As tech giants like Apple and Facebook prepare to spend billions of dollars on movies and TV, longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg is looking to write some big checks for original content, too. Katzenberg began his career at Paramount Pictures (where he worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture), but is best known for running Disney’s motion picture division during the period… Read More
Optoma has released new fully wireless headphones under its ‘NuForce’ audio sub brand, the BE Free8 earbuds. These are like Apple’s AirPods, requiring no wire to connect them, and they connect via Bluetooth to any device. The charging pod they ship with even has a similar design to the AirPod case, and carries three backup charges for powering up on the go. The NuForce… Read More
In a continued effort to pass on any responsibility for the largest data breach in American history, Equifax’s recently departed CEO is blaming it all on a single person who failed to deploy a patch.
Hackers exposed the Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and other sensitive info of 143 million Americans earlier this summer by exploiting a vulnerability in Apache’s Struts… Read More
This morning, Judge William Alsup ruled that the Waymo v. Uber trial would be delayed until December 4th. The trial had initially been expected to start with jury selection next Tuesday on October 10th. Ultimately this gives Waymo additional time to review new documents associated with the Stroz report in advance of the start of the trial. Waymo has been pushing for the delay to account for… Read More
As a member of the Data Generation, I’ve found that my photos, videos, and documents quickly expand to fill their containers. A standard USB drive is quickly replaced by another, larger one while home network file servers fall by the wayside as they get full, old, and dangerously lossy. In short, it’s time for the big guns. That’s why I was pleased to try out the Netgear… Read More
TechCrunch has learned that Amazon has acquired Body Labs, a company with a stated aim of creating true-to-life 3D body models to support various b2b software applications — such as virtually trying on clothes or photorealistic avatars for gaming. Read More
Stripe, the payments startup is now valued at $9 billion, is today taking the wraps off its latest effort to help its customers — which now number in the hundreds of thousands, and include companies like Lyft, Salesforce, Facebook, Deliveroo, and the U.K. government — generate more transactions, and thus greater returns for Stripe itself. It is launching Elements, a free toolkit… Read More
Polly blew up with teens last month by tacking multiple-choice polling onto Snapchat. Instagram is following suit with its own polling feature within Stories. Now just like adding a location sticker, you can add a two-answer poll on top of your Stories that friends can answer with a tap. Read More
It’s no secret that Microsoft’s Mixed Reality platform will support SteamVR games over time. That’s a big deal because Steam is, after all, the largest store for buying PC games and Microsoft needs a large catalog of VR games to jumpstart its ecosystem. Until now, though, we didn’t really know what the timeline for this would look like. As the company announced today at… Read More
Microsoft is getting ready to launch the next major update to Windows 10. Part of this update includes full support for Windows Mixed Reality. After lining up support and headsets from partners like Acer, Dell HP and Lenovo, Microsoft today announced that Samsung is bringing a virtual reality headset for room-scale VR to its platform. Read More
At a special event today in San Francisco, Microsoft announced that it has acquired social VR app AltspaceVR. The virtual reality social networking app allows users across headset and web platforms to join 3D chat rooms to play games, watch videos and attend events. Read More
The iPhone 8 Plus’s reign as “the best smartphone camera” was a mighty short one. DxOMark, the testing outfit many look to for fair evaluations of cameras from DSLRs to phones, gave Samsung’s Galaxy S8 a 94, tying the iPhone and in some ways exceeding it. Read More
Honda has a new bipedal robot, which isn’t perhaps as charismatic as Asimo, but which could be a lot more useful. The robot is a disaster relief model, dubbed E2-DR (very Star Wars) which has flexible, articulating joints, a waterproof design and a 2km/h walking rate. The robot can climb ladders, crawl over debris, work in extreme temperatures and has a range of sensors that let it see… Read More
If you just bought an iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus, you may have encountered a rather annoying issue. Some new iPhone users could hear crackling sound during calls. Apple just released iOS 11.0.2, which includes a handful of bug fixes, including a fix for this bug. Many users have been reporting crackling noise ever since the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus came out. A colleague also noticed the same… Read More
GM is sharing more info about its testing process for autonomous cars through Cruise, the startup it acquired last year. For the first time, Cruise has shared some numbers related to the advantages it says its program has by placing emphasis on city testing, vs. testing only in less densely occupied areas. “Cruise does the majority of its testing, or at least a significant portion of it,… Read More
Last week, Amazon went on the offensive. It was a sort an Operation Shock and Awe of Echos, bringing the total line up to six devices — seven, if you count the Tap (which Amazon kind of, sort of does). The Seattle event was an aggressive show of dominance from a company that has essentially controlled the home assistant space since the release of the first device in late 2014. For the… Read More
Sleep tech startup Eight has always aimed to connect its products (first a mattress cover, then an actual smart mattress) to the broader smart home ecosystem. Most recently, it launched a new Alexa skill that allows Eight owners to use the Echo and other Amazon devices to interact with their mattress, both to control it (say by adjusting the temperature) and to access their sleep data. We… Read More
One of the projects seeking to prove that they have a viable route for building one of Hyperloop One’s very first actual hyperloop routes has formed a formal public-private partnership to help keep the project moving forward. Missouri’s Department of Transportation, teamed with the St. Louis Regional Chamber, the Kansas City Tech Council, the University of Missouri System and… Read More
Google today launched a new database service for Firebase, its platform for app developers. The new Firestore database complements the existing Firebase Realtime Database and indeed, there’s quite a bit of overlap between these two services. As Firebase co-founder James Tamplin told me, the Realtime Database (RTDB) was always the flagship product of the platform. The service is now in use… Read More
Figuring out who can access services across a platform as varied as Google Cloud can be a challenge for IT administrators. Google has done a lot of the work for you with a set of fairly granular pre-defined roles, but recognizing that canned roles won’t suit everyone’s needs, the company announced a Beta of custom roles today. As the name implies, administrators can define roles… Read More
