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I've been writing about technology since 2007 for Tech.eu, Ars Technica, The Next Web, the Kyiv Post, and more.
Hello there, It feels like online tools for educators are two-a-penny these days, but today's startup is trying something different that feels almost like 'Substack for teachers', in that it's an all-in-one tool for offering their product as a business online.
Introduced in earnest back in 2015 together with the launch of the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts have often been hailed by enthusiasts as the decentralised future of deal-making.
Yes, we've only got two weeks left of this long year, things slow down little by little, and I'm starting to receive polite suggestions to talk in January when trying to record an interview before Christmas. So, welcome to the week of reflection on the past 12 months on Tech.eu - starting with the most important stories and trends we've noticed.
The two years since the COVID-19 pandemic started have forever changed the way most people think about work, health, entertainment - and shopping.
Over the past few weeks, we've recorded about 20 remote interviews for Tech.eu Podcast - which is probably more than we did in the previous five years combined. Until recently, we interviewed our guests almost exclusively in person to spare them the hassle and frustration of trying to achieve decent sound quality at home or ...
What started more than 70 years ago as a theoretical scientific discovery, has now become the sole focus of dozens of research groups across the globe. The Casimir force, named after the Dutch physicist who correctly predicted it in 1948, was first measured more than 20 years ago; and yet, it still holds a number of secrets, intriguing scientists all over the world.
The recent news about Microsoft acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion has resulted in quite some dismay on the software developers' side. Although it's not likely that GitHub will suffer the same fate as Skype, which is borderline unusable these days, a lot of people seem to have migrated, or at least backed up their data ...
Artem Shulga and his colleagues were devastated. The group of young physicists to whom he belonged had just lost a drone worth a few thousand dollars above the sarcophagus of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine.
At the beginning of her career as a university professor, Katja Loos was told by the national research evaluation committee that the research direction she'd chosen had no future and she'd "never succeed." A decade later, her group's papers are paving the way for an extremely important change in the chemical industry that could make polymer production far more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
The waves of popularity of electric scooters of all sorts have been reaching the rest of the world from the US for the past few quarters, with players like COUP, Lime, and many others setting up their businesses in European cities. Dutch startup Etergo, formerly known as Bolt Mobility, is trying to ride the wave ...
It's been almost 15 years since the model of a startup accelerator as we know it was implemented for the first time by Y Combinator. With thousands of programmes that have mushroomed around the world over the years, the model doesn't seem to age well.
When Bob Radocy lost part of his left lower arm in a car accident in 1971, there was little that the prosthetics industry could offer him. Artificial limbs available commercially at the time were quite crude, bulky, and inconvenient, and didn't really allow people to perform most daily tasks.
AMSTERDAM-With more and more similarly priced and specced Android smartphones arriving on the market, unique selling points are becoming increasingly rare. There's nothing bad about selling a decent phone with an attractive price tag, but it's always more interesting to take a look at something that stands out.
Although the way we read printed or written text hasn't changed much over the last 600 years, the media used for carrying the words have evolved significantly. From animal skin and waxed wooden plaques to paper, and from there to LCD screens and e-ink, there's now a wide choice of extremely affordable reading devices that can be used everywhere.
The Hyperloop has been in the news a lot over the past months, although most of these recent stories have covered the murky goings-on at Hyperloop One. There's a lot more to the Hyperloop concept and technology than the funds misappropriation scandals of one Silicon Valley startup, however.
Hot Octopuss was started just five years ago on the back of a scrap of paper. Like many businesses, it started as a desire to build a better product out of personal need, and grew into the successful adult toy company it is today, distributing devices around the world.
More than 25 years have passed since the Soviet Union collapsed, which resulted in 15 countries being free from the central administration and the communist ideology. The three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - were the first to declare independence and officially secede from the USSR.
Although calling a place "Silicon something" feels like a rather trite and modern manifestation of business buzzwordery, sometimes it's hard to refrain from that description, especially when there are reasons to use it.
