Among the revelations at Sean Spicer’s first official White House briefing as press secretary was the newly minted administration’s plans to add a quartet of so-called “Skype Seats” to the room beginning this week. The addition is an attempt to open the traditionally closed-off briefing up to reporters outside of the White House walls. According to Spicer, the… Read More
In preparation for Disrupt New York in May I’m going to hold a few pitching workshops in New York for you all. We’ll listen to and critique ten pitches on January 25 at 6:30pm at the Knotel space at 22 West 38th Street, 3rd Floor. This is an informal pitch-off but the two best teams will get two tickets to Disrupt New York and the undying admiration of millions of people (actually… Read More
Discussions around a women’s progressive platform must link issues of gender and race to STEM and technological innovation. These conversations, in turn, must inform economic policies and Silicon Valley should play a role in ensuring an inclusive workforce. Read More
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing… Read More
Apple has just released an update to macOS Sierra. 10.12.3 is a bugfix update, but it brings some much-needed changes for the new MacBook Pro released late last year. With today’s update, Apple has issued a couple of fixes for the graphics chipset in the 15-inch model. Apple has also fixed the Safari icon fetching bug that was affecting battery life. There are many screenshots and videos… Read More
One of the biggest surprises at last year’s Google I/O developer conference was the announcement of Instant Apps for Android. These new kinds of apps are meant to help bridge the gap between web apps and native apps. The idea here is to break native apps into very small packets that, because they are so small, can run almost instantly — and without having to go to an app… Read More
Microsoft heads to court Monday morning to defend its right to disclose when the government requests data on its users. The case, known as Microsoft v. Department of Justice began in 2016 when Microsoft sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) to challenge a part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) under which the government serves warrants to tech companies. The lawsuit is… Read More
In this strange “Age of Brexit” suddenly the chips are all up in the air. And while London remains the financial capital of Europe, that crown is now up for grabs. One of London’s biggest sectors, in terms of its financial sector, is its position as the multi-national clearing house of the European economy. It’s estimated that stripping the euro clearing from London as… Read More
There’s no shortage of equity crowdfunding sites out there, but GrowthFountain thinks it has the special sauce to cut through the mayhem by thinking close to home. Focusing on investors local (or at least regional) to the investment opportunities, the company in effect formalizes the kind of fundraising you’d do from friends, family and local investors. Read More
Two recent survey reports came in with news on positive traction in VR adoption by two very different segments of the industry: academic institutes and the 3D modeling community. Read More
Things aren’t looking great for Hawkeye. It was a valiant effort, but the first result of ZTE’s crowdsourcing Project CSX is presently at just around $35,000 into its $500,000 goal after the project launched on January 4, at the height of CES. The company’s admitting it made some key errors along the way, with VP Jeff Yee taking to the company’s forum to apologize… Read More
As a process development engineer, Ryan Chan was used to trying to make incremental improvements to the development process in manufacturing. Those changes would improve efficiency by around one to three percent, which would net hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Chan wanted to figure out how to get things moving even more efficiently. So he left, and he became an iOS engineer. That led him… Read More
Research conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge University in the UK, and Yale and George Mason in the US, offers a potential strategy for mitigating the spread of misinformation online — involving the use of pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance. Read More
Have you ever wanted to feel a dragon breathe on your wrist? A tiny reindeer paw at your palm? A virtual robot skitter up your arm and burrow into your chest? Axon VR is about to let you.
IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman checked out the Axon VR device at CES a few weeks ago and it looks like the sleeper hit of the show given how little it was covered and how amazing it looks.
The box, a… Read More
A badge of pride among frequent travelers, the battered passport could become a relic of the past, as sophisticated technology aims to replace more traditional means of identifying passengers. Australia is steadily working to update its own international processing, with a sort of self-service check out involving face, iris and/or fingerprint scanning designed to take some of the pain out of… Read More
Snapchat’s major redesign, which introduces a universal search bar to the top of the app, among other features, has today hit iOS. The refreshed user interface was first announced earlier this month, but was only available to Android users at the time with a promise that it would reach iPhone users “soon.” The app has long been criticized for being too hard to navigate… Read More
Confirming reports from earlier this month that a Google Voice update was in the works, Google today has launched a refreshed version of its VoIP calling service on mobile and the web. Largely, the update is about giving the product a more modern look-and-feel, after having not received a major upgrade in years. But the relaunch also includes a few new features, like support for… Read More
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open source group that’s also the home of the popular Kubernetes container management system, today announced that it has added Linkerd as its fifth hosted project. Linkerd (pronounced linker-DEE), which was incubated at Buoyant, follows in the footsteps of other CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing and Fluentd. The… Read More
My, my, hey, hey lossless audio is here to stay thanks to JustBoom, a set of Raspberry Pi “hats” that connect to the mini computer and offer high fidelity audio playback and amplification. The $24 hats include a lossless DAC, a mini-amplifier, and a high-resolution audio output with COAX and optical audio out. If you, like Neil Young, require the utmost fidelity in your music… Read More
Supersonic airplane startup Boom has just completed a key step on the way to building a production supersonic passenger jet; the startup finished its wind tunnel testing, verifying its first two years of aerodynamic design work and setting the stage for building the airframe that will eventually become the basis of it first flight-ready aircraft. I spoke to Boom CEO and co-founder Blake… Read More
