Furniture and kitchenware giant Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (WSI) is acquiring augmented reality startup Outward in an all-cash deal for $112 million. The furniture mega-brand, which operates stores like Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, West Elm and others, will be using the startup’s 3D imaging tech to “enhance and extend its high-touch customer service platform,” the company says. Read More
Apple has released a brand new ad for the iPad Pro. It features a young girl and a rose gold iPad Pro running iOS 11. And Apple’s pitch is quite clear here — the iPad is the future of computers. The company even thinks there will be a time when a young person doesn’t know what “computer” means. There’s this meme that keeps coming back on Twitter. A young… Read More
The Federal Communications Commission will drive a stake through its own net neutrality rules roughly this time next month, if Chairman Ajit Pai gets his way. Sources at Bloomberg and Reuters say the FCC’s head honcho will showcase plans next week for a vote to repeal a 2015 order regulating web traffic throttling. If Pai gets his way, the vote will go down just ahead of winter… Read More
Parkour! That’s what we should all be devoting our combined robotics expertise towards. There’s no nobler human pursuit, so of course we should create a robot that can master the so-called ‘sport of kings.’ And yes, that is the true sport of kings. Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, a robot dog that’s slightly less intimating cased in its… Read More
Apple’s first-ever vice president of diversity and inclusion, Denise Young Smith, is leaving Apple at the end of this year, TechCrunch has learned. Young Smith, who has only been in the position since May of this year, previously served as Apple’s head of worldwide human resources for three years. Read More
HTC’s Vive Tracker allows objects to be tracked in VR. It utilizes the same weirdly shaped configuration at the top of the HTC Vive controller, tosses a battery into it and a tripod mount and for $99.99 allows you to bring objects into virtual reality with you. Read More
On November 16, TechCrunch and Elevacao hosted Startup Battlefield Australia in Sydney. The pitch-off competition featured startups from all over Australia and New Zealand. Top-notch investors and founders served as judges. We also had a great line-up of speakers who discussed everything from entrepreneurship to inclusion to the blockchain. Here are all the videos from the event. Read More
Apple has made iOS 11.1.2 available, the second minor point release it’s put out in as many weeks. This one is specifically designed to address a bug where the iPhone X could become temporarily unresponsive to touch input when moving from warm weather to dramatically colder temperatures – like venturing outside in winter in Canada, for instance. The update is also said to address… Read More
Trello today announced that it is launching operations in Japan next year as part of its overall global growth strategy. When Atlassian bought Trello earlier this year, one of the motivations for the sale was that Trello thought the larger company could help it reach more users. It’s no surprise then that Trello is now leveraging Atlassian’s existing presence in Japan to grow… Read More
Tech site Mashable is being sold to publishing giant Ziff Davis, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The website, which focuses on tech and tech-related stories and has been publishing since 2005, will sell to Ziff Davis for around $50 million according to the report, which is far less than its valuation of $250 million, from a funding round it raised in March last year.… Read More
It’s been a while since my Facebook notifications feed was filled to the brim with invites to play FarmVille, but I’ve been reminded every so often at how awful those times were. It seems that tool for growing an app’s audience is not long for this world as Facebook has announced that App Invites, alongside a bunch of other developer integrations, will be sunsetting over the… Read More
Twitter confirms it’s testing a feature that allows users to more easily create “tweetstorms” – those series of connected tweets that have grown to be a popular workaround for Twitter’s character count limitations. The feature, which was recently spotted in the wild, offers a new interface for composing tweets, where individual tweetstorm entries can be written… Read More
Personal finance startup NerdWallet seems to be on the struggle bus, having just laid off 53 people today (about 11 percent of its workforce) due to the fact that the company is not hitting its profitability goals, TechCrunch has learned. As part of the restructuring, NerdWallet’s sales and partnerships teams will be folded into various product teams. Read More
Facebook wants to turn mindless, passive video consumption into “time well spent,” and now it’s giving social media stars a powerful tool to foster communities around their content. Today Facebook launches Facebook Creator, offering influencers Live Creative Kit for adding intros and outros to broadcasts, a unified inbox of Facebook and Instagram comments plus Messenger… Read More
If you use Apple Pay to sign up for Postmates Unlimited, you’ll be able to get free deliveries on orders over $20 and no peak hour price surging for the next 45 days, MacRumors first reported. To qualify for this promotion, you need to sign up by November 23. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time. Read More
As the House and Senate continue to examine the wave of disinformation around the 2016 presidential election, concerns around the security of voting systems examine something even more germane to the U.S. democratic system. Read More
Publishers have a lot of mixed feeling about AMP (accelerated mobile pages), but it’s pretty safe to say that consumers enjoy web pages that load faster and are less cluttered. What’s less safe to say is that the experience on AMP-optimized pages is always better content-wise. One of the thing AMP sucks at is grabbing readers and letting them explore the site further after reading… Read More
Either you’re one of 250 million monthly Imgurians, or you probably have no idea what Imgur is. But those who are part of the addictive image-sharing community know there’s been one feature at the top of the request lists forever: favorite folders. Today, Imgur fulfills the wishes of the masses with the official launch of favorite folders. Read More
Toyota Mobility Foundation, a charity set up by Toyota in 2014 to help bring about “a truly mobile society,” has launched a $4 million competition to encourage the development of new smart mobility technology to support the lives of people with lower-limb paralysis. Read More
At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company’s internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is being publicly launched to all, after testing with hundreds of early adopters including Ticketmaster, HBO, Keller Williams, Viber, and others. The idea behind Chatbase’s cloud… Read More
