3 founders on why they pursued alternative startup ownership structures

There is no one-size-fits all model for building a startup. At technewss Disrupt, we heard from a handful of founders about alternative approaches to creating a sustainable company that ensures more than just VCs and early founders benefit from its success.  One way is building

Amazon announces Luna game-streaming platform

At its Devices and Services event, Amazon launched its own cloud gaming competitor to Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud. It’s called Luna. The company is launching the product in early access at an introductory price of $5.99 per month. Users will be able to stream titles wirelessly without

Amazon redesigns the Echo line with spherical speakers and swiveling screens

Amazon today announced a lot of new products including the new Echo speaker line. And the products look dramatically different. Gone are the cylinders. They're spheres now and look like nothing else on the market. The lights are now on the bottom, while there are still rounded buttons on the to

Amazon's new Echo Show 10 follows you as you move

So this is crazy. Amazon's new Echo Show 10 swivels on its base to follow you around the room. The on-board camera is capable of recognizing a person and spins around to follow them — essentially taking the person tracking feature found on Facebook's Portal and Google's Nest Hub Max t

Ring’s newest security camera is a $249 autonomous indoor drone shipping in 2021

Ring built its entire business on reinventing the doorbell — and now it’s taking a similar approach to the humble home security camera, with the Ring Always Home Cam, set to be available sometime next year. You might not guess from its name, but this security camera is actually mobile: It&#

Ring to offer opt-in end-to-end encryption for videos beginning later this year

"speakable-summary" style="text-align: left;">Ring will be stepping up its efforts to make its security products secure for users by enabling end-to-end video encryption later this year. The company will be providing this toggle in a new page in its app’s Control Center, which will provide mor

Ring gets into automotive security with three new car products, including one debuting first for Teslas

Amazon-owned Ring is expanding from home and neighborhood security to the automative world, with three new products it debuted today at Amazon’s expansive devices and services extravaganza. These include Ring Car Alarm, Ring Car Cam, and Ring Car Connect – two new devices and one API/hardwa

Amazon’s Alexa becomes a better conversationalist and can now ask you questions, too

At its annual hardware event, Amazon today announced new capabilities for its Alexa personal assistant that will allow it to become more personalized as it can now ask clarifying questions and then use this personalized data to interact with the user later on. In addition, Alexa can now join a conv

Amazon redesigns Echo Dot as a sphere, adds animal designs and reading feature for Kids Edition

Amazon today introduced a redesign of its best-selling smart speaker, the Echo Dot. The company is bringing a new spherical design to the Echo Dot, Echo Dot with Clock and a new Echo Dot Kids Edition — the latter which now features colorful animal character designs. Instead of a flatter, hock

This is the newer, rounder $100 Amazon Echo

Amazon kicked things off at today’s big (virtual) hardware event in Seattle by introducing a very new and very round take on the Echo. The biggest change appears to be aesthetic, turning the smart speaker into a big, fabric-covered ball. That’s a nice improvement from a sound perspectiv

App makers band together to fight for App Store changes with new ‘Coalition for App Fairness’

A number of top app makers have banded together to fight against Apple’s control of its App Store and, to a lesser extent, Google’s control of the Play Store — a topic of increased regulatory scrutiny in recent months. Today, 13 app publishers, including Epic Games, Deezer, Baseca

Twitter plans to bring prompts to ‘read before you retweet’ to all users

Twitter’s experiment to get people to actually read the content they’re sharing is going so well the company plans to expand it to the platform at large “very soon.” In June, Twitter introduced a test feature on Android to promote “informed discussion” on the pla

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek pledges $1Bn of his wealth to back deeptech startups from Europe

At an online event today, Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, said he would invest 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) of his personal fortune in deeptech “moonshot projects”, spread across the next 10 years. (Watch the interview below): Ek indicated that he was referring to machine

The first rule of BookClub? No boring book clubs.

Book clubs can be magical. Bring together a group of friends, tear apart a book and all of a sudden the words have a second, paperless, life. But what if the author could join in the banter? Imagine riffing with Roxane Gay, debating with Ta-Nehisi Coates and eavesdropping on Jhumpa Lahiri. The expe