Technology news

Elon Musk is no stranger to big ideas. Musk, the founder of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City and the brains behind the revamped Hyperloop, took to the stage yesterday at Recode’s ‘Code’ conference to offer up a few bold statements about the world we live in and where we’re going from here. If Musk is to be believed, and it’s hard to doubt him at this point, we’re basically going to be zipping around in driverless cars between trips to colonies on Mars w

Nine months ago, the Unicode Consortium approved new sets of emoji to be added as part of the Unicode 9.0 release. These include some long-awaited ones like bacon, avocado, selfie, and face palm – and they’ll all officially arrive on June 21. You may be excited for these 72 new emoji, but one has made it through the cracks despite our own Nate Swanner’s pleas: the clown emoji. If you forgot what he looks like, here he is again for your viewing pleasure. It’s the app

Pebble just announced its new devices last week, and its already adding features to them. The wearable maker is adding Amazon’s Alexa voice service to its Core clip-on device – which doesn’t even ship until 2017. If you need a recap, the Core is basically like an Internet of Things version of the iPod Shuffle. It’s a small square with two buttons. By default, one is for controlling music, and another programmable to do anything of your choosing. It also has a GPS for tra

Google today launched a new website testing tool to help you determine its speed and mobile-friendliness. It’s a product from the Think With Google team, which provides insights on how to best optimize your business online to attract, convert, and retain customers. Google most prominently highlighted statistics about how websites today need to be fast.com fast, citing that if the page doesn’t load on mobile in three seconds or less, customers are likely to leave. If a site isn&

Snapchat just passed Twitter in monthly usage. Twitter, the microblogging service that currently acts as a journalist echo chamber and Jack Dorsey think piece generator (seriously: 1, 2, 3),  has fewer than 140 million users interacting with the service daily. Snapchat, just passed 150 million, according to sources familiar with the matter. It’s easy to see why the two services are moving down separate paths. Snapchat is all about engagement, while Twitter is mainly used to yell

Speed testing services seem to be the new thing tech companies are dabbing into on their free time – just weeks after Netflix launched Fast.com, Google has announced its own tool to help you measure your website’s speed and mobile-friendliness. The site takes your URL and measures on a scale of 1-100 your mobile design and loading speed. It looks at things like CSS, HTML, scripts and images to see how long it takes for your website to load on both a desktop and mobile devi

Last November, when the Paris attacks took place, Facebook was quick to enable its Safety Check feature which allows users to alert their friends they were safe. The company received backlash for failing to do so for other countries experiencing their own terrorist attacks, some citing that Facebook ignored calls for the feature even when asked. At the time, Facebook said it was difficult for it to track everything going on in the world, so today it is launching the ability for a community-acti

If you’re like us, you probably set your Wi-Fi name to something witty. Personally, we didn’t get much further than renaming our network to a 💁 emoji. However, super creative people like Russian artist Dmitry Morozov have taken Wi-Fi access to a whole new level. Morozov is the creator the Hotspot Poet – a set of four devices containing poems by famous poets. While changing its SSID every 10 seconds to lines of poetry, these expressive 

This series was brought to you by Index.co From the conception of an idea, to the first lines of code, early hires, and preliminary funding rounds – every company has a narrative. But there are always shared experiences: Processes, tactics, and habits that galvanize the experience of the fledgling startup. In this series, we talk to founders to hear their perspectives on the key element to their successful strategies. This week we talked with Thomas Staley, a student-turned-entrepreneur-t

First YouTube, then Facebook, and now one more: Twitter has just added support for 360-degree video. As with other implementations, you can just click and drag to look around the videos, and they work on both desktop and mobile. It works kind of similarly to the rewindable ScratchReels from last year. The feature comes on the heels of the start of the NBA finals tonight; the official NBA Twitter account will be posting videos shot with a Samsung Gear 360 during tonight’s game. While