Google employees are still going strong and not letting up on their demands. Following a sit-in protesting retaliation last month, Googlers are making four demands. “Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” Google walkout organizers wrote on Medium today. “As the company progresses from crisis…
Google today announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers. “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in…
It won’t be long before Red Hat becomes part of IBM, the result of the $34 billion acquisition last year that is still making its way to completion. For now, Red Hat continues as a standalone company, and if to flex its independence muscles, it announced its second agreement in two days with Microsoft Azure,…
Google seems to be waking up from its VR daydream. The company’s ambitious plans to leverage the smartphones that people already own to power VR experiences went unmentioned at its I/O developer conference. After spending 2016 and 2017 making big promises for how the company would shape the mobile VR market and ensure that its…
Hello old friend. I knew you would be back. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew we would be reunited again. It turns out all it would take was a cratering smartphone market to bring you back around. Google, of course, famously stood its ground on the importance of the 3.5 mm for…
Hey there hackers, il n’y a pas de temps à perdre! You heard it here first, there’s no time to lose. Today’s the last day you can sign up to compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 on 17-18 May — days two and three of the conference — in Paris. Come and join…
One major — and somewhat unexpected — theme at Microsoft’s Build developer conference this week is autonomous robots. After acquiring AI startup Bonsai, which specialized in reinforcement learning for autonomous systems, the company today announced the limited preview of a new Azure-based platform that is partially built on this acquisition and that will help developers…
Microsoft has been leaning into accessibility in gaming lately, most visibly with its amazing Adaptive Controller, and a new patent suggests another way the company may be accommodating disabled gamers: an Xbox controller with a built-in Braille display. As you might expect, it’s already quite hard for a visually impaired gamer to play some games,…
Behind all those on-demand shuttles, ride-hailing vehicles, dockless scooters, bikes and someday even autonomous cars is data. A lot of data. Numerous startups have popped up and several large, established companies have rolled out products all aimed at capturing and making sense of that data. One such company is Populus AI, a startup that has…
Despite Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick wanting to be part of the company going public, the company’s board is considering not letting Kalanick be there to ring the opening bell on May 10, Uber’s first day of trading, Axios reports. Kalanick also wants to bring his dad, The New York Times reports. Additionally, Kalanick’s fellow co-founders…
