Toy-makers at Mattel are attempting to revive the company’s sinking sales with the newest addition to the Barbie line: Hello Barbie. Mattel has brought Barbie to life with voice-recognition software by their San-Fransico based startup partner, ToyTalk, that will allow her to hold two-way, unique conversations with the child playing with her, as she “learns” more about the child.
In the wake of the Anthem hack, President Barack Obama signed an executive order urging private companies to work together and share information regarding cyber threats with the government.
At Stanford University, Obama said, “much of our critical infrastructure, our financial systems, our power grid, are connected” to the Internet, which creates “new points of vulnerability we didn’t have before.”
During their March 2015 Special Event, Apple unveiled their “reinvented notebook,” dubbed The New MacBook—adhering to the new naming convention Apple began with “The New iPad” in 2012.
Google is rumored to be in the process of developing its own ride-hailing service, similar to the likes of Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. Google is also rumored to be implementing its self-driving car technology into this new service. Would you ride in a driverless car?
When Spotify made its U.S. debut in 2011, I was pretty skeptical of how well it’d do here. With dozens of free music streaming options which run right in the browser (read: YouTube, Vevo, SoundCloud), why would anyone want to install another application? How well would it integrate with our existing music libraries? Could Spotify ever replace iTunes?
Made with Code, a Google initiative, is giving girls all over the United States the opportunity to code the lights on their respective Christmas tree in President’s Park, where Christmas trees from each of the fifty states are on display.
Code.org is using the popular Frozen heroines, Elsa and Anna, to bridge the gender gap in computer programming with a coding tutorial that teaches young girls basic coding concepts in about an hour, and lets you “create snowflakes and patterns as you ice-skate and make a winter wonderland that you can then share with your friends.”
These days our smartphones help us complete all sorts of tasks—from the mundane to the very complex. There are apps that track your fitness, your sleep, apps to help you organize everything from your schedule to your refrigerator, apps that tell you what to wear, apps that keep you on top of the news, but what about apps for creativity? Surely technology has no place in that enigmatic, often esoteric place in your brain where creativity is born? And yet, here we are. The advent of the smartphone has streamlined so many aspects of our life—why not the creative process? The following 10 apps can help you power through your creative block and get your next project to completion a whole lot faster.
There are a slew of organizations which offer free online courses for people interested in learning how to code, but don’t want to break the bank. Here are some to check out:
Last Wednesday at the Grace Hopper Conference, Facebook, Box and Pinterest announced they would be joining together and launching a brand new pilot mentorship program called WEST—Women Entering and Staying in Tech. The ideal goal of the program is to provide women interested in careers within the technology industry with one-on-one mentorship. The mentorship program will do so by providing support, advocacy and community development which will give women the resources needed to build successful careers in technology. The program will be able to do so by having female staffers from each of the above companies serve as mentors for the women who sign up.
