The future of conversational AI is not a league of anthropomorphic voice assistants that we address by name to handle our problems. We will not unlock our iPhones and ask for Alexa when we need to dim our lights. We will not ask Alexa through our Echo to ask Siri to play a song. Asking your personal assistant for what amounts to a warm intro to another assistant is absolute lunacy. Read More
dApps, or decentralized apps, are open-source applications built on top of a blockchain. But here’s the thing – users usually can’t interact with these dApps unless they have tokens issued by these projects. For example, both Augur, a decentralized prediction market and REXMLS, a free global listing network for real estate, require tokens to interact with.
But if you… Read More
Back in July, Niantic introduced a new concept to Pokémon GO: Legendaries. Meant to be some of the hardest to catch, Legendary Pokémon are ultra-strong, appear only for a limited time and require players to form “raid groups” take them down. Later today, the first set of Legendary Pokémon are leaving — and, perhaps a bit surprisingly, three new ones are already prepped to… Read More
Miss out on the first two rounds of tickets to the hackathon at Disrupt SF 2017? Don’t fret. Today, we’re releasing a new batch of hackathon tickets, so everyone out there who has been waiting to get tickets to the best hackathon in San Francisco can get in on the action. Read More
Amazon has a new fantasy series coming to its streaming service, which is “a fantasy-noir set in a neo-Victorian city,” according to Deadline. All eight episodes of the show, called Carnival Row, were picked up by Amazon, which means it won’t go through the usual pilot process Amazon uses to test much of its Prime Video original programming.
That’s probably because… Read More
Facebook is planning to open source LogDevice, the company’s custom-built solution for storing logs collected from distributed data centers. The company made the announcement as part of its Scale conference. Read More
As part of its Scale conference today in San Jose, Facebook’s computational photography team is announcing the completion of an internal research project dedicated to helping you clean up your poorly taken 360 photos. The team used a deep neural network to identify crooked 360 photos and reorient them to maintain realism. You’ve probably used leveling tools before on your smartphone… Read More
Treebo Hotels, one of the most prominent members of India’s emerging budget hotel networks, has closed a $34 million Series C round. The deal was led by new backers Ward Ferry Management and Karst Peak Capital, two Hong Kong PE firms, with participation from existing investors SAIF Partners, Matrix Partners India and Bertelsmann India Investments. Before this deal, two-year-old Treebo… Read More
When Amazon decided to buy Whole Foods, it seemed straight-forward enough. Huge company sees an opening and spends a ton of cash to gain an edge with a brick and mortar business, but the deal might have had some unintended consequences for AWS, Amazon’s highly successful cloud business. While Amazon has had a huge impact on retail in general, causing upheaval across the entire industry,… Read More
Half a decade after it was founded, website building platform Strikingly finally decided its time to raise a Series A. The Y Combinator alum announced that it closed a $6 million round from investors including CAS Holding, Infinity Venture Partners, Innovation Works, former Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale and TEEC. Strikingly also recently launched an app that lets users build and publish… Read More
Apple just sent out invites for its annual iPhone event, which is taking place on September 12 at its new Cupertino HQ, at the Steve Jobs Theater it built there specifically to host special events. It’s expected that Apple will reveal a brand new iPhone with a nearly bezel-free design on the day. TechCrunch previously reported that the event would fall on this day, confirming… Read More
Berlin’s big IFA trade show doesn’t officially open until tomorrow, but the announcements have already started pouring out of the show that’s come to be known as the “CES of Europe.” The event’s late-August/early-September timing has been a big part of its increasing relevance in recent years, as companies use the platform to debut wares in time for the… Read More
Stackdriver, Google’s monitoring, logging and diagnostics solution for applications that run on Google Cloud Platform and AWS, is getting a number of new logging features and expanded free log limits today. Starting December 1, Stackdriver’s logging feature will offer developers 50GB of logs per project and month for free. Above that, Google will charge a flat rate of $0.50 per… Read More
Full-color 3D printing at home has long been a wild-eyed dream of consumers and hobbyists alike. Thus far it’s been fun to print out little trinkets in a single color, but to create something more akin to a painted action figure would be a game-changer. And, thanks to inkject technology, we just might have reached that milestone.
XYZprinting, the maker of the popular Da Vinci line of… Read More
DJI has upgraded its Mavic Pro and Phantom 4 Pro drone hardware, and added new software features to the tiny DJI Spark, its smallest consumer drone. At IFA 2017, DJI revealed the new Mavic Pro Platinum, which adds around 11 percent more flight time per charge, and 60 percent noise reduction. It also gets a platinum paint job. The Phantom 4 Pro Obsidian has a matte-gray finish (which is not… Read More
It seems like everyone these days has a multi-room speaker system – the latest entrant is Marshall, the amp maker that brought its signature style to portable consumer speakers in recent years. The speaker maker is introducing three new models today, each of which packs Wi-Fi connectivity and multi-room capabilities. The Acton, Stanmore and Woburn multi-room models go up in size from… Read More
Instagram Stories, its Snapchat clone now used by daily more people than Snapchat itself, is coming to the web. Initially, the feature will allow desktop and mobile web users to view Stories posted by their friends and others they follow. But it in the months ahead, the web version will allow you to post to Stories, too. Instagram Stories has been only one of an array of attacks on rival… Read More
Amazon today is launching the first Alexa skills specifically aimed at children, which will go live with a new Verified Parental Consent feature in order to operate within the confines of child data protections, like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This move opens the door to larger children’s media brands who have, until now, avoided building apps for… Read More
Ah, the Lightsaber. The thing we’d all totally be carrying around if it weren’t for pesky physics getting in the way. Augmented and virtual reality are just about the only ways to bring lightsabers to life – and Lenovo is trying to do just that. They’ve built a new augmented reality headset called the Mirage, and lightsaber battling is one of the first things… Read More
SanDisk has a new record-breaking microSD coming to market, which will deliver so much storage you might be at a loss as to what to do with it all. The new 400GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card is the world’s highest capacity card of its type, and is ideally suited for use in Android smartphones that feature an expansion slot.
Android’s most recent versions allow you to adopt… Read More
