Author: Sarah Wells

Facebook has accused BlackBerry of stealing its voice-messaging technology in its instant messaging app. In an 118-page complaint filed Tuesday in San Francisco, Facebook claimed BlackBerry infringed on five other patents, including the tracking and analysis of GPS data, voice-messaging technology, and the ways in which the app displays graphics, video and audio. In the complaint, Facebook claims that the infringements have “caused and will continue to cause damage” to the company’s Messenger and WhatsApp messaging apps. Facebook hasn’t yet put a figure on possible damages, but the tone of the lawsuit itself rings hollow in retrospect of comments Facebook made...

Drops, the game-based language learning app, has announced Native Hawaiian as the newest addition to the app’s thirty-language selection. With just under 300 Native Hawaiian speakers worldwide according to the Endangered Language Project, this addition is the app’s second foray into digitizing niche and endangered languages for a new generation. “Our native tongue is Hungarian,” Drops co-founder and CEO Daniel Farkas told TechCrunch. “And we’ve watched the rise and decline of many niche languages — including our own. We know how important language is in representing culture and connecting people, and understand the significance of bringing under served languages...

It’s no surprise that political discourse in America is divided — especially online. And last week in MIT Technology Review, data visualization company Graphika brought those divides to life with 3D, colored depictions of the kind of filter bubbles found on Twitter in the U.S. Co-written by Graphika’s CEO John Kelly and the company’s research director Camille François, the graphics imagine Twitter users as colored orbs (larger or smaller depending on their follower sizes) and groups them depending on who follows whom. The authors told TechCrunch that to create these particular data visualizations they used data from about 13,500 of the best...

As a race, human beings have a lot of shortcomings. We’re not very fast, not all that strong and while we have been able to create technology that helps us overcome our environments, we’re not very good at adapting to them. Animals, on the other hand, have been successfully adapting and evolving to meet the world’s challenges long before we were stumbling around. While it might be too late for us to learn these lessons ourselves from our animal counterparts, it’s not too late to pass them on to our inventions. And biomimetic and bio-inspired labs across the world...

Eventbrite filed an IPO today for $200 million, confirming reports earlier this summer that the event-planning company plans to go public later this year. According to the document, the company plans to raise $200 million from selling Class A shares, but has yet to list the price per share. As for what Eventbrite intends to do with the new funds, many are pointing to the need to recover the company’s recent losses. While the company reported a net profit of $201.6 million in 2017, operating and loss expenses still left the company unprofitable that year. The company reported a...

Facebook announced today the winners of its annual Internet Defense Prize and awarded first-, second- and third-place winners a total of $200,000 for research papers that addressed topics of internet security and privacy. Combined with $800,000 in Secure the Internet Grants awarded to security and privacy researchers earlier this week, the company has now completed its 2018 goal to invest $1 million toward securing the internet. The Internet Defense Prize first started in 2014, but this year the prize quadrupled from its original $50,000 award to $200,000 spread across three groups. In a statement announcing the winners, Facebook said that...