London. At least six people are reported to have died in the blaze, with police expecting the death toll to rise. The Grenfell tower contains 120 flats. Clearly this is a tragedy. But should Facebook be reacting
Teaching people to code in bite-sized, gamified chunks delivered via mobile app is Py‘s mission. The fledgling startup is the brainchild of two friends and college computer science majors who found themselves repeatedly asked for advice on how to learn to code. “Lots of people asked us how should we learn to program or what
Finding a good backpack, one you can use in a range of situations, is tricky. But Venque’s Transformer A, which is currently on Kickstarter, might just fit the bill for a good chunk of customers, however. The modular pack is the latest from Venque, which got its start on the crowdfunding site back in 2013
Facebook today announced a series of improvements for its Safety Check feature – the service that allows Facebook users to communicate about their safety to friends and family during a crisis. Most notably, people will now have the option to start fundraisers from within Safety Check, in order to immediately translate concern for victims of
Ads aren’t enough to support professional online content makers. So Patreon is equipping them with new ways to organize, measure, and entertain fans who use its platform to pay them a monthly subscription fee for special access. With 1 million patrons paying an average of $12 per month to 50,000 creators, Patreon is on track
French startup Shadow, also known as Blade, just raised a Series A round of $57.1 million (€51 million). Shadow thinks your next computer is going to be in a data center. Your existing phones, laptops and Shadow’s own device (pictured above) act as a thin client, a window into your virtual machine running on a
Instagram is creating a standardized format that should make it clearer to everyone when a post has been paid for by an advertiser. These aren’t for ads that businesses buy directly from Instagram, but rather for influencer marketing, where brands pay celebrities and other users with a significant online following to promote their products. It’s
When housing costs too much or educators have to commute from far away, there’s rapid teacher turnover that hurts students. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropy vehicle is funding home down payment assistance for roughly 60 educators and support staff at three schools near Facebook’s headquarters. The $45 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is
Long time UK-based health-focused social network HealthUnlocked has flipped the switch to make its mobile app globally available, aiming to boost access to its network and feed more data into machine learning matching algorithms it began applying to the platform earlier this year — idea being to help people with the same health condition find each
Heresy, a startup co-founded by Dimitar Stanimiroff, who was previously MD Europe at Stack Overflow, is a new sales tool designed to increase collaboration between sales team members, and help them make better data-driven decisions, collectively and individually, and ultimately close more sales. The Software-as-a-Service isn’t a CRM replacement as such — in fact, it
Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the non-profit behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project that’s currently in use by about half of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft is joining at the Gold Member tier where it joins the likes of Google (which joined last December and also hired the foundation’s