This week on the Technotopia podcast I talked to Ken Mages, a Chicago-based inventor and co-founder of Secure One. Mages has been working in computers since his college days at the University of Illinois where he started a business doing what would later be called desktop publishing. His experience in the tech industry is boundless and he’s a really easy guy to talk to. He and I chat… Read More
http://ift.tt/2dlGriD Inventor Ken Mages sees the Internet as democracy in action http://ift.tt/2dgoeGU
Remitly, a startup co-founded and led by a former executive of Barclays who saw a gap in the market to build money transfer and other financial services for emerging markets and the “unbanked”, is today announcing that it has raised $38.5 million, as well as expansion to seven more countries in Latin America. The funding, which brings the total raised by Remitly to just under… 
The consumer products startup founded by Jessica Alba, The Honest Co., on Friday told the Wall Street Journal that it plans to reformulate its dish soap, laundry detergent and other cleaners after an earlier controversy over their ingredients. The Honest Co. markets its products as gentler, healthier and more environmentally sustainable than those of mainstream brands in the U.S. However… 
Logistics are difficult, especially when every day you’re trying to keep track of 9 meetings, 13 phone calls, a dinner, a post dinner, and a post post dinner. In a new update, Google has decided to do its part to make daily logistics easier by more fully integrating its Maps and Calendar offerings for Android users worldwide. Now, when you open up Google Maps, you’ll be able to… 
Meet Atomic, a prototyping service for your next mobile app or website. It works in your browser, but it’s a lot more powerful than you’d expect. Atomic handles animations and lets you make interactive designs. And you can collaborate on your designs with your team in real time. The startup launched the version 2 this week adding a bunch of new features that make your design… 
Facebook is stealing the Stories format and invading countries where Snapchat isn’t popular yet. Today in Poland it launched “Messenger Day”, which lets people share illustrated filter-enhanced photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, just like on Snapchat. By using the international popularity of Messenger to spread the Stories format, Facebook could boost retention… 
We’re taking more digital photos than ever, but we’re not very good about printing them out to enjoy them in our homes. Meanwhile, the digital picture frame market has filled with cheap products that haven’t kept up with technology developments, like ubiquitous Wi-Fi, better photo quality, and higher resolutions, in order to instead chase ever-lower price points. Aura aims… 
It’s good news and bad news for the publishing industry. The good news is that print revenue was up 3.4 percent in April, primarily in trade paperbacks, with some solid grown in young adult print and religious titles. The bad news is that revenue is down 4.3 percent year-to-date with a 7 percent loss in April compared to 2015. Further, ebook sales were down 22.7% compared to last year.… 
A dramatic privacy about-face by messaging app WhatsApp this summer, in which it revealed an update to its T&Cs would for the first time allow the sharing of its user data with parent company Facebook, is getting the pair into hot water in Europe. 
Security firm Avast has today confirmed the completion of a $1.4 billion acquisition of fellow Czech-based antivirus company AVG. The deal will see Avast’s customer base nearly double — swelling from 230 million to more than 400 million in total, 160M of whom are mobile users. 
Art photo filter app sensation Prisma, which only launched this summer but racked up more than 55 million downloads in a matter of weeks, has sparked a rush of other photo-processing apps all promising to transform your selfies into art fit to hang on the wall. 
Shazam, the mobile and desktop app that acts as a digital ear and song identifier, crossed the 1 billion download mark recently, according to a report from Billboard on Thursday. The London-based company, Shazam Entertainment Ltd., also announced that it has achieved profitability, at long last, thanks to a new focus on advertising sales, alongside revenue from commissions on digital… 
SoundCloud as a company is a disaster, but its the only streaming service with the DJ sets and remixes kids love. So it makes perfect sense that Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire SoundCloud, the Financial Times reports. Spotify already declined to buy it twice over the past year and a half, but talks broke down over pricing. But since then, SoundCloud has hammered out deals with the… 
As we inch closer to a time when we may rely on truly autonomous devices to move us or do things on our behalf, the need for software that’s able to think on its feet (or mid-air) will be essential. Now, an artificial intelligence startup working on this emerging area of machine learning has raised a seed round of funding to try to do just that. Cambridge, UK-based Prowler.io, which… 
I live a pretty cosmopolitan futuristic life atop a glass skyscraper in New York City, but I’ve yet to get a pizza delivered by drone, order a taxi from Alexa or open a hotel door with my smartwatch. We’ve got the questions wrong: It shouldn’t be how are you innovating or which project is doing new things, but why are you doing it and on what level. 
MightyTV, an app that helps you figure out what to watch next, is now available on Android. The startup is led by AdMeld co-founder Brian Adams, and it presents users with a stack of movie and TV recommendations which you swipe through, Tinder-style. If you’ve seen something already, you can say whether or not you liked it, which will influence the recommendations you see next. If you… 
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