The new information technologies have been penetrating more and more parts of people's lives over the past decade, and their sexuality is by no means an exception. What started with porn and hook-up websites of all kinds has since branched off into a number of different paths, of which explicit video is actually the most mundane.
Although many countries across the world strive to build a Silicon Valley of their own, regional technology business ecosystems are all very different, and are likely to remain so. It's very interesting to observe how each country's history affects the way startups and bigger companies grow and coexist on the market.
In the past few months, a number of stories have hit the news about remotely controlled drones flying dangerously close to aircraft around major airports. In January and February of this year, the UK Airprox Board -which investigates near-miss incidents-released no less than 10 reports on drones flying in conflict with commercial aircraft.
Modern chemistry can sometimes produce the most unlikely things, including materials familiar to everyone but with totally new-and useful-properties. A recent example of such a material is "flexiramics," which is being developed by Dutch startup Eurekite at the University of Twente.
The Germany-based team of FeelSpace has developed a vibro belt for outdoor navigation, which can significantly improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired. Showcased at the Falling Walls Lab conference in Berlin in November, the prototype consists of 32 vibro motors, which can give the user an idea of when and where to ...
It's hard to get the exact data on how many startup acceleration programs are being launched every year, but it's definitely a lot. If you search Google News for something like "new startup accelerator," it will return hundreds of headlines from all over the world.
A controversial Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that offers "artificial gills" for a mere £210 (~$299) has taken an unexpected turn: the company behind the so-called Triton project has issued refunds to all its backers.
Despite being illegal to use on roads and pavements in the UK, self-balancing "hoverboard" scooters are growing increasingly popular both in Europe and the US. Although mostly looked at as a toy and a fad that will fade soon, the scooters could be more dangerous than they seem, but also represent a wider issue in the hardware industry.
Although traditional corporations and hip and innovative startups may be seen as being on opposite sides of the barricades, they often make steps towards each other. Corporate accelerators, entrepreneurs-in-residence and other forms of collaboration between the two have become a normal thing for the community in Europe and the US in recent years.
Over the past few years, the future of work has become a concept that everyone defines slightly differently, depending on their own experience and occupation. A commonplace here, however, is that the idea of working 9-to-5 in one place for decades isn't something the millennials are after.
As Europe slowly but surely catches up with the US in all things disruptive, innovative and entrepreneurial, its Eastern half is becoming less unlikely a place for the next unicorn to be born. Within the region, Poland plays a big role, boasting rapidly evolving infrastructure for startups and an increasing number of success stories.
Did you have a chemical experiment kit when you were a kid? Would you buy, or have you already bought, one for your children? Chemistry is one of the sciences that are hard to understand by just reading books, so having something tangible to play with is a crucial part of learning.
Elegized by so many science fiction writers, artificial intelligence has seen a procession of successes and breakthroughs over the last few decades. From the Deep Blue defeating Kasparov in 1996 to a self-teaching AI smashing Super Mario World in 2015, thoroughly crafted algorithms can solve increasing numbers of tasks.
The transportation industry has gone through significant changes over the past few years, however most of them affected rides on the ground. Uber, Lyft and BlaBlaCar, as well as newcomers like GoOpti, make it easier and cheaper for customers to get from the point A to point B.
Wireless chargers using standards like Qi have been on the market for a while; IKEA even includes them in some of its furniture these days. But if you think about it, there's not much difference between wired and wireless charging in these systems. After all, the charger still needs to be plugged into a wall socket, and you still need to leave the phone in a designated place to charge.
Emerging markets have been a hot topic (or a buzzword) among VC funds and angel investors alike over the last few years. Although the geographical meaning of this phrase changes over time, generally it always means promising growing economies outside the U.S. and Western Europe, which are building their entrepreneurship ecosystems from scratch.
In the discussions regarding European startup landscape, people usually mention cities like London and Berlin as the main hubs powering the ecosystem of the region. As a result, we know quite a bit about these cities but potentially miss out on up-and-coming ones, which could be no less exciting and worth our attention.
