Google’s Jamboard will cost $5,000 plus an annual management fee, Airbnb closes Series F to go over $1 billion, Google goes after Slack and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are expecting their second baby. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Chowbotics Inc. has landed $5 million in a Series A round of venture funding to develop what it’s calling food service robots. These are machines designed to prepare food in restaurants, cafeterias and hotels, as well as food courts in airports, malls and hospitals. The company’s flagship product, Sally, is a salad-making robot that uses 20 different food canisters to prepare… Read More
The feud between Oculus and ZeniMax Media is opening up once again, this time with the CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, suing his former employer for earnings that he claims are still owed to him. Carmack is suing ZeniMax Media for $22.5 million that he says has not been paid to him for the 2009 sale of his game studio, id Software, known for such video game classics as Doom and Quake. Read More
Radar can detect things like asteroids millions of miles away, and it’s easy to track satellites in Earth’s orbit, but there are middle distances that aren’t so easy to monitor. Lunar orbit is one of them. But because using terrestrial radar to find and track satellites, spacecraft and other objects that have gone dark would be handy, NASA researchers made it work anyway. Read More
Ever wonder how design has helped drive success for businesses like Airbnb, Facebook, Slack and IBM? How about how their teams are structured? How they operate? What their processes look like? High Resolution is bringing clarity to these questions, and we’re doing it 25 times. We’re sitting down with 25 masters of the digital design industry to learn how they approach,… Read More
I have to admit I’m pretty reliant on Uber. With a sub par public transportation system, the ridesharing app makes it significantly easier to find my way around San Francisco. Apart from the occasional delay or aggressive driver, the service has been pretty dependable overall. But like many users, as evidenced by the “delete Uber” social media campaign,… Read More
Google today quietly launched an improved always-free tier and trial program for its Cloud Platform. The free tier, which now offers enough power to run a small app in Google’s cloud, is offered in addition to an expanded free trial program (yep — that’s all a bit confusing). This free trial gives you $300 in credits that you can use over the course of 12… Read More
On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on… Read More
The Kairos Society isn’t just trying to bring the next generation of entrepreneurs together — it’s investing in their companies, too. The organization today announced a seed fund called Kairos Society Ventures, and the portfolio already includes Abaris (which offers a private-sector alternative to social security), Brazilian education startup Me Salva, Colombian… Read More
Snap today took another step on its quest to truly become the “camera company” it says it is. Following the November 21st launch and subsequent February 20th close of its NYC pop-up shop, it’s now opening a temporary store on the Venice boardwalk near its Los Angeles headquarters. Of course, would-be camera sunglasses buyers don’t have to trek to a physical location… Read More
Google is doubling the maximum number of CPU cores developers can use with a single virtual machine on its Compute Engine service from 32 to 64. These high-power machines are now available in beta across all of Google’s standard configurations and as custom machine types, which allow you to select exactly how many cores and memory you want. If you opt to use 64 cores in… Read More
Twitter confirmed it’s testing a new feature that flags users’ profiles as potentially including “sensitive content.” When you click on one of these profiles from a link on Twitter, or if you visit the profile’s web page directly, you won’t be immediately shown the users’ tweets. Instead, a warning message displays, reading “Caution: This… Read More
Facebook’s Instant Articles were always a bad deal for news outlets. While quick to load so they drove more readers, the hosted-on-Facebook mobile web format sterilized the design of publishers and severely limited how many ads and other business-critical units they could display. Publishers need paying subscribers, event attendees and loyal daily readers, but they traded those for… Read More
Onstage today at Google’s Cloud Next conference, the company announced a series of new tools to assist users with data preparation and integration. The updates bolster both the power and agility of Google Cloud for businesses.
The first of these releases is the new private beta of Google Cloud Dataprep. Dataprep makes the data preparation process more visual. The tool includes anomaly… Read More
Mark Zuckerberg is sure to get a ridiculous amount of likes for his latest post. The Facebook founder, now 32, posted this morning on his Facebook profile page he and wife Priscilla Chan are expecting a second daughter. No names have surfaced yet for the baby but this is very good news for the couple as they had some difficulty getting pregnant the first time. Zuckerberg wrote about the… Read More
The WikiLeaks-hosted “Vault7” collection of documents allegedly leaked from within the CIA’s Computer Operations Group is a messy mix of jargon, incomplete info and broken links. So for your convenience I’ve gone through the whole pile of docs and listed as many of the tools and techniques mentioned by spook IT as I could find. Read More
Google’s delivering on its promise of keeping its interactive whiteboard under $6,000. Priced at $4,999, the Jamboard is just a hair more expensive than the 55-inch version of Cisco’s Sparkboard and considerably less so than the $8,999 Surface Hub, which was both the first of the trio to be announced and first to market when it started shipping last March.
Google’s 55-inch… Read More
Here’s some welcome news for Gmail users: Google is adding support for third-party add-ons that can integrate directly into the service. There are plenty of services that add functionality to Gmail already, of course, but they typically do that through a browser extension. With this new capability, which Google announced at its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, users will be… Read More
Google today announced a number of major updates to Drive, its online file storage service, which all aim to make it more useful for the company’s business and enterprise users. In addition, the company announced that Drive now has 800 million daily active users, which probably makes it the largest online file storage service in the market today. Read More
