Author: Greg Kumparak

Postscript raises .5M to help Shopify shops stay connected with customers over SMS Back in February, we wrote that Postscript “wants to be the Mailchimp for SMS.” Now they’ve raised $4.5 million to help get it done. This round was lead by Accomplice, and backed by Kayak co-founder Paul English, Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale, Klaviyo co-founder Andrew Bialecki, Drift co-founder Elias Torres, Front co-founder Mathilde Colin, and Podium co-founders Eric Rea and Dennis Steele. The Postscript team is currently made up of 14 people. Postscript is meant to help e-commerce…

Gift Guide: Black Friday tech deals that are actually worth considering Ah, Black Friday. The day of a zillion “deals” — some good, many bad, most just meant to clear the shelves for next year’s models. Hidden amidst ten thousand “LOWEST PRICE EVER! ONE DAY ONLY!” e-mails, though, are a handful of solid sales on legitimately good stuff. Whether you’re trying to save some coin heading into Christmas or you just want to beef up your own gear collection, we’ve picked a few things that seemed worthwhile while trying to…

Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger are down for many around the world If you’re having issues with various Facebook -owned services this morning, you’re very much not alone. There appears to be a major outage impacting Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook itself. Many users are reporting that the apps appear to work but aren’t actually pulling anything new, instead just showing whatever they’ve got cached from before the servers went down. Others can’t even get the page to load. Messenger messages, meanwhile, just sit indefinitely in a not-quite-sent state — so if…

Twitter will finally let you turn on two-factor authentication without giving it a phone number Two-factor authentication is good! SMS-based two-factor authentication? Not the best option. After countless tales of people having their phone numbers and inbound SMS hijacked by way of SIM swapping, its clear that SMS just isn’t the right solution for sending people secondary login codes. And yet, for many years, it’s been the mandatory go-to on Twitter . You could switch to another option later (like Google Authenticator, or a physical Yubikey) — but to turn…

Valve’s flagship Half-Life VR game will land in March of 2020 As expected, Valve just dropped some details about Half-Life: Alyx, the flagship VR game it teased earlier this week. Here’s what we know so far: It’s scheduled for release in March of 2020 Players will take on the role of Alyx, wearing a pair of “gravity gloves” that allow you to grab things otherwise out of reach. It’ll take place sometime between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Alas, for anyone hoping for something that takes place after the events set…

Is this Niantic’s next game? First came Pokémon GO. Then came Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Then came… Catan? It’s starting to look like the next property to get Niantic’s “real world game” treatment will be Catan — the namesake island from the popular Settlers Of Catan board game series. Late last month, the company behind Catan said during a board games conference in Germany that it was working on a “upcoming massively multiplayer location based game” (albeit with no mention of Niantic). Called Catan: World Explorers, they noted that it…

Valve confirms it’s making a ‘flagship’ Half-Life VR game After what feels like years of rumors, it’s official: Valve is making a virtual reality Half-Life game. Official word of the new title comes via Valve’s (brand new, but verified) Twitter account, where the company is promising more details later this week: While it’s a bit curious to drop news like this as the first tweet from a brand new account, Valve’s long-established official Steam twitter account retweeted it — so signs are pointing toward it being legit. Alas, we know…