Google acquires Twitter’s Fabric mobile development platform

Over the past couple of years, Twitter has offered developers numerous services to help them build, test, deploy and maintain their apps as part of its modular Fabric platform. Now, the company is selling it off to Google.

The move is likely an attempt on Twitter’s part to slim down in troubling times. The good thing is that none of Fabric’s useful services – including Crashlytics for reporting crashes, Digits for user authentication, Answers app analytics and Nuance for speech recognition – are going away, as Google will continue to offer them to developers as they are.

The people behind Fabric will join Google’s Developer Products Group and work alongside the Firebase team...

European Tech Funding Report for 2016: last year saw 3,420 deals totalling €16.2 billion

European tech companies raised more than €16 billion last year, spread across 3,420 deals tracked by the Tech.eu team for all of 2016. This and more in our latest report!

r the past few years, the Tech.eu team has been meticulously keeping track of all funding and M&A deals involving European technology companies. Today, we’re releasing our report on tech financing in Europe and Israel, offering an in-depth look at the state of capital investments in European tech companies in Q4 and full calendar year 2016.

Below are the main take-aways from the report, with a breakdown of what you can expect to find in the full report. Follow us on Twitter, where we share interesting tidbits from our research.

Learn to build stellar Android apps by completing 14 projects in this hands-on training (91% off)

There’s no substitute for genuine hands-on experience. So if you’re looking to build cool new apps, the best way to learn is by doing just that with this Complete Android Developer course package. Right now, you can lock in this bundle of over 230 lectures and more than 31 hours of content for just $17 from TNW Deals.

Your guide to the Android universe is Rob Percival, a top-rated web developer and instructor. Rob will not only give you a thorough introduction to Android M, the latest Android platform, but take you through each stage of developing 14 different apps to show you how it all works.

Read more at http://thenextweb.com

Apple Watch stand turns your favorite wearable into a mini Macintosh

Christmas is over, but a $15 silicone smartwatch stand could still stuff your stockings if you’re one of millions of lazy people who have yet to take them down.

The Elago W3 stand looks like a miniature Macintosh and works with Series 1 and Series 2 Apple Watches (both 38mm and 42mm versions). The simple device was designed to support Apple’s nightstand mode, allowing you to use it as an alarm clock on your bedside table by just slipping the watch bands into the dedicated slot. It looks like a legitimate (albeit tiny) Macintosh, and even comes equipped with the floppy drive cutout.

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The proliferation of chatbots in financial services sustained momentum this week with savings chatbot Digit’s announcement that it will launch on Facebook’s Messenger platform, Bloomberg reports.

Digit exited its pilot stage in February 2015.

Over the past two years, Digit users have saved around $350 million through the app, which has to date operated via SMS and mobile. The San Francisco-based fintech says launching on Messenger will allow its users to communicate with the company via a channel they already frequently use for social interactions.

Digit wants to make saving easier and more conversational...

Samsung’s Gear VR and Googles Daydream have made tethered VR the norm for Android devices. Mobile VR devices like the Pico Neo CV that track users as they roam around a room, however, are something a bit more special.

Picos Neo CV is similar to devices like the HTC Vive in that it offers true untethered VR with six degrees of freedom. Though the Vive uses a pair of base stations to track movement, the Neo CV does not. Instead, it uses a front-facing fisheye camera and a series of gyroscopes to track the users relative position inside of a room, company executives said.

The Neo CV is actually a derivative of the Pico Neo, which used an associated Nintendo-like controller, rather than the users own body, to move about the room. That headset itself costs about $295.

The new head-mounted Neo ...

A new bed uses biometric sensors to monitor sleep patterns, measuring things like heart rate, breathing and position and adjusting to keep sleepers comfortable.

Sleeping patterns are strongly linked to health and wellbeing, but studies show that as many as 35% of people have some symptoms of insomnia. Looking at this from a purely economic perspective, in the US alone the impact on the economy is an estimated USD 63 billion in lost work performance due to poor sleep each year. It’s perhaps not surprising then that an increasing number of innovation is focusing on healthy sleep, from this wearable ring that trains people to sleep better to this wifi-connected smart crib, that detects when babies cry and safely rocks them back to sleep...

Find A Better Way charity and the University of Glasgow recently announced their project using lab-grown bone replacements in reconstructive surgery.

Dedicated to using technology to clear the 110 million active landmines still scattered around the world, the Find A Better Way charity has partnered with the University of Glasgow to fund a new method for improving post-blast reconstructive surgery. Much of a surgeon’s success in rebuilding the injured parts of the body lies in the amount of viable bone and tissue that are available. Now, using 3D printed scaffolding and lab-grown bone, personalized pieces can be produced in three to four days.

The bone scaffolds are coated with stem cells and growth factor, and once a large enough piece has been grown it can be implanted into the body...

You Need to Market Like You’re Selling Cereal

When I was a kid, I would sit down at the breakfast table every morning to read the cereal box. There were jokes, mazes, quizzes, colourful pictures, cartoons, cut outs, give aways and anything/everything else a kid wants to look at.

I’d choose the brands of cereal I wanted to eat purely by the box. And I chose the box purely by the content and the branding. Because it spoke to me and appealed to me. They knew what I wanted.

They gave me what I wanted.

The folks who designed and wrote those boxes bridged the gap between entertaining and educating and selling more effectively than any marketers I’ve encountered since.

And that’s what your job is...