HowStuffWorks has changed owners more the once in the past few years. Discovery sold the company to Blucora in 2014, and Blucora, in turn, sold it to digital advertising company System1 last year.
Now, however, the nearly 20-year-old digital media brand is spinning out as an independent company. It’s also announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by The Raine… Read More
Gboard for Android is getting support for stickers for all those times you just can’t find the right GIF. Words, after all, can’t always express how we really feel. Read More
If you still have a functional SNES console, or one of the myriad third-party devices that plays actual SNES cartridges, you probably want to rush out and pre-order this limited edition Street Fighter II SNES cartridge celebrating the game’s 30th anniversary. The newly manufactured cartridges will number only 5,500 in total, including 4,500 in ‘Opaque Ryu Red,’ and 1,000… Read More
Salesforce and IBM are joining forces again as they attempt to deepen their alliance. The partnership began last March when they agreed to sell each other’s artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. Today’s announcement is all about data integration. Salesforce will be adding the ability to include IBM weather data in Lightning apps, while IBM will enable customers… Read More
Ricoh has revealed a brand new version of its Theta 360-degree camera: The Theta V, which upgrades the video capture quality to 4K resolution, adds live streaming support, and immersive “surround” sound audio recording. It takes over as the flagship Ricoh 360 camera, adding some much-appreciated modernized touches to one of the oldest and best-loved lines of consumer 360 cameras… Read More
Elon Musk apparently felt left out when student teams competed to achieve top speed on the SpaceX Hyperloop test track last weekend, because he decided to run the SpaceX pusher vehicle, which includes a Tesla drivetrain, down the track on its own to see how fast it could go.
The Tesla/SpaceX vehicle, which works basically like a Hyperloop tug boat to propel some of the student pods that… Read More
As Amazon continues to expand its retail muscle beyond its own e-commerce portal, there’s been some activity among startups and businesses hoping to develop systems that can help others compete better with it. Deliv, a “crowdsourced” same-day delivery startup that currently partners with some 4,000 retailers to help them offer same-day delivery services to rival those of… Read More
It’s hard to shake the feeling that Sony’s Xperia line exists primarily as a method for getting its camera technology out in the world. It’s not that they’re not solid phones, it’s just the company doesn’t seem particularly concerned with selling a lot of them, or doing much innovating outside of the imaging side of things. Read More
A wide-ranging, UK government-commissioned industrial strategy review of the life sciences sector, conducted by Oxford University’s Sir John Bell, has underlined the value locked up in publicly-funded data held by the country’s National Health Service — and called for a new regulatory framework to be established in order to “capture for the UK the value in algorithms… Read More
Garmin has three new wearable devices it’s debuting at IFA 2017, including the vivosport GPS-enabled activity tracker, the vivomove HR hybrid touchscreen smartwatch and the vivoactive 3, a smartwatch with Garmin Pay, which supports Visa and MasterCard credit and debit cards to enable mobile payments on the go. The Garmin vivoactive 3 includes GPS, a heart rate monitor, and battery life of… Read More
Top tier 1 automotive industry supplier Magna has introduced a new functional autonomous driving platform concept it’s showing off to automaker customers, which it says can work with any vehicle without impact to either car design or looks, and which can add scalable self-driving capabilities all the way up to SAE Level 4 (highly automated self-driving, which does not require human… Read More
Grab may be in the process of raising a huge $2.5 billion investment round, with SoftBank, Didi and Toyota confirmed as participants, but Uber’s Southeast Asia-based rival has lost its head of engineering.
Arul Kumaravel, VP of engineering at Grab, has left the company for personal reasons, according to a source. It’s not yet clear what his next plan is. Grab confirmed the… Read More
Olympus makes extremely good mirrorless cameras. I’ve been using a first-generation OM-D for a number of years now, and I know a couple of TechCrunch staff members who swear by theirs. Two years after releasing the last camera in the E-M10 line, the company is back with the Mark III, which brings a couple of key additions to the budget interchangeable-lens camera. Read More
Smart knobs have a short and not very illustrious history, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cool. That, at least, appears to be the thinking at Logitech, which has just added a smart knob (or dial if you’d rather) to its newest wireless keyboard. The Crown, they call it — and the keyboard it sits on is The Craft. Read More
Libratone, a Danish maker of snazzy high end wireless speakers, has announced its existing Zipp and Zipp Mini speakers will get support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant via a free app update, slated to arrive this fall. Read More
LG gets a fraction of the love of heavier hitters like Samsung and Apple, but it’s not for lack of trying. The company makes good — and in many cases envelope-pushing — phones. Recall the company’s recent forays into dual-lenses and new aspect ratios. Heck, they even released a modular phone before it was cool. Maybe they’ll have a little more luck this time out… Read More
When Google Home was unveiled, many people immediately noted the smart speaker’s striking resemblance to a home fragrance diffuser. Now there’s a smart home fragrance diffuser that looks like a smart speaker. Pium, a self-described “next-generation smart diffuser,” is currently participating in Samsung Electronic’s Creative Square incubator program. Visitors to… Read More
The rumor mill has been buzzing for a while now about a new, more affordable Nest Thermostat — and sure enough: it’s now official. They’re calling it the Nest Thermostat E. As rumored, they’ve shaved off a good chunk of the price tag; whereas the original Nest Learning Thermostat will continue to sell for $250, the Thermostat E will go for $169. So what’s… Read More
The popular language learning service Duolingo today announced that Tinycards, it flashcards app, is now available on Android. Tinycards, which marked Duolingo’s first foray beyond its flagship language learning service, launched as an iOS-only app in 2016 and came to the web in 2017. Read More
While Bill Maris was the CEO of Google’s venture unit, GV, the outfit made a bet in 2013 that drew snickers: it poured $258 million into the ride-share company Uber at a roughly $3.7 billion post-money valuation. The investment was by far GV’s biggest investment at the time. Yet while seemingly rich, the investment looks brilliant in hindsight. (It also looks complicated, of… Read More
