Twitter unveiled the first sign of its much awaited new design on Tuesday, to a near-universal reaction that it looked just like Facebook. Read more
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Uber swaps four wheels for two with New York courier “experiment”
Uber, the ambitious start-up best known for delivering people, now wants to deliver anything that can fit in a rucksack. The private driver and taxi-hailing app will on Tuesday add cycle couriers to its New York fleet with what it calls Uber Rush. Read more
Amazon makes a Dash for your shopping list
by Barney Jopson
Frustrated by not being able to dictate your shopping list to Amazon? Well, even if you weren’t, Jeff Bezos’s company has come up with a solution to the problem you never had.
The Seattle-based online retailer on Friday unveiled a new stapler-sized device called Dash that let’s you speak a list of groceries to your Amazon account, to which it is linked via Wi-Fi. Read more
A Silicon Valley comedy that is almost as strange as the truth
Could there be a better-timed comedy series than HBO’s new Silicon Valley? The tech hotspot has never been hotter. And the opportunities for satire have never been funnier.
Google: The price of a vote
Google’s founders have just completed a silent coup of their own company – and so far, it hasn’t cost them a dime.
The new class of non-voting Google stock that started trading on Thursday is selling at a discount of around 0.3 per cent to the existing, reduced-voting right shares. If that gap rises above 1 per cent, the company will have to pay out cash to compensate investors: but the narrow spread at the outset suggests that is no longer a risk. Read more
Analysis: All eyes on the future
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Palmer Luckey is holding court among the geeks. The boy king of virtual reality is answering questions from game developers about whether the pioneering headset he built in his parents’ garage, Oculus Rift, might work with something known as “galvanic vestibular stimulation”.
GVS, he gleefully explains, is “basically taking high-voltage electrodes and passing current through your head for entertainment”.
Silicon Valley notebook: Spotting the next big app
Want to hear a Silicon Valley joke? Two geek billionaires walk into a coffee shop and nobody notices.
There’s no punchline. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago when I was in Mountain View and the co-founders of WhatsApp popped into their local for a brew. Despite being full of start-ups, nobody in the Red Rock Café seemed to recognise the pair who had just sold their app to Facebook for upwards of $16bn.
WhatsApp has almost 500m active users around the world but many in Silicon Valley’s elite only discovered the chat app when Mark Zuckerberg opened his chequebook. It’s entirely possible that, in the past year, more people here have tried Google Glass, the sci-fi headset that most outside Silicon Valley love to hate, than sent a message on WhatsApp. Read more
Education technology company 2U passes Nasdaq entry exam
By Adam Palin in London
Education technology company 2U appears to have passed its entry exam, with shares up 7 per cent at noon on its Nasdaq debut.
At a share price of $13.91, the Maryland-based company – which develops cloud-based degrees with universities – is valued at $544m. Not a bad start as a listed company for one that has yet to turn a profit.
South Korea consumers jump global Galaxy S5 queue
Samsung Galaxy S5 (Getty)
South Koreans consumers will be able to jump the global queue for Samsung Electronics’ new flagship smartphone, after mobile operators put it on sale two weeks ahead of the official launch date. Read more