In just a few years, crowdfunding has found a firm place in the tech industry, with many companies launching campaigns to fund their products. Current Kickstarter stats tell us that almost $2 billion have already been pledged on the platform by 9.5 million people.
Monetization of content projects, be it a newspaper or online-only news publication, is a pain these days. When we saw massive newspapers dying, everyone around seemed to be quite sure that all the advertising money from the print will soon appear in the online media - but that never happened.
While London is undoubtedly the center of gravity in the British startup and venture ecosystem, there's plenty of no less fascinating things going on outside the M25 motorway. A good example would be the burgeoning ecosystem in Bristol and Bath, which form part of the so-called Silicon Gorge in the south west of England.
Started in the early 2000s as a community on the LiveJournal blogging platform, 500px has become one of the most popular places in the internet to store professional and amateur photos, with more than 50 million images in its archives. Its history, however, has been a bumpy ride, which ended for its co-founder Oleg Gutsol ...
A woman's role and performance in the world of technology has been a hot topic for many years, and was revisited on Oct. 9 when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made some controversial comments while talking to Maria Klawe at the Grace Hopper Conference in Phoenix.
Bad mobile apps are everywhere. We bet every single user have seen a bunch of those, and still remembers the amazingly terrible experience they offered. If you'd like to join the cohort of bad designers, this guide will help you to create a properly abysmal product.
Online zooming presentation software maker Prezi - based in Budapest and San Francisco - recently announced important new numbers: 29 million users, and is projected to have 36 million by December 2013. A month later, the company's cofounder and CEO Peter Arvai came to Kiev, Ukraine to take part in the IDCEE conference.
Over the past five to ten years, minor and major news outlets all around the world have become very aware first of the possibilities of the Web, and then — the possibilities of mobile.
A significant trend in all parts of the modern world over the past few years, 'the sharing economy' has become a concept that disrupted quite a few major industries, including hospitality, fashion, and transportation. As an example from the latter category, French-born city-to-city ridesharing service Blablacar has been actively expanding lately and raised a massive $100 million funding round in July.
A bit more than a year ago, in June 2013, a slide was shown at the keynote at Apple's WWDC conference mentioning a word that few people had heard before, iBeacons. In the following months, it became a much-hyped term in the technology press, "the next big thing" that was promised to change the world in general and retail in particular.
In the aftermath of the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled Victor Yanukovych as president, Ukrainian politics saw quite a few people with business backgrounds enter government service, with Dmytro Shymkiv, former head of Microsoft Ukraine, among them.
With social media taking an increasing role in the modern world, social analytics services are seeing a significant boost in demand and, therefore, revenues. A good example is Socialbakers, a six-year old Prague-based company that has raised $34 million in funding to date and has grown to over 300 employees in 13 offices all over the world.
It totally makes sense to install a set of programming tools on your gadget. In today's post, we've put together some of the best IDEs for Android.
It's cheaper to share. That's the basis of a trend known as the sharing economy, in which people split costs for traveling, share clothes and economize in other ways. Ukraine's technology sector is already making money from the sharing economy.
Russian internet giant Yandex has launched an alpha version of its new Chromium-based browser for Windows and Mac OS X that incorporates a few interesting ideas of how a modern browser might look. The main difference from the interface of Chrome or Firefox is the ultimate minimalism and the fact that the tabs are moved to the bottom of the page.
In the process of iPhone and Android application development, wireframing is extremely important. At the first stage, an initial idea becomes a quick sketch to share with teammates, while later a UI/UX designer can use more sophisticated tools to create a full-featured prototype with transitions, links, and screenflows to model user experience.
Increasing screen size, RAM, or storage capacity hasn't been a problem for smartphone vendors in recent years, though we can't say the same about battery life, which is often a problem for many users and hasn't increased in line with our increasing reliance on these devices..
