Google has Nest. Apple has HomeKit. And now Samsung is buying into the future of home automation too, with the $200 million purchase of SmartThings – a hardware startup that makes it easier for all your smart appliances to talk to each other.
SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson announced today that after starting from the bottom of KickStarter, his two year old home automation company has been bought by Samsung and is moving to Silicon Valley.
Google Shopping Express van making deliveries to Stanford. Photo: Elaine Adolfo
Barnes & Noble has decided to team up Google in an effort to reclaim its King of Book Retail title from their mutual rival Amazon.
Starting today, the two companies are partnering up to bring same-day delivery of books from local Barnes and Noble to customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, giving both companies an answer to Amazon’s same-day offerings.
Scrolling to the bottom of every spam email in search of that tiny “unsubscribe” link is among my least favorite Internet chores, but Google is finally making it a lot easier to never receive spammy emails from all the brands, social networks, and Nigerian princes you’ve courted over the years.
To bring you one step closer to a clutter free inbox, the company announced on its blog this morning that Gmail users will now see a new “unsubscribe” link anytime they receive a bulk email.
Samsung vowed to end child labor in its supply chain once and for all with its new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on child labor, but after coming down hard on Dongguan Shinyang Electronics this summer for employing under age workers, the Android maker has decided to just enforce 30% of its policy.
One of the world’s top tech companies is suing Samsung for patent violations, only this time its not Apple.
Microsoft announced this afternoon that it filed a lawsuit against Samsung in the U.S. District Court of Southern District of New York, for not paying up on cross-licensed intellectual property from Microsoft that its been using in smartphones since 2011.
