The adult entertainment industry has long been a silent driver of new technologies, from ISPs to graphics cards. With virtual reality, many see porn as one of the more obvious use cases that could lead to heavy headset adoption early on. Today, Pornhub released data that shows some of the early success the site has had since introducing a VR porn section in April of 2016. Read More
The Think & Learn SmartCycle is already getting a mixed reaction. In the five or so minutes I stood in front of Fisher-Price’s booth at tonight’s CES kickoff event, reactions ranged from excited to confused to downright disappointed in the human race. And indeed, it’s easy to see why someone might complain about the necessity of such a device, but here we are. Read More
Following an extremely contentious election cycle, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will label election systems in the U.S. as “critical infrastructure.” The new categorization would allow election systems to “receive prioritized cybersecurity assistance” from DHS, although this would only be by request of a state or local government. In a press release,… Read More
What happens when you mix two software dudes, a little kid, and a light switch? You get the Knocki, a clever little device that connects to a wall or under a table. You can tap the surface to trigger events – turning on a light, muting speakers, etc. – and it is surprisingly small and easily-hidden. The founders are Ohad Nezer and Jake Boshernitzan, both of Houston, Texas.… Read More
The connected hardware space has undoubtedly gone through a renaissance over the last four years, with VCs nearly tripling their funding between 2012 and 2016. We gleaned some new data from Pitchbook around venture funding in IoT to get a quantitative understanding of whether investment in the space is continuing to grow or flattening out. Here’s what we learned. Read More
There’s some inherent irony in the Mercury. The first BlackBerry device produced solely under the TCL umbrella is far more instantly recognizable as a BlackBerry device than any of the OEM DTEK products the two companies produced as a pair. The phone is still in a sort of pre-announcement stage. TCL was apparently initially planning to wait for MWC in a month and a half to debut the… Read More
Meet Blitab, an Android tablet combined with a smart Braille surface. It’s one of the most affordable Braille devices out there and could change the way visually impaired people use computing devices. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES.
The devices for this niche market are really disappointing. There are specialized devices called Braille… Read More
Very few people can move financial markets with their tweets, but like it or not, President-elect Donald Trump is one of them. And while you can’t do anything to prevent the madness, you can keep up with it using a new tool from Trigger Finance.
Originally a class project at Cornell Tech, Trigger makes it easy for users to set up real-time alerts when news drops about their stocks. Read More
Construction sites can be dangerous places. And while recent advancements in safety technology have done a lot to help protect workers, there hasn’t been as much focus on protecting the site itself from things like fire, water and mold damage. Any of these three risks can cost construction companies (or insurance companies) millions of dollars in damages, and are the biggest causes… Read More
Matibabu, which is competing in our Hardware Battlefield at CES today, isn’t looking to cure any diseases. Instead, the Uganda-based company is looking to make it easier to diagnose malaria so those who are infected can get the right help faster. I actually first ran into Matibabu back in 2013 when the team competed in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finales. Back then, the team won the… Read More
Nvidia already announced a partnership at CES to bring a AI self-driving car to production, and now Mercedes-Benz is also teaming up with the GPU-maker on a vehicle with AI on board. Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz are also setting an ambitious timeline for their goal; the two will field this new vehicle within the next 12 months, Nvidia confirmed to TechCrunch. The news came out on stage at a… Read More
Today the U.S. intelligence community released a report claiming that the Russian government was behind hacks of American political organizations during the 2016 election cycle and that the hackers acted with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct approval. The new report is a joint effort backed by the CIA, FBI and NSA and draws on intelligence gathered by all three agencies. A… Read More
Ford announced an updated Fusion Hybrid development vehicle for its autonomous driving testing late in December, and the car was on display at CES this year. The new vehicles include both a new platform in the base Fusion vehicle, and a new virtual driver system, which covers sensors arranged around the car, the sensor fusion system that combines all the data the car collects into one picture… Read More
Draw with your face? Conference call ping pong? Not any more. Google today quietly revealed that it will shut down the Hangouts API, preventing new apps from being built and shutting off existing apps on April 25th. There was no blog post about this, just an updated FAQ and email notification to developers active on the API, forwarded to us by one of these devs. Some examples of experiences… Read More
Everything that moves, says a16z partner Frank Chen, will go autonomous.
But what does that really mean? In this presentation from the a16z Summit, Chen goes over the 16 most commonly asked questions about autonomous cars, and what their answers might be: Will we progress level by level, or go straight to Level 5, i.e. full automation? Will they use LIDAR or not? What blend of software… Read More
The new Markforged Metal X is pretty great. It is a full metal 3D printer that generates real metal parts out of powdered metal which is then hardened under massive heat and allows for amazingly strong and light materials. The printer uses tubes of powered metal bound with plastic. The “extruder” first creates the shapes on a regular build plate and then you bond the material in… Read More
As it tweets in lockstep with the President-elect about punishing leakers involved in the Russian hacking scandal, WikiLeaks somehow managed to come up with something even more questionable. Seemingly out of the blue, the WikiLeaks Task Force suggested building a database of private information on Twitter’s verified users: In a tweet to Vocativ’s Kevin Collier, WikiLeaks… Read More
Some Sprig customers might be bitter about getting guilt-tripped into tipping, but at least the startup is being sweet to its on-demand food servers. TechCrunch spotted that Sprig added a tipping feature to its freshly made meal-delivery app this week. Now Sprig has confirmed this is part of a wide-range of not-yet-announced perks for its servers, including a $1/hour wage increase, to $14.50,… Read More
LEGO has long offered the Mindstorms platform for big kids (and adults) to make cool robotic projects. Now, however, they’ve launched the Boost platform, a robotics and programming system aimed at 7 year olds. The Boost kit comes with everything you need to make five projects including Vernie and Frankie, a funny robot and robotic cat, respectively. The kit includes a battery-powered… Read More
Not a week goes by and it seems like we hear more bad news about Silicon Valley’s darling turned cautionary tale Theranos. The latest bit is a whopping 155 layoffs at the company today. The one drop blood test company once worth $9 billion took a quite the tumble from grace after an intense series of investigations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food… Read More
