SAN FRANCISCO — For people with autism, communication with other people doesn’t always come naturally. Recent high school graduate Shubhankar Jain understands — his younger brother Paras is autistic. Watching Paras, who Jain said is intelligent but has difficulty interacting with people emotionally, inspired Jain to build an app, Audeo, that utilizes natural language …

It’s summertime, and Uber wants its users to have on-demand ice cream. The company will bring back its ice cream truck service on Friday, letting people in 33 cities across the globe summon a truck of summer’s most iconic dessert for one day only. Uber is partnering with local trucks to deliver group offerings, so you can share, and pay …

Clinkle, the secretive mobile-payments service backed with $25 million in early investments by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, will soon allow more college students to sign up. The company is still in stealth mode, with a pilot program at Stanford, but plans to launch at other colleges within the next year. It won’t be available to the general public, …

Uber is adding a new feature that lets customers split the cost of a ride among multiple passengers, according to a report from The New York Times on Monday. The car e-hailing service is including the new feature in its next iPhone and Android software updates. After you request a ride, you can tap on the arrow next to the …

After wiping his hands clean of Research In Motion, former co-CEO Jim Balsillie will now lead Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a federal agency that promotes green tech, The Canadian Press reported Tuesday. Balsillie left Canadian-based RIM, the maker of BlackBerry, in March 2012 amid shareholder criticism over the company’s poor performance in recent years. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis also stepped down, …

Tempo, the calendar app that wants to be a smarter digital assistant, raised $10 million dollars in its first round of funding, its creator Tempo AI announced Thursday. The money is going toward building better artificial intelligence for Tempo, which, Tempo AI CEO Raj Singh envisions, will learn to anticipate your every move, no matter who you are. “There’s many …

Uber is now offering its ride-sharing service — which lets users get rides from people in their personal cars — at prices lower than taxi cabs, the company announced today. The peer-to-peer service uberX, which mimics the models of companies like Lyft and Sidecar, will now have fares in San Francisco that are 10 percent lower than taxi prices, according …

Polyvore, the e-commerce site for fashionistas, announced Wednesday that users have downloaded its iOS app 1 million times. To mark its milestone, the profitable company has added a few features, including hashtags and ways to edit your collections. Users can now undo or redo changes they make in the editor, resize the images to fit the screen, realign text, and …

ClubLocal, a company that contracts with merchants of home services like plumbing or handyman work, wants to make sure customers waiting to have their homes fixed know exactly when the repair guy (or gal) is showing up. The company, which expands to the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday after testing its service in Dallas, lets customers schedule a service …

Tempo, the calendar app that uses Siri-like artificial intelligence to schedule meetings and dial in on conference calls, is racking up user data to decide where it will land next. The app, created by Tempo AI, highlighted its popular conference call features on Wednesday. While the company — which comes from SRI International, the same place that created Apple’s Siri …