On this week’s Technotopia I talked to Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante, the co-creators of Arduino. This pair of Italian artists saw their little single-board computers as a gateway to high-tech art but they’ve essentially created a world in which anyone – from an 11-year-old hacker to a huge corporation – can make amazing hardware in a few hours.
The pair recently… Read More
Zume has long had grand ambitions for its food automation service, and the Mountain View-based startup is now $48 million closer to that goal, courtesy of a new series B. The funding, first spotted by CNBC, was detailed in an SEC filing, alongside the company’s plans to raise a total of $50 million. Cofounders/co-CEOs Julia Collins and Alex Garden confirmed the round this morning with… Read More
Waymo is working with a number of organizations on a new self-driving education campaign to help answer questions the public has about autonomous vehicles and technology. The program is designed to provide easily accessible info that offers answers to questions including “are self-driving cars safe?” and “how do they know what to do?” and it includes participation… Read More
Laundryheap is a London-headquartered laundry on-demand startup that has taken a different path to competitors such as Laundrapp and Rocket Internet’s Zipjet. Rather than raise VC funding, the company, which claims to already be break even and is operational in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Dublin and Dubai, has been entirely bootstrapped over the last three years. Read More
Google has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited its platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, according to the Washington Post. Read More
Hulu has picked up four new series that are centered around e-sports, according to Variety. The network-backed streaming service, which has been coming in hot lately with an Emmy-winning original drama and a push toward more back-log seasons of popular series, purchased the rights to about 15 total hours of content from ESL. Here are the four series: Player v. Player: a talk show with… Read More
Nintendo SNES Classic owners should be glad to learn that more games aren’t out of your reach. Cluster, the Russian coder who originally cracked the NES Classic Edition, has now figured out how to side-load more games to the SNES CE through his Hakchi tool. With the release of Hakchi v2.20, users can expand their options on the little SNES, which comes with only 21 games pre-installed.… Read More
Sony’s getting the old crew back together for one more job. According to a new report out of the Nikkei Asian Review, the electronics giant is reuniting the team between its beloved, bygone robotic dog Aibo, in order to develop a new version of the bot for the age of smart assistants. The dog is said to be the first of a number of consumer offerings from the company designed to help… Read More
Elon Musk ranks alongside the Wright Brothers and the scientist who brought warp speed light to humanity, according to Star Trek: Discovery. On last night’s episode of the new CBS All-Access show, Captain Gabriel Lorca (portrayed by Jason Isaacs) listed Musk alongside the Wrights, and fictional warp drive inventor Zefram Cochrane as peers in space flight technological innovation. Musk,… Read More
Cruise, the self-driving car startup GM acquired last year, has acquired a startup of its own – Strobe, a LiDAR sensor maker that reduces an entire LiDAR array down to just one chip, which Cruise says will be instrumental in helping it reduce the cost of LiDAR on a per vehicle basis by nearly 100 percent. The cost issue is a big one: LiDAR remains one of the single most expensive… Read More
It’s time to say goodbye for real this time. Windows Phone’s death has been slow and painful, but, as CNET spotted, the head of Microsoft’s Windows division finally admitted you shouldn’t expect anything more when it comes to Windows Phone. Microsoft doesn’t plan to let existing Windows Phone users down — there will be security updates. But don’t… Read More
SpaceX launched its 14th Falcon 9 rocket of 2017 this morning, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket carried 10 Iridium satellites to orbit, and was the third mission for Iridium that SpaceX has conducted, with more planned to complete the communications provider’s Iridium NEXT satellite network. SpaceX also recovered the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket it… Read More
SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:37 AM PDT (8:37 AM EDT) and you can watch the launch stream live above. The launch is for client Iridium, and will put a third set of 10 satellites in orbit for the communications company. The launch has a backup window tomorrow at around the same time if this launch has to be scrubbed for any reason. The Falcon 9 first stage will also be attempting… Read More
Chef has long made a name for itself as the go-to tool for helping businesses automate the deployment of their on-premises or cloud infrastructure environments. About a year ago, though, the company also launched Habitat, a more application-centric service that allows developers to package up their code for deployment on a wide variety of platforms, ranging from containers and VMs to… Read More
GitLab, a collaboration and DevOps platform for developers that’s currently in use by more than 100,000 organizations, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series C round led by GV (the fund you may still remember under its former name of Google Ventures). This brings GitLab’s total funding to date to just over $45.5 million. In addition to the new funding, the… Read More
Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, continues to be keen to be seen to be doing things differently vs the Travis Kalanick era Uber which got bogged down with so many scandals — most recently culminating in the company being stripped of its license to operate in London. Read More
Micro-lending and small business financing are a critical component of economic growth around the world, and the need for access to low-cost capital is especially important in developing countries. The Catch-22 is that these countries are also the ones where the lending markets are the least developed. The problem is especially acute in Mexico. Read More
Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2017 is the premier exhibit hall for international cutting-edge tech startups. If you aspire to show your stuff alongside hundreds of other early-stage companies, you absolutely can — we’ll even tell you how you can do it for free. But you must act quickly, because you have only until October 13 to submit your application. Read More
Yesterday at GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, BlackBerry announced the Motion, an all-screen smartphone with a massive battery. Made by TCL under the BlackBerry Mobile brand, the Motion packs a 5.5-inch screen and running on a Snapdragon 625 SoC platform. The phone will be initially available in Middle Eastern markets for around $460 USD. North American availability was not announced. The… Read More
The global e-commerce race — and how it is underpinned by logistics, delivery and economies of scale — continues to heat up. And today, the Belgian Post Group, also known as bpost, announced its latest move to bulk up its operations in North America. It has acquired Radial, the fulfilment company formerly known as eBay enterprise, for $820 million. This is important because Radial… Read More
