It’s time to actually make the world a better place.
Silicon Valley was birthed from an existential threat to the world. Nazi radar defense technology was decimating the Allied air forces. But American engineers heeded the call, and in a Harvard lab led by Stanford professor Frederick Terman, invented radar jammers that helped win the war.
Terman brought the engineering talent back to… Read More
Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) has written to newly appointed FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai in defense of net neutrality, vowing to “fight to protect it every step of the way.” Read More
This is pretty much the definition of unnecessary, but then, that’s part of the fun of hack days. A quartet of Netflix designers have given the world “MindFlix,” by way of a short video, highlighting the hack’s use of a the Muse headband to control the movie streaming site’s familiar interface. “Instead of implanting chips in our brain for Hack Day,”… Read More
One year ago Facebook made the surprising announcement that it was shuttering Parse, the development platform that it purchased in 2013. While the company said they would keep the service online for a year so developers could migrate their apps to a new backend, that time has finally come. In what is probably the last ever post on the Parse blog, the service reminded users that today… Read More
Venky Ganesan, managing director of $4.4 billion venture capital firm Menlo Ventures and current chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, is walking a political tightrope and trying not to fall off. The venture capital industry, financiers to many tech giants, relies on immigrant talent to launch startups, help them thrive and drive their continued success. Right now, that puts… Read More
Over 2,000 Google employees rallied against President Donald Trump’s executive order that bans immigration from seven majority Muslim countries today. Googlers all over the country, including at campuses in Mountain View, San Francisco, New York and Seattle, are rallying against the immigration ban. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin, who was spotted at one of the… Read More
Here’s a fast and easy way to buy tickets to the 10th Annual Crunchies Awards in San Francisco: TechCrunch’s Messenger bot. Type the word “crunchies” into our Messenger bot or click here to purchase tickets with just a few clicks. After purchasing the ticket, the bot will also send a scannable QR code. Everything is done within Messenger. Take a look at how it works.… Read More
Three months after acquiring iconic audio tech company THX, Razer is making another move to expand its business beyond hardware and software for the gaming community. The company has acquired Nextbit, the startup behind the Robin smartphone, founded by Android veterans who had set out with high hopes (and some decent funding) to rethink how to build a mobile phone that leaned on cloud… Read More
Reactions to President Trump’s executive order placing a three-month ban on entry to the U.S. from seven majority Muslim countries have been rippling out across the Atlantic over the past 48 hours — with figures from the U.K. tech industry adding their voices to a general chorus of dismay. Read More
In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration established the very cool-sounding “Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles,” which does exactly what it says. It requires that 100 percent of all EVs and hybrids make some noise at low speeds by 2019. If a vehicle can move forward or in reverse without engaging an internal combustion engine, it needs… Read More
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has come out strongly against the executive order issued by Donald Trump regarding immigration and blocking certain refugees from entering the U.S. Amazon had previously expressed support for employees affected by the order in an email from HR VP Beth Galetti, but the new message from Bezos expresses opposition to the executive order in general, and also details steps… Read More
Rashaun Williams, a former fund manager at QueensBridge Venture Partners, the venture capital firm made famous by the hip-hop legend Nas, has joined boutique merchant bank Manhattan Venture Partners to leverage his proximity to star power for a new secondary investment fund. Read More
Good enough and convenient. That’s proved a winning strategy for Instagram’s clone, according to a dozen analytics providers, social media celebrities, and talent managers who told TechCrunch they’ve seen a decline in Snapchat Stories usage since Instagram Stories launched on August 2nd. Read More
A wearable wireless hydration sensor from North Carolina State University will be able to tell how thirsty you are via a chest patch or wrist-worn device. The device is designed to tell you when you might be facing heat stress due to dehydration. “It’s difficult to measure a person’s hydration quantitatively, which is relevant for everyone from military personnel to athletes… Read More
MXNet, Amazon Web Services’ preferred deep learning framework, was accepted to the Apache Incubator today. Admission to the incubator is the first step necessary for the open-source initiative to officially become part of the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation supports the efforts of thousands of developers maintaining open-source projects around the world.… Read More
The sky above the port may be the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, but in most hacker dens it’s usually all psychedelics and healthy snacks. And what better way to partake in your favorite psychoactive substances than with a true cyberpunk’s vape? The DaVinci IQ is a black slab designed to heat herbs to temperatures between 230 and 430 degrees Fahrenheit. A grid of… Read More
Machine learning is not new. We have witnessed it since the 1990s, when Amazon introduced a new “recommended for you” section for its users to display more personalized results. When we search for something on Google, machine learning is behind those search results. The “Friends” recommendations or the suggested pages on Facebook or a product recommendation depend on… Read More
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced Monday that he’s filing suit in federal court against Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and select senior Trump administration officials, seeking a declaration that key portions of Trump’s Executive Order on immigration be declared unconstitutional. Alongside the lawsuit, Washington-based tech companies Amazon and… Read More
Google is making a number of ad partner announcements around its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format today. The idea behind AMP is to speed up the mobile web experience for users and it’s no secret that ads play a major role in making regular mobile (and desktop) pages load slowly. With AMP ads, Google and its partners aim to make ads load fast again. The new partners Google is… Read More
Apple will report its holiday quarter earnings tomorrow. Once again, all eyes will be on the iPhone. The device now represents the vast majority of the company’s revenue. So anything that can affect iPhone sales is a big deal. And if you’ve been paying attention to Apple’s past earnings, you know that Apple has had a complicated year. In short, revenue has been down for… Read More
