If, say, the presidential inauguration is a thing you’d like to watch on Friday morning, then great news, friend, there are plenty of options. The bad news is that you’ve missed the musical stylings of Toby Keith, Lee Greenwood and 3 Doors Down.
The good news is that the real, good-old-fashioned inauguratin’ doesn’t really get started until 11:30AM ET tomorrow. Read More
Enterprise tech startups unveiled their products and pitched investors at Alchemist Accelerator’s 14th demo day in Santa Clara, Calif. today. The companies ranged from a Stanford AI labs spinout, Eloquent Labs, to the hardware-makers like Amber Agriculture and PubInno, to lots of software-as-a-service and cybersecurity developers, more like you’d expect from an… Read More
Nintendo has just confirmed that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be the last first-party game for the company’s soon to be replaced Wii U. It’s a bittersweet moment for die-hard fans of the console — and yes, they exist. Read More
The U.S. Department of Transportation has identified 10 sites as officially designated proving grounds for autonomous vehicle testing in the U.S., including The Willow Run, Michigan-based American Center for Mobility; Concord, California’s GoMentum Station; the City of Pittsburgh and more. The sites are designed to help the locations share best practices and information, forming a… Read More
Hollywood and the academic artificial intelligence community have an interesting relationship, to say the least. Many people interested in the field, myself included, love science fiction, but regularly end up being the obnoxious commentator on family movie night pointing out that Johnny Depp’s Transcendence is more anti-intelligence than artificial intelligence. So it wasn’t all… Read More
Roli’s fun little modular musical instrument took a turn for the more serious today, as the UK-based startup announced compatibility with a number of top music production apps. The functionality comes courtesy of a new Dashboard app for Mac and Windows unveiled at the NAMM conference in Anaheim today, letting Blocks serve as controllers for Logic Pro X, Ableton, Cubase, Omnisphere,… Read More
While running Yardsale, a previous Y Combinator startup based around essentially making it easy to sell your old stuff, Ryan Mickle had the benefit of talking to alumni and colleagues to figure out what to use to build it. But one of the basic services he used to run it ended up costing more in the long run as the app ran into critical problems when it came to some transactions —… Read More
Amazon has stayed relatively silent on the topic of VR-based e-commerce and the VR platform in general, especially as fellow tech titans like Facebook and Google have devoted so many resources to virtual reality.
However, the company has been looking to embrace VR content. Last month the company hired former Tribeca Film Festival head Genna Terranova to oversee VR projects at the… Read More
Samsung tonight confirmed that it’s chosen January 23 to announce the long-awaited findings into its investigation surrounding the Galaxy Note 7. The date had been floated earlier this week in a story that also pinpointed the root cause of the explosions as, predictably, a faulty battery. The press conference will be held at the company’s headquarters in Seoul, South Korea at… Read More
Slack has been busy lately. The two-year-old company has covered a lot of ground since it launched. Beyond growing to 4 million daily active users and 1.25 million paid users, the company also just announced a long-awaited feature: threaded conversations. Plus, Slack has moved into seven global offices, including San Francisco, Vancouver, Melbourne, London, Toronto, Dublin and now NYC. The… Read More
A hacker prodding a public-facing Army recruitment website in early December stumbled upon a vulnerability, then another, until he found himself suddenly connected to an internal Department of Defense network that should have prompted him for special access credentials. Read More
Machine learning and AI are incredible tools, but they also require a similarly incredible amount of computing power. If that requirement could be cut by a couple orders of magnitude, AI would be unfettered from its banks of parallel processors and free to inhabit practically any device — which is exactly what a breakthrough at the Allen Institute for AI makes possible. Read More
Uber settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission today for $20 million. The lawsuit alleged that the ride-hailing app recruited drivers by misleading them about the amount of money they could earn through the app and the auto financing deals they could get through Uber’s Vehicle Solutions Program. The lawsuit claims that Uber made “false, misleading, or… Read More
Amazon and the U.S. Department of Labor have signed an agreement to create a registered apprenticeship program to train veterans for tech jobs at the online retail giant, the DOL announced today. Through ApprenticeshipUSA, people can earn a salary while learning the skills needed for the job. This comes after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced last May the company’s goals to hire… Read More
Government websites just took a serious step toward robust security. Today, the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council announced that all new executive branch domains moving forward will use HTTPS, the secure, encrypted alternative to HTTP. The change is expected to go into effect in spring of this year. Since 2015, the government has been working to migrate all of its sites and… Read More
Wix, the website building platform with more than 98 million users globally, is making another acquisition to build out the tools that it offers to businesses and individuals that use its platform to build and maintain websites and mobile apps. Today the company is announcing that it has acquired Flok, which makes CRM solutions such as loyalty cards and chat services and rewards programs,… Read More
Snap Inc.’s quest to earn enough money to IPO sees it flip-flopping after pledging not to use “creepy” ad targeting. Snap will now allow advertisers to use Oracle’s Data Cloud (formerly Datalogix) third-party data about what users buy offline to target ads on Snapchat, according to The Wall Street Journal. Snap tells TechCrunch that this rolled out over the last few… Read More
Shortly after downloading the Tandem app I’m trying to explain the finer points of using the English auxiliary verb ‘will’ in a messaging chat with Juan, 35, from the Dominican Republic… Read More
MakePrintable, a new 3D printing site, does what it says on the tin. The service will take a 3D model – maybe one you scanned in or something you made – and modify it based on the type of printer, the material, the desired print orientation, and plate positions. It fixes rough spots, thin prints, and generally makes things printable. Founded by Muhannad Taslaq and Baha Abunojaim… Read More
Waymo’s Pacifica minivans with self-driving tech on board are set to hit city streets for testing by the end of this month, but Conan O’Brien got an “exclusive” look at early test clips from the origins of the former Google autonomous driving project. Basically the takeaway is there’s clearly an urgent need for large mammal detection sensors, but take a look and… Read More
