The Lazada-Alibaba deal, Alibaba’s largest overseas acquisition to date, is a pivotal event for Southeast Asia and its implications span the entire commerce value chain from digital advertising, logistics, finance, insurance to even healthcare. Read More
Data breaches are on the rise. Just recently we saw new reports confirming Yahoo! suffered another breach back in 2013. It seems like putting personal information in a website today feels a bit like getting into a car 50 years ago — with minimal seatbelts, no airbags and no testing, you just had to hope to avoid a crash. In the same vein, we just have to hope to avoid a data breach. Read More
Fashion e-commerce powerhouse Rent the Runway has confirmed that it raised $60 million in a funding round led by Fidelity Investments. Technology Crossover Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Advance Publications are also participating in the round. Recode, which first reported the news, was told that the valuation was a “significant step up” from the… Read More
Internet-connected devices may start helping in criminal cases. As first reported in The Information, police in Bentonville, Arkansas have issued a warrant to Amazon, asking the company to hand over data from an Echo device to help prosecute a suspected murderer.
James Andrew Bates, the suspect in the case, was charged with first-degree murder in November of 2015 after authorities… Read More
Roughly a week from now we’re going to be drowning in connected home product launches. It seems fairly likely that it’ll be the major story of this year’s CES, with smart home plays from Google, Apple and Amazon duking it out in the middle. Sylvania wisely is getting ahead of the fray, announcing its own offering a full week ahead of the Las Vegas melee. The longtime purveyor… Read More
Raising venture capital is tough for any startup. But it can be a little more difficult when you’re located outside of Silicon Valley. More difficult, but definitely not impossible. Read More
We made hundreds of videos in 2016 — and we’re proud of all of them. But some videos just take on a life of their own; whether they’re deeply nostalgic or impossibly cutting edge, there’s some special witches’ brew of hard-to-replicate factors that leads certain videos to take off like rockets. From robots and explosions to self-tying shoes, here’s a rundown… Read More
Guess what – Amazon sold a whole bunch of Echoes this holiday. Nine times as many as last year, according to its count. Of course, the company’s never been inclined to give specific numbers when it comes to this sort of thing, only revealing in a press release this morning that it moved “millions” worldwide. There were some telltale signs over the past couple of weeks,… Read More
They say that news is what happens to a writer on his way to the bathroom and I’ve recently discovered something fascinating. Alexa – and, to a degree, Siri and Google’s OK Google solution – have become indispensable additions to our home. The kids tell Alexa to turn on the lights and start Netflix. We ask her how to spell words and do basic math. She tells us which day… Read More
The holidays have come and gone and — as usual — Fitbit got a bit of a lifeline. Once again, everyone is buying Fitbits for gifts. We won’t know exactly how many, but if you just take a quick look at the download charts, Fitbit hit the top of the App Store (even in the presence of the gargantuan promotions of Super Mario Run). In fact, it looks like it’s a pretty… Read More
Making excuses for breaking New Year’s resolutions used to be a hell of a lot simpler. Now that we’ve got social media for every life choice and are wearing our fitness levels on our wrists, there’s really no reason not to keep up. Which isn’t to say, of course, that we all couldn’t use an extra jolt. Read More
Cujo certainly felt like the right product at the right time when the smart firewall’s creators took to the Disrupt stage to debut the device back in May. Since its debut, IoT attacks have grown in prominence as users add more and more failure points to their home security ecosystem one connected device at a time. Since then, the startup has raked in crowdfunding and scored favorable… Read More
LG’s apparently not much for surprises at this year’s CES. The company has already announced a number of the devices it plans to debut at the show, including a bunch of smartphones and monitors. Maybe it’s still got enough up its sleeve to present some legit excitement – then again, maybe it’s holding back the big phone announcements for Mobile World Congress.… Read More
Samsung’s C-Lab experiments are rarely earth-shattering, but they’re usually fairly interesting. Since last year, the electronics giant has used the Creative Lab as a way to foster innovation within its walls, including everything from a wearable 360-degree camera to smart belt with the unfortunate but rhymey name Welt.
The company’s once again using its presence at a big… Read More
As our desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, etc. stand idly by for a huge portion of the day, the need for computing resources is growing at a fast pace. So how can we make a more economic and efficient use of all the computing power that’s going to waste? Read More
Last January I wrote a TechCrunch post predicting the major programming trends of 2016. But in the software development world, things can change very quickly. It can be difficult to see the high-level trends clearly through all the chatter about shiny new development languages, frameworks and tools. So, as we near the end of 2016, how accurate were my predictions? Read More
Corporate machine learning research may be getting a new vanguard in Apple. Six researchers from the company’s recently formed machine learning group published a paper that describes a novel method for simulated + unsupervised learning. The aim is to improve the quality of synthetic training images. The work is a sign of the company’s aspirations to become a more visible leader… Read More
Egypt has intensified its cyber crackdown under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In recent years authorities have blocked Facebook’s controversial Free Basics program for not allowing it to spy on users, imprisoned citizens for satirical Facebook posts and reportedly used Deep Packet Inspection technology allowing for extensive surveillance of Egyptians’ online activities. Read More
It’s the holidays and that means it’s time to watch robots cream humans in bouts of skill. The latest example of robotics winning over a meatbag? This amazing air-hockey robot powered by a smartphone, Arduino board and a plotter-like robotic arm. The system works by watching the puck on the surface of the table and moving to where the puck is going. It actively blocks attacks on… Read More
Seattle police arrested Oculus’ Head of Computer Vision Dov Katz on December 23rd in a sting operation in which a police officer posed as a 15-year-old girl. Katz allegedly arrived at an Embassy Suites in Tukwila, Washington with $600 after agreeing in texts messages to pay $300 for sex without a condom. Katz told police he was there to rescue the girl. GeekWire has screenshots from… Read More
