TechCrunch

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 Cable companies rule TV because they control the expensive wires and satellites that can deliver low-latency live content at scale. Cable companies can then dictate how much per monthly paying subscriber they offer the channel owners for access because there are few alternatives for live distribution. And the cable companies can charge consumers exorbitant prices because they’re… Read More

 As consumers get their first taste of voice-controlled home robots and motion-based virtual realities, a quiet swath of technologists are thinking big picture about what comes after that. The answer has major implications for the way we’ll interact with our devices in the near future. Spoiler alert: We won’t be yelling or waving at them; we’ll be thinking at them. That answer… Read More

 It was only about a month ago that Apple finally added the iPhone to its refurbished online offerings, along with iMacs and MacBooks, and now the company’s got another key addition. Starting this week, the company has added Apple Watches to its official refurbed store, with prices starting at $229 for the 38mm version of the first-generation model. That puts the watch at 14 percent below… Read More

 Former Google self-driving car project Waymo is wasting no time demonstrating its readiness to enter into commercial agreements — the Alphabet-owned autonomous driving technology company is in formal discussions with Honda on partnering up to use Waymo self-driving software and sensors on Honda vehicles. Honda announced the discussions, which preface a potential collaboration between the… Read More

 Disney’s ABC TV group is embarking on a journey into Snapchat original programming creation, and it’s starting with The Bachelor, its storied 21-season franchise that chronicles the epic romance of a random person and a selection of around two dozen potential matches selected for their potential to generate interesting TV. I say that like I don’t watch The Bachelor, The… Read More

 I’ve been mostly enjoying my time with the Phase, thus far. It might be all the time I spent with the Gear S3 of late, but it feels good having a relatively reasonably sized watch on again. Something that’s not flashy like the Apple Watch Nike+, something that, honestly, you forget you even have until you need it. The Misfit Phase isn’t a groundbreaker. That path has already… Read More

 I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today’s machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles’ heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current… Read More

 When a movie is more CG than it is real — think movies like Avatar or any of Pixar’s stuff, where all or nearly all of the environment is rendered — a new challenge appears: the camera. Getting a fake camera (like the one in a rendering program) to move and behave like a real camera (like the one that the camera guy is traditionally holding) can be a pain. Testing a scene from… Read More

 Neither public markets nor tech giants offered any solace in 2016 for the ever-growing list of private unicorns. There are 180 tech companies circling the runway with valuations over $1 billion, the most in history. While interest in an all-expenses paid trip to the NYSE valuation guillotine was at an all-time low, non-traditional Fortune 500 companies did pluck a lucky few from the skies at… Read More

 Researchers at North Carolina-based Locus Biosciences think they have a potential cure for antibiotic resistance using CRISPR’s lesser-known Cas3 enzyme. Most of the interest in CRISPR technology centers around the enzyme Cas9, which acts as a type of genetic scissors, allowing scientists to snip out, edit and replace DNA at certain intervals along the genome. However, Cas3 goes beyond… Read More

 GM has made a number of big acquisitions and investments in the past few years. It picked up self-driving company Cruise earlier this year and dropped $500 million into Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor. For the most part, GM acknowledges that it needs to figure out how to tap into new aspects of the automotive experience, CTO Jon Lauckner said. But all these companies start somewhere. And… Read More

 Mark Zuckerberg gave new insights about how he sees Facebook’s role in informing the world today during a Live video one-on-one year-end chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s CEO also lent support to employees trying to fight fake news today, though reports indicated some employees were dissatisfied by his initially tepid response to the issue. “Facebook is a new kind… Read More

 Drug production is generally a matter of big factories churning out millions of aspirin or ibuprofen tablets a day, but there’s a lot to be said for manufacturing common drugs on a small scale, close to where they’re used. Researchers from the Netherlands have created an efficient and simple method for doing so that uses a method much like plants have for making their own resources. Read More

 It’s that time of the season again. Here are my Top 10 predictions for digital media in 2017. Read More

 VC dollars aren’t as readily available as they were in previous years, and for the companies that are receiving funding, they’re finding that the terms are becoming increasingly less palatable. The good news for startups looking for funding is that a new pathway for direct investment is emerging: the family/multi-family offices of wealthy individuals and families. Read More

 Debugging startup Backtrace I/O was launched to solve a real problem that its founders faced when they were engineers at adtech company AppNexus — at least according to Backtrace CEO and co-founder Abel Mathew. Mathew told me Backtrace aims to “solve the process of debugging,” something that most companies tackle by “cobbling together very old, outdated solutions”… Read More

 U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) has penned an open letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick asking the executive to provide more transparency around its recent changes to user location data collection. The letter contends that consumers should have more direct control over their personal data, but, failing that, they should at least be provided a full and clear understanding of how and when… Read More

 After years of advocating for diversity and inclusion, and telling tech companies how to improve in that area, the Anita Borg Institute has released a diversity report of its own. The Anita Borg Institute, the organization behind the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, is on par with the likes of the tech companies it critiques when it comes to diversity. The… Read More

 Facebook released its latest transparency report today, detailing government requests for user data for the first half of 2016. According to the report, government requests for account data increased by 27 percent globally as compared with the last half of 2015. The number of requests grew from 46,710 to 59,229, Facebook said. The majority of the requests (56 percent) received from U.S. law… Read More