Technology

With the year coming to close, deal activity has tapered down to seed and angel level investments in startups engaged in online furniture rentals, online healthcare, networking platforms, news aggregators, and digital photography. Canvera Bengaluru-based online digital photography company Canvera, has reportedly raised Rs. 15 crores at a pre-money valuation of Rs. 75 crores from Info Edge. With its prior ... Read More »

On Christmas Eve in 1968, millions around the world listened in a live broadcast to the book of Genesis that describes the creation of the Universe. The only difference was that the broadcast was being made from space – the Moon to be precise. Millions watched and listened as the Apollo 8 astronauts – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill ... Read More »

Was it black and blue or white and gold? The internet was divided but for Cecilia Bleasdale, who bought the dress for her daughter’s wedding, going viral left her confused – and caused family friction ‘I’m not a public person’ … Cecilia Bleasdale, beside her partner Paul Jinks, holds the dress that divided the internet. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the ... Read More »

If you’ve just bought a new PlayStation 4, Xbox One or Wii U for your kids this Christmas, here are the things you need to know before handing it over Video games are a social activity, so keep the console somewhere everyone can play – and join in! Photograph: Finnbarr Webster / Alamy/Alamy So it’s Christmas and you’ve bought your ... Read More »

Should autonomous vehicles be programmed to choose who they kill when they crash? And who gets access to the code that determines those decisions? Google’s prototype self-driving car at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Photograph: Tony Avelar/AP Wednesday 23 December 201512.00 GMTLast modified on Wednesday 23 December 201512.02 GMT The Trolley Problem is an ethical brainteaser that’s been entertaining philosophers ... Read More »

Flywheel claims to be the world’s first and only regulator-approved, GPS-based taxi meter – and is stepping up competition against rivals Uber and Lyft Traditional taxi firms in California hope state-approval of the TaxiOS app will help them outperform unregulated rivals such as Lyft and Uber. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images California’s state regulators have approved TaxiOS, an app for ... Read More »

Entrepreneur may be facing extradition to the US, but in 2016, labels will be more focused on navigating the changing economics of streaming Kim Dotcom is facing extradition, but Music executives are also less likely to be fretting about piracy in 2016 than they are about streaming services. Photograph: Michael Bradley/AFP/Getty Images You might expect champagne corks to be popping ... Read More »

Facebook video is growing fast, but does it have a piracy problem? Photograph: DADO RUVIC/REUTERS Facebook has ambitions to compete with YouTube in the online video world, but one of the latter’s prominent creators has criticised the social network’s strategy. Hank Green is one half of the Vlogbrothers duo, whose YouTube channel has more than 552m views and 2.6 million ... Read More »

Flash has been blocked by Mozilla in its Firefox browser Photograph: firefox The mob is turning against Flash. Mozilla has blocked every version of Adobe’s Flash plugin from running within its Firefox browser, while Facebook’s head of security has called for Adobe to kill it off. The moves come following a series of vulnerabilities in Flash being actively exploited, including ... Read More »

The hashing technique used by Hello Kitty website SanrioTown leaves it easy for an attacker to use force to uncover a significant proportion of the obscured passwords. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex Shutterstock A data breach at SanrioTown.com, the online community for Hello Kitty fans, has leaked details of more than 3 million user accounts online. The information exposed in the breach includes ... Read More »