Pokémon GO’s next big sponsor partner in the U.S. is Starbucks, which is going to host new gyms and PokéStops at 7,800 company-run Starbucks stores in the U.S. In addition to the new in-game locales, Starbucks is also making a Pokémon GO edition Frappuccino to celebrate the tie-up. What does …

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) gave the green light to Bluetooth 5 this week, a new spec that promises some pretty radicular performance enhancements over its predecessor, according to the organization. The latest version of the ubiquitous wireless technology is said to offer twice the speed, four times the …

The primary weakness of Google’s Daydream VR is still a lack of content, but the young platform got a bunch of new software today, including a sizeable list of new games. I tried out a bunch, and here’s a look at what I thought of a few and which ones …

A new video app from Hyper wants to help you catch up on the latest news during your commute. What’s interesting about Hyper News, compared with apps from traditional news publishers, is that it has been specifically designed so you can watch its videos even when there is no internet connection available. This makes …

French-based location sharing app Zenly hopes to be the next Snapchat and co-founder Antoine Martin came onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London to talk about how it plans to get there. The original idea came from Foursquare check-ins but Zenly allows users to check-in and share their location with friends and family. Martin …

Reddit has just completed a major redo of its scoring algorithm aimed at cracking down on bots and vote brigades while also showing just how big the site has gotten. In a self post on the site, admin KeyserSosa explained that the team felt that some of the many rules …

Can mobile app startups please stop building SMS invite systems into their apps already? The latest example of a venture-backed startup getting dinged by customers for having spammed their entire address book without permission is Sequoia portfolio company Tribe. The video chat app hit the App Store last year, and had been …

Paving the way for friend-to-friend payments to come to Facebook Messenger in Europe (and after the functionality debuted in the U.S. all the way back in March last year), Facebook has quietly secured an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland. A quick search of the state bank’s register …

Secret co-founder David Byttow said his shuttered startup would make a return of sorts, tweeting as much in November. Byttow launched the revived anonymous publishing app as IO on Thursday morning, with a different approach that has more in common with Medium than mobile social apps like Twitter (and with Bold, …

There are plenty of apps out there that purport to keep you “safe.” Apps that immediately phone your main contacts when you are threatened or attacked. Apps that allow you to share your location with key contacts. But for modern women, especially in big urban cities like New York or …