Ah, portrait mode. Ever since Huawei pioneered the depth-sensing tech and Apple ran with it, it seems every other Instagram photo has that faux-DSLR look. Unfortunately, our smartphones aren’t exactly perfect at imitating the shallow depth of field of a real large-sensor camera, so it’s important to help the tiny sensors out when we can.…
Germany has been hit with the biggest hack in its history. A group of unknown hackers has leaked highly-sensitive personal data from more than 100 German politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brandenburg’s prime minister Dietmar Woidke, along with some German artists, journalists, and YouTube celebrities. The leaked data that was published on a Twitter…
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends The release of Google’s new Pixels always heralds new innovations for Android phones, and this year’s launch of the Pixel 3 range has been no different. The Pixel 3 XL — the larger of the two phones announced — is a great example of the biggest modern trends in smartphones with a…
Huawei fined two employees for a New Year tweet from the company account, sent from an iPhone. The original tweet Bloomberg reported that Huawei blamed the mistake on their overseas social media agency, but for some reason decided to punish two employees from the marketing department. The punishment included a CNY5,000 (about $700)…
Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest players in the Hadoop big data space, today announced that they have finalized their all-stock merger. The new company will use the Cloudera brand and will continue to trade under the CLDR symbol on the New York Stock Exchange. “Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera…
The only kids’ programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open-source tool. Scratch, for those without school-aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures. The system is…
Apple today is sharing some good news in the wake of yesterday’s reveal of a significant, market-moving cut to its revenue forecast, attributed to declining iPhone sales in China’s slowing economy. The company says its App Store, at least, was having a good holiday. This year, customers spent $1.22 billion during the 2018 holiday season and…
Longtime political operative Bradley Tusk got his start in Silicon Valley in 2011, when a little-known founder of a transportation startup requested his help surmounting regulatory barriers. That founder, Travis Kalanick, couldn’t afford Tusk’s $25,000 fee, so Tusk agreed to accept half of his payment in equity. As you can imagine, that deal worked out pretty…
An ongoing case in Singapore is testing the legal boundaries of virtual conferences. A court in the Southeast Asian city-state this week convicted human rights activist Jolovan Wham of organizing a public assembly via Skype without a permit and refusing to sign his statement when ordered by the police. Wham will be sentenced on January 23…
Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with more than a million customers and a unicorn valuation to boot, has quietly began working on a U.S. launch, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, the fintech startup has set up a small team to begin laying the ground work to bring a version of Monzo to North…
