Daily Archives: March 2, 2017



NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 2: (L to ) Snapchat co-founders Bobby Murphy, chief technology officer of Snap Inc., and Evan Spiegel, chief executive officer of Snap Inc., prepare to ring the opening bell as Thomas Farley, president of the NYSE, looks on, March 2, 2017 in New York City. Snap Inc. priced its initial public offering at $17 a share on Wednesday and Snap shares will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, had a great day in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. After pricing the IPO at $17 per share yesterday, the stock opened at $24. It then closed the day at $24.51, a 44% premium to the people who bought it yesterday. But like with all IPOs, not everybody got to access Snap’s IPO price. This is usually reserved for a smaller group of… Read More

Snapchat stock finishes up 44% on first day



zelda In the hype period for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game’s creators compared it to the original NES classic. I chalked this up to the usual pre-release silliness; how could a brand-new game be anything like something released in 1986? It turns out I’d underestimated both Nintendo’s candor (understandable) and the timelessness of the first Zelda’s design. Read More

A Link to the Past


Messenger Facebook’s Messenger bots may not be having the impact the social network desired. Just yesterday, online retailer Everlane, one of the launch partners for the bot platform, announced it was ditching Messenger for customer notifications and returning to email. Following this, Facebook today announced an upgraded Messenger Platform, which introduces a new way for users to interact with… Read More

As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat



Messenger Facebook’s Messenger bots may not be having the impact the social network desired. Just yesterday, online retailer Everlane, one of the launch partners for the bot platform, announced it was ditching Messenger for customer notifications and returning to email. Following this, Facebook today announced an upgraded Messenger Platform, which introduces a new way for users to interact with… Read More

As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat


google-assistant Your Android phone is about to get an upgrade. Google today is making good on its promise to bring its Siri alternative known as Google Assistant to more Android devices, starting today. The company announced at Mobile World Congress over the weekend that its Assistant would soon launch in the U.S., followed by English-language launches in Australia, Canada and the U.K., as well… Read More

Google Assistant hits more Android devices today



Illustration of laptop connected to bookshelf Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo’s new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems… Read More

Ozlo releases a suite of APIs to power your next ...


blackstorm boss raids Co-founder Ernestine Fu hopes that Blackstorm Labs, the makers of a bullet hell-ish fantasy shooter called EverWing, has figured out how to tap into that real-time co-operative experience that you might find in a massive online game like World of Warcraft within Facebook Messenger. The company is calling the experience Boss Raids. EverWing runs on HTML5 within Facebook Messenger, where… Read More

Blackstorm Labs looks to bring the co-op experience to a ...



still1 There is an inherent problem that plagues all dating apps. The world is getting smaller — instead of choosing a mate from the pool of our college classmates or neighborhood friends, we’re now connected to everyone on the planet with a few taps of the thumb. This means that dating apps rarely run short of people to serve up, which means that we’re playing a game of optimization. Read More

Dating app Sapio wants you to think harder about swiping ...


homepage-kidscontrol-1600-web-right-min A new startup called unGlue wants to help kids better manage their time on connected devices. Just don’t call it parental control software, says co-founder and CEO Alon Shwartz. The idea, he explains, is to offer families a simpler solution for setting limits on screen time across devices, whether inside the home or away. Shwartz, a serial entrepreneur, came up with the idea for… Read More

unGlue helps parents set screen time limits on any device