For car owners, getting their vehicle repaired or even dealing with routine maintenance can be a pain. Launching today, a company called CarDash wants to make auto service less painful and more transparent. Read More
When it comes to password breaches on public sites like Adobe, LinkedIn and Yahoo!, there are some known knowns. For instance, there’s a decent chance those credentials will end up for sale on a black market site on that mysterious part of the internet known as the “Dark Web.” That matters for a couple of reasons. First of all, research suggests that a lot of folks use the… Read More
Today, Mozilla is launching its latest update to Firefox for Windows and the hallmark feature is WebVR support that will enable desktop VR users to dive into web-based experiences with ease. WebVR is a standard that allows people utilizing supported browsers the ability to click a link that takes them directly into a VR experience. With the updated Firefox, all you have to do is click a… Read More
Israeli startup Oryx Vision has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Third Point Ventures and WRV to help continue to develop and commercialize its innovative LiDAR tech, which is designed to be as simple as a digital camera with greater reliability and sensitivity than existing LiDAR, while also achieving a low cost. Oryx’s LiDAR has no moving parts, and uses antennas in place… Read More
Brands have long been able to search for company mentions on social media, but they’ve lacked the ability to search for pictures of their logos or products in an easy way. That’s where Salesforce’s latest Einstein artificial intelligence feature comes into play.
Today the company introduced Einstein Vision for Social Studio, which provides a way for marketers to search for… Read More
On the heels of a $25 million funding round, connected device maker Tile is today rolling out a more premium line of lost item trackers, with the launch of its Tile Pro series. The line today includes two new devices, a dark slate-and-graphite Tile Sport and a white-and-gold Tile Style. Beyond their more fashionable look, these Pro trackers include upgraded internals, allowing the devices to… Read More
Lonely Planet has a new app for travel enthusiasts. Called Trips, the app uses an Instagram-like design populated with beautiful images of far away places. Much like Lonely Planet’s website, the idea behind Trips is to offer travelers an easy way to share their experiences and discover new areas of the world, this time on their smartphones. However, Instagram already has a healthy amount… Read More
Major tech companies have actively reoriented themselves around AI and machine learning: Google is now “AI-first,” Uber has ML running through its veins, and internal AI research labs keep popping up.
They’re pouring resources and attention into convincing the world that the machine intelligence revolution is arriving now. They tout deep learning, in particular, as the… Read More
A major update to the UK’s data protection rules will place new requirements and responsibilities on companies that process users’ personal data, including by making it easier for consumers to withdraw consent their data to be processed; view what data is held on them for free; ask for their data to be deleted; and move their data between service providers. Read More
Accelerator network SparkLabs opened its newest program today in Taipei. Headed by managing partner Edgar Chiu, SparkLabs Taipei will focus on preparing Taiwanese startups to enter other countries. Read More
A week after its first investment in Europe, Chinese ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing is spreading its wings once again after it announced a financing deal with Careem, an Uber rival in the Middle East that is valued at more than $1 billion. The size of the investment was not disclosed. Yes, Didi is backing yet another Uber rival in another corner of the world. Aside from Taxify, the Europe… Read More
Softbank wants to invest in either Uber or Lyft, iPhone 8 might scan your face and QR codes come to Venmo and Faraday Future is getting a factory in Hanford, California. All this on Crunch Report! Read More
Google has fired the employee behind a controversial memo on gender diversity that went viral inside the company, and across Silicon Valley and much of the world’s tech industry.
The author, who has been revealed to be Havard PhD graduate James Damore, confirmed to Bloomberg that he has been terminated from his role as an engineer at Google for “perpetuating gender… Read More
Two months ago, Facebook’s AI Research Lab (FAIR) published some impressive training times for massively distributed visual recognition models. Today IBM is firing back with some numbers of its own. IBM’s research groups says it was able to train ResNet-50 for 1k classes in 50 minutes across 256 GPUs — which is effectively just the polite way of saying “my model… Read More
A little competitive spirit is often just the thing when you want to spur some innovation, and that’s exactly the idea at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, where AI systems will be competing in a variety of tasks. Teams are already setting their systems against one another imitating how muscles work when we walk, answering pub quiz questions, and subtly… Read More
MIT researchers have unveiled a new method for wirelessly monitoring sleep. The whole thing works a bit like echolocation — radio waves are beamed off a sleeping subject and changes in the body are detected when they bounce back. The research is the latest in a number of different activities the team has been monitoring using low-power radio waves. Read More
On the heels of this morning’s news of a deal that brings CBS channels to AT&T’s DirecTV Now, the network this afternoon announced its plans to expand its own streaming service, CBS All Access, to international markets. The expansion will begin with a launch in Canada in the first half of next year, with other markets to follow. Read More
Google is expanding its Africa initiatives, on the back of CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent trip to Nigeria. While visiting Lagos, he announced the global internet services company’s plans to train 10 million Africans in digital skills over the next five years. Alphabet will also increase its funding to African startups. Read More
Nostalgia may be a hot property right now, what with Nintendo’s classic consoles selling like hotcakes and retro pixel graphics in vogue, but God help me, I can’t get enough of it. Perhaps this 50-game collection from a host of talented and proven developers will sate my retro thirst. Read More
It takes a lot of smarts to move from tech CEO to full-time novelist, but Rob Reid pulled it off. The author of After On, Reid has spent years in the murk and mire of Silicon Valley and is ready to name names and, above all, explore all facets of the coming technological changes facing us all. I spoke to Reid about his new book, as well as the problem of finding an audience online and what… Read More
