TechCrooks™

There's an interesting trend in web design these days: Making websites that look, well ... bad. Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites - some decades old, some built recently - and hundreds more like them, eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces that has long been the industry's best practice. Instead they're built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from '90s graphics. The name of this school, if you could call it that, is "web brutalism" - and there's no question that much of the recent interest stems from the work of Pascal Deville. In 2014 Deville, now creative director at the Freundliche Grusse ad agency in Zurich, Switzerland, founded brutalistwebsites.com . He meant it as a place to showcase websites that he thought fit the "brutalist" aesthetic: Design marked by a "ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy"

Oracle Corp. and Google step before a jury a second time with potentially $9.3 billion on the line , and the prospect of profoundly changing how software is protected and licensed. The "World Series" of intellectual property, as the judge who presided over the earlier trial dubbed it, was left at a stalemate four years ago with Google's Android trophy untarnished. As the judge said then, there can be "only one winner" in the end. If that turns out to be Oracle , Google will have to pay fees for the operating system used in 80 percent of the world's mobile devices. The central question of the trial starting Monday in San Francisco federal court will be the same as in the last one: Did Google cheat by using part of Oracle's Java programming language to develop Android without a license? Oracle, saying monetary damages alone won't compensate for its loss, also seeks a court order "reasonably tailored" to the case that it says would put a

Shopo, a marketplace for artisinal goods that has been compared to Etsy, was acquired by Snapdeal and relaunched in July 2015 . The company's year-long journey has seen it grow while keeping its focus on small businesses that would not be well served on the parent platform, says Sandeep Komaravelly, Senior Vice President Snapdeal - Shopo. What's interesting is that Komaravelly believes that much of the growth the platform has seen in this time has been driven by design, as it has not been strongly marketed as yet. To showcase the point, Komaravelly gave Gadgets 360 a behind-the-scenes peek showing exactly how the design has evolved since July, and why. We've talked a lot in the past about how Indian startups are turning to design to act as a differentiator in a crowded market. Improved data connections, and better displays on smartphones mean that companies are now turning to glossy magazines for inspiration and moving away from the tired designs that were so commonplac

Battleborn, by Borderlands creators Gearbox, is simultaneously hilarious and annoying, extremely eye catching and visually drab, with exciting moment to moment gameplay that's still boring because of how repetitive it gets. That sounds pretty par for the course for Gearbox, but Borderlands was able to go beyond that with its insane combination of loot and huge skill trees. Does Battleborn also deliver more, or fall under the weight of its imperfections? Borderlands was the FPS take on a game like Diablo - lots of loot to collect, skills to upgrade, and hordes of enemies to kill. Battleborn brings the FPS treatment to League of Legends - short rounds of 10 - 30 minutes, where you face off against swarms of minions and enemy heroes, and take down the other team using your weapons and your skills. Instead of slowly leveling up your character over the course of hours of play, you quickly gain levels for your character during each match, unlocking abilities as you go along, and reset

Micromax showed off its latest flagships, the Canvas 6 and Canvas 6 Pro , at a grand event in Gurgaon last month where it also unveiled a new logo and brand identity. No longer content to be thought of as a "budget" smartphone manufacturer, the company which has so far made the most of India's smartphone boom, wants to take on new Chinese competitors such as Xiaomi and LeEco , which have seriously upped the ante in terms of features, build quality, and price. Where other companies have pushed high-resolution screens, top-flight CPUs, fingerprint sensors and metal bodies at extremely low prices, Micromax has decided to go with 4GB of RAM as its trump card. Pretty much all phones under Rs. 10,000 now have 2GB of RAM, and 3GB isn't unheard of under Rs. 15,000. Let's see if this one feature is enough to distinguish the Canvas 6 Pro from its competition, or if Micromax is barking up the wrong tree. Look and feel The Canvas 6 Pro might be Micromax's best-lo

Twitter and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre have partnered to prove the infinite monkey theorem, which states that monkeys infinitely typing at random could eventually re-create the complete works of William Shakespeare. The project uses a machine to capture the random keystrokes of one group of monkeys: Twitter users. CompleteTweets tweeted, "I'm typing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, word by word, one Tweet at a time. #Shakespeare400 https://t.co/uxENhdOyZR" In the Globe Theatre's lobby in London, a typewriter is hooked up via a mass of wires to a computer that combs Twitter looking for tweets that contain certain words. Starting with "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the machine types out the entire play, word for word, as soon as a match is found in the Twitter-sphere. Launching the project Sunday, the machine has already gotten to Act 4 of the play, or around 1.22 percent of the complete works. It will ultimately work its way through 37 pla