Google first announced Android Wear 2.0 at its I/O developer conference in May, with a promise to roll it out to all users later this year. It has now delayed those release plans in favor of more developer previews and today, it launched the fourth of these. Just like before, there is no way to get an over-the-air update to Android Wear 2.0 for your watch, so this release is still squarely… Read More
Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including… Read More
Hollywood’s love affair with VR continues.
VR game maker Survios announced today that it has raised $50 million over a pair of funding rounds, a good chunk of which comes from MGM who led one of the two rounds with Lux Capital leading the other. Shasta Ventures, Danhua Capital, Shanda Holdings, Felicis Ventures and Dentsu Ventures also participated in the rounds.
The company was… Read More
The FS9100 name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but then, no one really chooses fingerprint scanners for their flashy name. The latest technology from Synaptics could, however, very well alter the way smartphone manufacturers approach biometric unlocking, making it possible to embed a sensor under up to one-millimeter of glass. That means, among other things, that phone makers will… Read More
Slack, the workplace collaboration platform with 1.25 million paying users and 4 million overall, is adding one more key feature to its artillery of tools for people to communicate with each other, and it’s one that could help it pick up even more users away from other services like Skype and gmail: it’s adding video calling, the audiovisual complement to the audio chat… Read More
Chrevrolet has delivered its first three Bolt EVs to customers, making its success in delivering a long-range all-electric car available at a decent price official. The company’s first three customers are based in California, and all took delivery in the Bay area. Chevrolet had said that it would be delivering the Bolt by the end of 2017, and it made good on that promise by putting… Read More
It’s easy to forget when you’re not immersed in eSports, but the audience represented in the competitive gaming space is massive (predicted to reach nearly 292 million this year). With so many available eyeballs, streamers aim to reflect their personalities in the most animated way possible to build loyal fans and a subscriber base that follows them across platforms.
Boom offers… Read More
“We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik told an audience at a press event in San Francisco today. Krafcik also noted that the Waymo team conducted the first fully driverless ride on public roads in Austin last year, using a car with no steering wheels and no pedals in “everyday traffic” on city streets. This… Read More
Google today announced Android Things, its new comprehensive IoT platform for building smart devices on top of Android APIs and Google’s own services. Android Things is now available as a developer preview.
Essentially, this is Android for IoT. It combines Google’s earlier efforts around Brillo (which was also Android-based but never saw any major uptake from developers) with… Read More
Virtual reality is often a technology that can lead to some deep existential questions related to who we are and what makes us human. These questions are especially poignant as startups grapple with how humans are going to represent themselves online in VR worlds. Loom.ai is aiming to crack this problem by making it as easy as possible for users to build a realistic avatar of themselves while… Read More
The U.S. Department of Transportation wants all future cars in the U.S. to be able to talk to each other, with the aim of helping to prevent “hundreds of thousands” of accidents per year. The proposed rule would require that all new “light duty vehicles,” a category which includes your average consumer car, to have vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication tech built-in.… Read More
Of all the third-party partners announced on-stage at Apple’s big MacBook Pro unveil back in October, Adobe was almost certainly the most enticing. In the two months since the Touch Bar was shown off, Apple’s mostly relied on its own proprietary software to demonstrate the appeal of the new input device, which ranges from the fairly useful (Final Cut Pro) to the kind of neat… Read More
One of the barriers standing in the way of ethically designed AI systems that benefit humanity as a whole, and avoid the pitfalls of embedded algorithmic biases, is the tech industry’s lack of ownership and responsibility for ethics, according to technical professional association, the IEEE. Read More
In November, Google announced plans to bring RCS, a next-generation upgrade to SMS, and something of an iMessage alternative for Android users, to customers with Android phones on Sprint. At the time, Google said that it planned to roll out RCS to other carrier partners in the months ahead. In just over a month since the original announcement, a second carrier is coming on board: Rogers… Read More
Doppler Labs, makers of the Here One live audio tuning system, are today announcing a new campaign in conjunction with Global Citizen to build awareness around hearing health. Today, more than 1 billion young adults are at risk of losing their hearing, according to Doppler Labs’ Director of Accessibility and Advocacy KR Liu. Doppler Labs has never designated any of its products as… Read More
A few weeks ago, Adobe announced its Project Felix 2D/3D compositing tool at its MAX conference in San Diego. The announcement was one of the highlights of the event but sadly, the application wasn’t actually available yet. That’s changing today with the official launch of Project Felix. Sadly, you’ll need a paid Creative Cloud membership to get access to the bits —… Read More
Velodyne has a new LiDAR sensor design that could help bring an autonomous driving future closer than ever; it’s a small, solid-sate design that has a cost of less than $50 per system, when purchased at the kind of high volume rates needed for mass manufacturing. LiDAR’s cost has been a limiting factor in seeing it applied more broadly as part of semi-autonomous driver… Read More
Facebook, the social networking app used by 1.8 billion people globally, does not provide figures for how much of that audience is comprised of minors — that is, people under the age of 18 (and theoretically over the age of 13). But chances are that these days it’s a significant number, when you consider some news out from the company today: Facebook is launching a new… Read More
BBC Worldwide is teaming up with UK broadcaster ITV and AMC Networks to launch a new streaming service called BritBox, that aims to bring the best of British TV to American audiences. The service promises to deliver the largest subscription video-on-demand library of British television anywhere on the market today, and it will be streamed ad-free, the companies said. AMC Networks has a… Read More
Google has acquired the company and team behind CoWatch‘s software, an Android-based smartwatch OS that differed from most in that it also offered Amazon Alexa access on your wrist. Cronologics announced on its site that it will be joining Google, working on Android Wear, after having developed its Android-based OS for the CoWatch hardware. It’s a time of consolidation for the… Read More
