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Websites are one of the most important assets of a business.Your website should be more than images and text. It should eliminate time consuming repetitive tasks like booking, providing estimates, lead capture and funnel information, just to name a few.

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Accompany’s digital chief-of-staff application launches in beta

Accompany’s digital chief-of-staff application launches in beta

Many executives and employees have need for a role that’s basically a “chief of staff” — someone who keeps track of all the details about everyone they encounter and are headed off to meet in their professional careers. But there’s plenty of information that they might be missing out on, and as you head downstream to smaller companies those roles are just as… Read MoreContinued Read More

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Kik users have exchanged over 1.8 billion messages with the platform’s 20,000 chatbots

Kik users have exchanged over 1.8 billion messages with the platform’s 20,000 chatbots

After a few months of testing the waters, Kik is still bullish on chatbots and has quite a few reasons to be. Just last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Kik CEO Ted Livingston divulged that developers had built over 6,000 chatbots on the platform. Fast forward a few months and the popular messaging app has announced today that more than 1.8 billion messages have already been exchanged… Read MoreCon…

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Rev. Jesse Jackson says Apple is ‘setting the pace’ around diversity and inclusion

Rev. Jesse Jackson says Apple is ‘setting the pace’ around diversity and inclusion

About one year ago, Apple unveiled a diversity site featuring its employee representation data and a letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Today, Apple has revealed its latest diversity numbers, showing slight but consistent improvement year over year. Worldwide, Apple is 68 percent male and 32 percent female (last year, Apple was 69… Read More

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Skype gets new bots for travel, tickets and entertainment, but they’re far from perfect

Skype gets new bots for travel, tickets and entertainment, but they’re far from perfect

Following yesterday’s launch of a new version of the Skype Windows 10 application, Microsoft today announced an expanded collection of its “Skype bots,” the automated chat assistants that it introduced earlier this year in a limited preview. The new bots include those that can help you make travel arrangements, locate event tickets, pull in information from other… Read MoreContinued Read More

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What real cloud-native apps will look like

What real cloud-native apps will look like

There is much talk of “cloud native” these days, and people are taking liberties with the interpretation — as they do with everything else associated with the cloud. Cade Metz put it right: “The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco and other companies that don’t want to… Read MoreContinued Read More

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Lear plans to ship a modular unit to let cars talk to smart cities and other vehicles

Lear plans to ship a modular unit to let cars talk to smart cities and other vehicles

Car component supplier Lear is hoping to ride the wave of connectivity to new heights, with plans to develop and ship a unit for its car-maker customers that lets their vehicles communicate with other cars on the road, city infrastructure including connected roads and traffic lights, and with cloud-based services. The part would also be modular, letting OEMs easily install physical upgrades. Rea…

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Let’s meet in Columbus, Ohio, next week

Let’s meet in Columbus, Ohio, next week

This is going to be fun. I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, next week, Wednesday, August 10, and I’ll be holding a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270. We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8 p.m. we’ll have an open stage with live music… Read MoreContinued Read More

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Comma.ai open-sources the data it used for its first successful driverless trips

Comma.ai open-sources the data it used for its first successful driverless trips

Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving. Read MoreContinued Read More

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40 photos from Facebook’s “Area 404” mad science laboratory

40 photos from Facebook’s “Area 404” mad science laboratory

Take a tour of Facebook’s new 22,000 square foot hardware lab where it’s building drones, satellites, lasers, VR headsets, and the machines that store the world’s biggest collection of photos. Click the arrow to the right or scroll down on mobile to see what’s behind the Area 404 security doors. Read MoreContinued Read More

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ReachNow expands BMW car sharing to Portland

ReachNow expands BMW car sharing to Portland

After launching in Seattle in April, BMW’s car sharing service ReachNow is expanding down the I-5 corridor to Portland, Oregon. In Seattle, more than 13,000 people signed up in the first month, and ReachNow was able to add 150 vehicles and expand its service area by late June. It’s likely the Portland expansion will follow the same plan, with a fleet of vehicles in the city center… Read MoreCont…

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YouTube Kids rolls out an ad-free option

YouTube Kids rolls out an ad-free option

YouTube Kids, the child-friendly version of YouTube’s service that launched last year and faced criticism for the way it handled advertisements, has today launched a version of the service that will offer parents the option to pay for an ad-free experience. Now, YouTube Kids will be bundled into the YouTube Red subscription program, a paid membership that offers a variety of… Read MoreContinued…

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Study identifies 20 ‘second Earth’ candidates with potential to harbor life

Study identifies 20 ‘second Earth’ candidates with potential to harbor life

Finding life beyond Earth means combing through an incredibly vast array of potential planetary candidates, but one new study from a team of researchers led by San Francisco State University astronomer Dr. Stephen R. Kane hopes to add some additional specificity to the search. The international group of scientists behind the study examined the over 4,000 planets outside of our solar… Read MoreCo…

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Owlchemy Labs nabs $5 million to keep on building crazy VR games

Owlchemy Labs nabs $5 million to keep on building crazy VR games

Owlchemy Labs wants you to reach out and grab VR content with your hands. The Austin-based VR studio just secured a $5 million Series A led by Qualcomm Ventures with participation in the round also coming from HTC, The VR Fund, Colopl Next and Capital Factory. Right now the studio, founded in 2010, is best known among those in the VR community for building the game Job Simulator, which was… Read…

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Microsoft’s Excel API, which lets developers access data stored in spreadsheets, hits general availability

Microsoft’s Excel API, which lets developers access data stored in spreadsheets, hits general availability

After a relatively short beta, Microsoft today announced that the Excel API — a way for developers to programmatically use Excel for Office 365 for doing calculations, building dashboards and more — is now generally available. Read MoreContinued Read More

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7 Olympic technologies to help the athlete in you go higher, faster, better, stronger

7 Olympic technologies to help the athlete in you go higher, faster, better, stronger

Many American Olympic athletes are using cutting-edge technology like motion tracking systems, wearable jump monitors and Doppler radar to help them jump higher and go farther before hitting Rio this August 5 for the Summer Games — and so can you! So fasten your joggers and come along as we take a look at the technology our Olympians are using to help them go for the gold. Read MoreContinued…

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Basis Peak watches recalled, service shutting down due to overheating

Basis Peak watches recalled, service shutting down due to overheating

Basis Peak, a fitness watch tracking your health and sleep habits, is now being recalled by the company after reports of overheating. The Intel subsidiary first sent a statement about the overheating issues mid-June and is now asking customers to stop wearing their watches and is shutting down service “immediately.” “We had hoped to update the software on your watch… Read MoreContinued Read More