No one ever says hardware is easy, and today it looks like another promising startup has hit a wall. Navdy, which made an in-car heads-up display that projected info like navigation on to your windscreen, has been sending out notices to customers and others who might have claims against the company, as part of a General Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors. Read More
Noah Heller, one of the chief architects of Hulu’s virtual reality strategy, has left the video streaming service to set up his own venture firm, 3Rodeo. Primarily focused on backing Los Angeles-based technology startups, the new fund has already committed capital to three deals, Heller confirmed. Read More
Researchers at Duke University, OSU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have solved one of the biggest problems with new forms of quantum encryption: quantum key distribution. QKD is the process of distributing keys during a transmission and in a way that will tell both sides of the conversation that someone is eavesdropping. The new system, which uses lasers to transmit multiple bits at once,… Read More
Waymo continues to press its lead in terms of actual miles driven on roads, which is potentially the most important metric out there when it comes to building successful autonomous driving technology. The Alphabet-owned company that began life as Google’s self-driving car project around a decade ago now has 4 million miles driven autonomously on roads. Read More
It’s been just ten days since Stitch Fix debuted on the stock market, and it has risen almost 54 percent since that time. It’s an astonishing feat for the fashion styling business, which got off to a rough start, but quickly turned things around as it started to gain momentum by its third day of trading and soared 24 percent today, better known as “Cyber Monday.”… Read More
Plex confirmed it’s rolling out a new feature that will allow cord cutters to skip the commercials in the TV programs recorded using its software, making the company’s lower-cost solution to streaming live TV more compelling. Unlike other commercial-skip options, Plex’s option will remove commercials from recordings automatically. Read More
Lucid, one of the companies that looks like it could have the best chance to potentially field a true all-electric competitor to Tesla’s Model S, is moving its headquarters to a new facility in Newark, California — one with twice the space of its current base of operations in Menlo Park. Read More
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp marked Nintendo’s most significant mobile title launch since Mario Run and it seems like the game has already delivered some significant downloads, with data from SensorTower suggesting that the title, which lets users chat with animals, catch fish and shake trees for fruit, has already been downloaded 15 million times in its first six days of availability. Read More
Sadly, not all of the Pixel 2’s surprises have been the good sort since Google’s latest flagship launched. Visual Core is one of the more pleasant ones, though — a custom system-on-a-chip (SoC) that’s just been hanging out in the phone not really doing much of anything. Read More
It looks like Congress won’t be ignoring the recent thoroughly sketchy report that Uber failed to disclose — and made efforts to hide — about a data breach that affected 57 million users in 2016. On Monday, Senator Mark Warner issued a set of questions to the ride-sharing company regarding the hack and its failure to inform both regulators and its own users. Read More
SpaceX filed a new amended update to its $351 million funding round from this summer, adding around $100 million to the round in newly disclosed funds and bringing the total to $450 million. The new follow-on funding puts SpaceX’s total post-money valuation at $21.5 billion. SpaceX spokesperson James Gleeson provided the following statement regarding the amended filing: “This… Read More
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has teamed up with Harvard’s Wyss Institute to create a super strong, affordable artificial muscle that could be used to create soft robots with “superpowers,” including the ability to lift up to 1000 times their weight. The new soft robotic artificial muscles are inspired by origami, and can be constructed in… Read More
Microsoft Office is now available for Google Chromebook users through the Google Play Store – a notable addition, given the two companies offer competing products in terms of office productivity software. Neither Google nor Microsoft are making a formal announcement about the Office applications’ arrival on Chromebooks. But we understand the Office Android apps will only be free… Read More
Fans are stoked for a fourth season of Black Mirror, as they should be. The Emmy-award winning series, which shows the dark side of our inevitable future, does an outstanding job of story-telling while encapsulating an entire plot line in a single episode at a time. But Netflix is keeping its cards close to the vest. The streaming giant has yet to announce a release date for Season 4, but… Read More
Google confirms it has now addressed an issue that caused the YouTube app to drain the battery excessively when running on iOS devices, even when the app was idle in the background. In some cases, users reported the device would even become heated as a result of the problem, but not everyone experienced this issue. It’s unclear to what extent the issue affected the combined iOS and… Read More
As Verizon’s digital media business Oath rolls on with its merging of Yahoo and Aol (which includes TechCrunch), today comes news of a significant departure. David Karp, who founded and led the Tumblr business, is leaving by the end of the year to be replaced by the social media site’s president and COO, Jeff D’Onofrio. The news was making the rounds on Twitter, and we… Read More
Private equity giant Thoma Bravo has agreed today to buy Barracuda Networks in a take-private deal that’s valued at $1.6 billion. The company was offered $27.55 per share, about 16% above Friday’s close.
Though above Barracuda’s 52-week high, the price is down from the over $40 per share where the stock was trading in 2015. Barracuda went public in 2013.
Campbell… Read More
Google announced today it’s expanding the focus of its Google Trends service – the site that lets anyone track what the world’s web searchers are looking for in both real time and non-real time. The service now includes data from more Google products beyond web search, the company says, with the addition of search data from verticals like Google News, Shopping, Images and… Read More
Reliam, a company that provides managed services for businesses that want somebody else to manage their public cloud deployments on platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round from Boston’s Great Hill Partners. Reliam says that Great Hill has reserved a full $75 million to fund additional acquisitions and growth. In the… Read More
HeadSpin, a mobile application testing service, launched today to give developers a one-stop shop for quality assurance and control for mobile application development. The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Manish Lachwani, knows the mobile appspace better than almost anyone. The former co-founder and chief technology officer of Appurify (which Google bought), Lachwani… Read More
