Tech News

The first macOS Sierra public beta is coming today

If you have a useless Mac lying around, today is your lucky day. Apple is releasing the first public beta of macOS Sierra later today — it’s probably going to be available at some point over the next couple of hours. This first public beta is likely based on the second developer beta that was released a couple of days ago.

But the main difference is that you don’t have to pay the annual $99 fee to access this public beta. Head over to beta.apple.com to find out how you can enroll in the public beta program. Once you’ve signed up, open up the Mac App Store and download the beta.

Tech News

Rumor: Google is working on two Nexus smartwatches

A new report suggests Google is working on two smartwatches that may be Nexus devices for release after it debuts new Nexus phones.

Like the Nexus phones, the watches are believed to be essentially the same internally, but with different screen sizes. Codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, it seems Google is leaning toward the round screen for Android Wear.

Tech News

Facebook blames ‘technical glitch’ for temporary removal of Falcon Heights shooting video

Facebook has denied censoring a viral video taken after a police officer fatally shot a man in his car in Minnesota.

Lavish Reynolds pulled out her phone and began a Facebook Live stream after her boyfriend, Philando Castile, was shot by a police officer who, Reynolds said, had pulled their car over for a broken taillight in Minnesota’s Falcon Heights district. Media reported that Castile later died from his injuries.

Tech News

Samsung predicts strongest profits in over two years

Samsung Electronics' earnings guidance for the second quarter of 2016 show the company expecting to record its strongest profits in more than two years. Samsung expects to have made about 8.1 trillion won ($7 billion) in operating profit off 49.8 trillion won ($43 billion) in revenue during the period between April to June, representing a 41 percent year-on-year bump in profit and 3 percent in sales.

Tech News

Bumble is going to help you find your next job with BumbleBizz

Bumble, the popular swipe-based dating app understands this, so is launching a feature to help users temporarily set aside dreams of love so they can match with someone who may help them advance their career.

The feature will work almost identically to regular Bumble which is designed to help you find a partner, and Bumble BFF which is designed to help you find a new friend. In fact, Bumble’s co-founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe says that BumbleBizz “was always part of the overall vision – to enable people to connect at the key engagement points in life. For love, for friendship and now for network.”

Tech News

Nvidia unveils the GTX 1060: Faster than a GTX 980 for $250

Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 1060, the most affordable member of its Pascal-based graphics card lineup yet. Starting at $250 (UK price TBC, but likely £220), Nvidia claims the GTX 1060 is faster than a GTX 980—a card that costs upwards of $400 (£380)—and features a power-sipping TDP of just 120W. It'll be released worldwide on July 19.

While the full technical details behind the GTX 1060 aren't available just yet, Nvidia has revealed that the card is based on a new GP106 chip, rather than a binned version of the the GP104 chip used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The GTX 1060 sports 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8GHz (only a 6GB version will be available), and a boost clock of 1.7GHz that Nvidia claims is easily overclocked to 2GHz and beyond. Power supply is via a single 6-pin connector.

Tech News

One of the founders of Android is starting an education company inside Google

Rich Miner, Android's cofounder and a general partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm GV, now has plans to step down and start an education company within Google. Miner told Fortune that the company is being built at Google because of the company's pre-existing education assets, rather than it becoming a separate Alphabet entity. However, it'll take some before what Miner plans on building comes into focus.

Tech News

Audible launches a subscription podcast network

Audible is expanding outside of audiobooks in a big way. It’s launching a new service today called Channels, which offers short-form news and podcasts for people who’d rather not listen slowly through an entire book.

Tech News

iOS 10 preview: Apple breaks down its walled garden

iOS 10 will be released this fall as a free update — the public beta should start very soon for the more adventurous iOS users. Every year, a vast majority of iOS users update to the latest version in the weeks following the release. It’s a free update after all.

And yet, some of the big and small changes in iOS are much more telling than anything Apple could say or announce. iOS is a software statement, and it could potentially change the way we use our phones.

Tech News

Zoox raises $200 million at $1 billion valuation for its self-driving cars

TechCrunch has confirmed reports that auto startup Zoox is raising about $200 million at a$1 billion valuation. We’ve also learned that investors Lux Capital and DFJ are involved in the round.

The Palo Alto-based startup founded by Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson, has been deliberately quiet about what they are working on presumably for competitive reasons, but the Zoox team has been working on autonomous vehicles for a few years now.

Tech News

Spotify claims Apple is forcing it to pay the in-app billing toll for iOS updates

Spotify is accusing Apple of some pretty sketchy business practices. In a letter to Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, Spotify claims Apple is blocking updates to its app to get it’s 30 percent cut and help Apple Music shine.

Specifically, Spotify says Apple is refusing updates citing “business model rules,” adding that Spotify must use its in-app billing system (which earns Apple a 30 percent cut, mind you) if Spotify “wants to use the app to acquire new customers and sell subscriptions.”

Tech News

The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys

In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last.

Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router—for less money—and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher.

Tech News

How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from a community-driven technology where customers and partners have invested time and code. It all seems to be happening for no reason other than the tech isn't currently printing money.

It's a familiar pattern for open source projects that have become the property of Oracle. It started with OpenSolaris and continued with OpenOffice.org. And this time, it's happening to Java—more specifically to Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java.

Tech News

Facebook gives up on Paper

The words "Facebook Paper" might only be vaguely familiar to you. This is because Facebook's iPhone-only news app, launched in 2014, never got much traction.

Facebook never shared any usage numbers for the app, but the signs that Paper's shelf life is coming to an end were plenty. Facebook shut down Creative Labs, Facebook's internal team that brought the app to life, in Dec. 2015, and Paper wasn't updated at all this year.

Now, in a message to users, Facebook announced it would completely shut down Paper on July 29.

Tech News

Facebook now lets you raise funds for your favorite charities

Starting today, Facebook is rolling out a tool that lets you create personal fundraisers for verified charities, along with a way to accept donations from other users without having to send them elsewhere to complete their transactions.

The new feature builds on Facebook’s efforts to enable charitable organizations to rally support on the social network. Last year, it launched a tool to allow nonprofits to create and run fundraising campaigns.

Tech News

Of course you can use Alexa to shop for Amazon Prime products now

Now you can talk into your friendly little home AI tower to order toilet paper. And deodorant and batteries. And tens of millions of other Amazon Prime qualified products, because no one does synergy quite like the good people at Amazon.

Tech News

Mobileye says Tesla auto braking tech wasn’t designed for scenario behind fatal crash

Following yesterday’s news of the NHTSA’s investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S, Mobileye, the Israeli technology company helping power the carmaker’s Autopilot feature, has sent a statement to TechCrunch regarding the incident.

“We have read the account of what happened in this case,” reads the text attributed to Dan Galves, Mobileye’s Chief Communications Officer. “Today’s collision avoidance technology, or Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) is defined as rear-end collision avoidance, and is designed specifically for that.”

Tech News