Russian Internet giant Yandex has rolled out a new feature for its cloud storage service Yandex.Disk that allows users to siphon their photos from Facebook, including the ones they're tagged in, to a safe place in the cloud.
Schoolchildren and adults willing to learn something new have widely adopted mobile technologies over the past few years. Smartphones and tablets have become not just devices for calling, browsing the Internet and occasionally watching movies while commuting, but gadgets that can replace or at least complement traditional textbooks, lectures, and other conventional study methods.
Kickstarter-backed Ukrainian startup Petcube has announced the beginning of shipments of its combined HD webcam, speaker and laser pointer that lets pet owners play with their furry (or sometimes hairless) friends remotely. Starting from today, the device is available for order on Amazon, Fab.com, and the startup's own website for $199.
For any mobile application development company, hiring is an extremely important part of existence, which can get painful if done wrong. Thankfully, there's plenty of advice shared over the Internet about where to look and what to do when considering someone for a mobile app developer position.
Although Android and iOS mobile application development is an exciting and rewarding job by itself, sometimes we need to go deeper and fine-tune a whole operating system so that it satisfies certain business requirements. As this is not something done very often, there are quite many pitfalls and not much advice over the Internet on how to overcome them.
With a decades-long history of being one of the countries where online music has been mostly pirated, Russia is now seeing the emergence of music services that offer users a legal way to stream tracks.
The new ways of getting work done have long since proved that people do not necessarily have to be located in one place to create amazing products and collaborate efficiently. Many, if not most successful international mobile app development companies work with remote employees or whole teams, and Stanfy is not an exception.
In the former USSR countries, criminal activities with stolen credit cards have created a market of $680,000,000. This accounts for 27 percent of the total high-tech crime market, says a report released by Russian cyber security firm Group-IB, covering the period from July 2013 and June 2014.
What happens when a band gets its hands on six iPhones, four iPads, one iPod and three MacBooks? Ukrainian musicians Brunettes Shoot Blondes used their collection of Apple hardware to tell a story about an adorable big-eared creature jumping around the screens to catch up with a girl who doesn't seem to be very fond of him - at first, at least.
The last few years saw Ireland not only struggling in efforts to recover its economy, but also becoming a popular destination for major US companies that want to put on a bridge to Europe. Likes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created a huge number of jobs in Dublin, making it a significant European technology hub.
By looking at the variety of online services for wannabe programmers, it seems like nowadays it is easier to learn how to code than how to cook. There is, however, not much of gamified experience for those who know the craft but still want to stretch their brains instead of playing another few hours in WoW or LoL.
Back in December 2012, we told the story of Russian startup Dream Industries, the founder of which claimed that he was raided by his own partners and the startup's investors. The latter answered with accusations of ineffective management and inappropriate expenditures.
Looking at the history of computers and software, it's safe to say that one of the main reasons behind their development was to automate as much as possible, leaving humans to do creative things that machines are unable to accomplish. In the last few decades, automation has touched many areas of our life, from warehouse logistics to software development.
While growing numbers of children learn to code in school, if not in kindergarten, there's still a lot of we grown-ups whose skills are rudimentary at best and don't go much farther than basic HTML editing.
Long-distance relationships are never easy, but it seems to be less so for the relationships between co-founders of tech companies. Living proof of this are the CEO and CTO of GitLab, which provides a self-hosted open-source collaboration platform intended for software developers.
When using phones, we mostly pay attention to the front side of the gadget where the screen is, while its rear isn't usually considered to be of any importance. Ukraine-based startup Concepter, known for its crowdfunded smartphone flash iblazr, has decided to put the back of your iPhone to use by giving it simple notifications for calls and text messages.
Having a healthy level of entrepreneurship in their country is a great thing for governments, not least because it can be a significant source of tax income. However, to reap the fruits you first need to sow - or, relating to governments, to help aspiring startup founders to build their businesses.
It is widely believed that while successful tech companies build good products, the real innovation comes from those that build new markets. A typical example of this would be Apple, which can take most of the credit for the mobile app and tablet markets as we know them today.