Lyft and Waymo are working together on self-driving car technology, with a new deal first reported by the New York Times on Sunday. The deal has been confirmed by both parties, and will see Google’s former self-driving car unit work together with the ride-hailing company on efforts to introduce self-driving to the general population via fleet services. Waymo just launched a… Read More
Rocket Labs is targeting a big first in commercial spaceflight – the first launch of an orbital rocket from a privately-owned launch facility. Its Launch Complex 1 is located on New Zealand’s North Island, and it’s now finally ready to start test firing actual launches from the finished facility, in preparation for beginning commercial operations once it’s satisfied… Read More
European and U.S.-based tech ‘scale-ups’ with Asia ambitions, rejoice. Outing today is a new $500 million VC fund from Silk Ventures, and backed in part by the Chinese government. Read More
Lucid Motors is a startup focused electric cars, and the company revealed the design of its first car, the Lucid Air, at the very end of last year. The luxury sedan looks like a natural competitor to Tesla’s Model S, but the company has a view of the direction of the industry that makes its car unique from the rest of the field in more ways than one. Crucially, Lucid is betting that… Read More
As the world readies to open for business on Monday, companies and governments are bracing for a second round of cyberattacks in the aftermath of Friday’s WannaCry hack.
Indeed, security experts are already warning that a new version of WannaCry has emerged over the weekend that doesn’t have the kill switch protocol that stopped the initial version of the cyberattack late on… Read More
The U.K. National Cyber Security Center is warning the nation to be on guard for another wave of cyberattacks after Friday’s massive WannaCry ransomware attack. The nation’s National Health Service was severely impacted in Friday’s attack, forcing the country to shut down everything but emergency services in hospitals around the U.K. The National Cyber Security Center was… Read More
It’s been a long night at Pier 36, the site of the Disrupt NY Hackathon. Around 750 engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 24 hours to work on their projects. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regulars. Here are the top hacks … Read More
At the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York today, a team of sophomores from Rutgers University introduced a social robot, named Robota, to help teachers in special ed classrooms. Read More
Is your money burning a hole in your pocket, and you’d like to use some of it for good causes, but you don’t know where to begin? A new app called Cradle wants to help. Presented at the Disrupt Hackathon today in New York, Cradle lets you identify the kinds of causes you’d like to support, gives you a list of relevant charities, helps you figure out how to give and sets up… Read More
Technology such as Facebook’s Safety Check has massively helped with the challenge of identifying and finding people when they go missing, but it is anything but perfect. Confidant, a project developed at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York this weekend, is aiming to complement existing systems with a notification service that gives early alerts when a person may be missing. Read More
Classroom collaboration software exists, but Epigrammar thinks its approach better tackles the issue of student grammar, test creation and comprehension. Teachers can help facilitate student conversations on an assigned text by uploading it to Epigrammar, then helping their students review and annotate the work, in real time. Read More
We’ve all seen the maps that show Florida being consumed by rising sea levels. But many of us still underestimate the impact of climate change because we can’t visualize its effects. At the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 Hackathon, James Butler, Caitlin Squyres and Florian Carls put together CityConnect, which lets people see flood levels for the City of Cambridge using… Read More
Hardware is hard at the best of times. But software developer Patrick Morris-Suzuki set himself the ambitious challenge of creating a blink-detecting system for hands-free typing during an overnight hackathon here at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2017. Read More
With only 24 hours to build an app, it’s never easy to come up with a viable idea, nevermind build one that involves training a machine learning algorithm. Yet that’s exactly what a team of four friends accomplished this weekend at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt New York Hackathon. Read More
Last night on Saturday Night Live, a spoof advertisement for an “Alexa Silver” poked gentle fun at how an Alexa speaker could be used with the elderly to do things like listen to their long, rambling stories (and respond with “uh-huh”), as well as answer questions even when addressed as “Alaina,” “Allegra,” “Aretha,” or other names.… Read More
WEDJ (that’s “We DJ,” not “Wedge,” for the record) is a collaborative music-playlist-building app that sprung out of this weekend’s all-night Hackathon at Disrupt NY. Built by a team of four part-time hackers, the app is something of a real-world version of the dearly departed Turntable.FM designed for use in bars, clubs, offices and other social experiences. Read More
RoboWaiter’s crack team, consisting of a developer, designer and a robotics expert, came together at last night’s Disrupt NY hackathon to create a faster, better, smarter waiter using IBM Watson and robots. Read More
Where will self-driving cars go once they drop you off? In big cities, parking can be expensive and take forever to find. But TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon team Val.ai built a way for autonomous vehicles to participate in auctions for nearby parking spaces. Read More
What if every time you took an Uber, you gave to charity without spending extra money? That’s the idea behind Buttons for Good, a hack developed at TechCrunch’s Hackathon at Disrupt New York. Read More
Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, one hacker came up with a project that might have come in handy for all the other developers in the room. CodeCorrect was presented as a way to fix errors developers run into while they’re writing code. Read More
