Yes, you read that correctly: Ford put a man in a car seat disguise so that a Ford Transit could masquerade as a true self-driving vehicle. Why? To evaluate how passers-by, other drivers on the road and cyclists reacted to sharing the road with an autonomous vehicle.
The trial, conducted with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, also made use of a light bar mounted on the top of the… Read More
To the uninitiated, startup fundraising can be confusing. And even some of the resources designed to be approachable for the newcomer often raise more questions than they answer. So we’ve launched a series called “A Startup Takes Flight” to simply explain the dynamics of fundraising and deal terms. Read More
A couple of years after participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield, YayPay is raising $5.3 million from QED Investors, Birchmere, Fifth Third Capital, as well as 500 Fintech Fund, Aspect Ventures, Gaingels, Techstars and Zelkova.
YayPay is trying to optimize the workflows in your company’s finance department. In particular, too many mid-sized companies waste a ton of time… Read More
Who cares about an OLED and a notch when your phone can sip power from its surroundings, allowing you to make calls without ever having to charge your phone. This wild cellphone is part of a Google Faculty Research program and received three U.S. National Science Foundation grants for total investment of about $2 million. For that money, the creator, Vamsi Talla, built a single-board… Read More
Hi there. It’s your Disrupt Hackmasters, Reshma and Jeffery, and we’re here with the details on this year’s hackathon judges. If you’re in it to win it, you’ll want to do your homework on these industry veterans before the event to see what makes them tick. Read More
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the early descriptions of Lore, the new streaming show based on the popular podcast by Aaron Mehnke. But the “anthology series” looks sort of like a period piece, horror version of Black Mirror. Mehnke’s narration is present, which is the driving force of the podcast, but there’s also dramatization, with a cast that includes… Read More
Dish’s streaming service for cord cutters, Sling TV, is now offering consumers without access to local broadcasts channels the ability to add an over-the-air (OTA) antenna to their existing setup – in some cases, for free. The company announced today two OTA antenna bundles which will include either a free a free Winegard indoor antenna when they prepay for two months of Sling, or… Read More
Oracle today announced that it is joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member. With this move, it’s joining companies like Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and RedHat as the top sponsors for the Linux Foundation-based group that’s the home of the Kubernetes container orchestration project and related tools. Membership in the CNCF… Read More
A federal circuit appeals judge ruled today that Uber must hand over the due diligence report it commissioned ahead of its acquisition of self-driving truck startup Otto.
Alphabet’s self-driving car division Waymo will now be able to receive this key document, which Waymo has argued likely contains information pertinent to its allegations that one of its former engineers, Anthony… Read More
Apttus, the unicorn quote-to-cash vendor built on the Salesforce platform, announced a $55 million round, which is likely its final private investment on the way to an IPO. While CEO Kirk Krappe wouldn’t definitively confirm the company was going public, he did say that today’s round was about gaining the confidence of future investors. “We decided we needed a certain amount… Read More
Offering to gate the smorgasbord of personal content that lives on a mobile device behind a face biometric inevitably raises lots of security questions, even as always on face-scanning tech being housed in a smartphone raises privacy concerns… Read More
Want to get 50 percent of your battery life back with just 30 minutes of charging? You can do that with the iPhone 8 (and 8 Plus) and iPhone X (via Engadget). These are the first phones put out by Apple that will support a quicker charge rate if you have a higher capacity charger – though you’ll have to pick one of those up separately to take advantage. Like the iPad Pro before it,… Read More
If you’re in a big city like New York City, you’re probably used to walking around the block away from where you live to the corner shop and picking up a jug of milk or some dishwashing detergent. But Paul McDonald (who says he has not lived in New York), who was at Google for more than 13 years, wants to collapse that distance between walking to that store to pick something up… Read More
It’s only taken six years, but the popular project management tool Trello — which was recently acquired by Atlassian — today launched its desktop apps for Mac, with the Windows app launching tomorrow. Until now, Trello only lived in the browser and while it worked really well, it also meant that it never quite felt integrated into any workflow that wasn’t… Read More
Bad news for traditional pay TV: cord cutting is accelerating at a pace faster than previously estimated. According to a new industry report from eMarketer, there will be 22.2 million cord cutters ages 18 and older this year – a figure that’s up 33.2 percent over 2016. The firm said it’s had to revise its forecast as the pace of cord cutting has increased. Previously, it… Read More
Asus, the Taiwanese hardware firm known for its ZenBooks, ZenFones and Zenbo the cute, humanoid robot, is stepping into the VC game with the launch of a $50 million venture capital fund. Managed in partnership with Fenox Venture Capital, it will focus on strategic investments with startups that want to enter Asian markets. Read More
Nobody likes to lose. Especially gamers. But unlike other sports or activities, video games aren’t conducive to practice.
Sure, you could play Destiny 2 until your thumbs bleed. But when it comes to fine tuning — maybe you’re slow to react to enemies on the top left side of the map, for example — video games don’t offer the environment to practice, practice… Read More
The iPhone X is billed as a future-focused device with a lot of cutting edge tech, available at a premium. It kind of reminds me of the positioning of the original MacBook Air, or the new MacBook, when those two devices were first introduced – tomorrow’s tech, available today, but for a bit more money and with a few trade-offs as a result of being ahead of its time. And the iPhone… Read More
While Tampa Bay residents are beginning the process of removing the sandbags from their homes and getting back to the business of daily living in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, the city’s multi-millionaire real estate developer, Jeff Vinik, is busy with plans of his own. Last year, Vinik and Bill Gates’ Cascadia fund jointly acquired a swath of waterfront property in Tampa… Read More
Heptio, the startup founded by Kubernetes co-founders Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round led by Madrona Venture partners. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners also joined in this round, which comes less than a year after the company’s $8.5 million Series A round. Read More
