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
Uber investor Benchmark says the firm is confident about Uber, “despite speculation to the contrary,” the firm wrote on Twitter today. In fact, Benchmark is “incredibly optimistic” about Uber’s future. The firm went on to say Uber could be “comfortably” worth more than $100 billion in the next couple of years, according to its own analysis. Today, Uber… Read More
Despite reports and rumors of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick trying to make his way back to the company, Uber co-founder and board member Garrett Camp says otherwise, Recode reports. Read More
Hampton Creek has just informed TechCrunch that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved of the safety and labeling of all of its products. It would now like to know if Target wants to put them back on the shelf. In late June, the retail giant yanked Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo eggless mayonnaise spread, along with 20 other products from all stores and on Target.com after hearing… Read More
Over the weekend, the security community raised legal funds for Marcus Hutchins, the researcher famed for stopping the spread of the malware known as WannaCry. Hutchins, also known as MalwareTech, was arrested by the FBI last week for his alleged role in disseminating Kronos, a banking trojan that first wrought havoc in 2014. Read More
In the world of high-end virtual reality, the battle is to capture the larger subset of a niche market. For HTC, which makes the Vive headset, this task has become more difficult as significant price cuts (some temporary) from Facebook's Oculus have left HTC selling comparable hardware at double the price ($799 vs. $399). Though price cuts may be inevitable, for HTC their main focus has… Read More
Last week, Apple accidentally released a firmware for the HomePod. This file is filled with references to unreleased Apple devices. According to strings in a library file spotted by Guilherme Rambo, the next Apple TV is going to support 4K videos as well as Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Hybrid Log-Gamma. Read More
As the saying goes, the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. Also not evenly distributed: Access to the expensive education typically needed to stand a chance of obtaining one of the jobs of the future. Y Combinator backed Lambda School is hoping to change this, with a new approach to funding higher education. Read More
YouTube today is launching a new sharing feature in its mobile app, previously in testing with users in select markets. The feature allows YouTube users to send their friends videos and chat from within a new tab in the mobile app – effectively turning YouTube into a mobile messenger of sorts.
The feature has been in testing since the middle of last year, and, at the beginning of 2017… Read More
Apple just dropped a brand new beta for your favorite iOS update of the year. While iOS 11 isn’t coming out until September, the company has been testing the new version for a couple of months already. I still don’t recommend installing the beta on a device you use every day, unless you’re willing to live with bugs, crashes and poor performance. The fifth beta is only… Read More
A year after taking up the case, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled in favor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its challenge against podcasting patent troll, Personal Audio. The decision is a massive relief for the vibrant and ever-growing medium, which has been operated under the threat of lawsuit for a number of years. It’s also part of the… Read More
Venmo today rolled out a feature designed to make it easier to find friends within its mobile payments app, so you can add them to your connections list or get paid yourself. The feature, found under the new menu option “Scan Code,” is available now in both the iOS and Android version of the Venmo app. When tapped, it launches a new interface that allows you to either use the… Read More
Uber unsealed former CEO Travis Kalanick’s deposition in the Uber versus Waymo self-driving car technology case over the weekend. Kalanick, who was deposed for more than six hours last month, spoke about when he learned that Anthony Levandowski, who formerly worked at Google, downloaded documents related self-driving technology. “The deposition yet again confirms that Uber was… Read More
Iflix, an Asia-based startup providing Netflix-like streaming services in emerging markets, has landed $133 million in fresh funding to accelerate its business. The investment was led by U.S. media conglomerate Hearst, which counts BuzzFeed, Vice and Roku among its investment portfolio. The group was joined by another new backer EDBI — the corporate investment arm of the Singapore… Read More
In the days before electronic music, musicians used to have to play things called “guitars.” There are very few players left among us with the skills necessary to play this seemingly lost instrument but programmer Chris Ladd hopes to resurrect the so-called “git-fiddle” with modern technology. Ladd, a former programmer for the New York Times, created TabBank, a… Read More
