Six years ago, Google raised a lot of eyebrows when it announced it was developing a self-driving car. At the time, very few people took the technology seriously. However, things have been gearing up, and now self-driving cars are about to be part of our everyday life. Just last August, Uber rolled out its first batch of 100 driverless taxi-cars in Pittsburgh.
This is one of the most… Read More
Ford, GM, Toyota and VW are just a handful of the car manufacturers planning to put self-driving cars on the road in the next five years. If you ask Uber or Tesla, they might say driverless cars have already arrived… which means we’re running out of time to secure one of the juiciest new targets for hackers. Read More
Need a teeny tiny computer that can run Android or Linux? Only have $20? Well you’re in luck. When we first met the Orange Pi (get it?) the company was selling a nice Raspberry Pi clone for $15. Now they’re selling a souped up version with all the trimmings. The board includes an Ethernet port and three USB ports. It has 1GB of memory, H5 High Performance Quad-core 64-bit… Read More
I’m a really lucky guy. In the course of this work I get to talk to a lot of my personal heroes and my favorite so far has been Ruben Bolling aka the creator of Tom the Dancing Bug. Bolling is a fixture in the alt-comics scene and he has a lot to say about the rise and fall of the alt-weekly and the new laws of popularity. If you want to know how to build and keep an audience you can look… Read More
Imagine a typical day in 2020: You read the news and realize the presidential election is coming up. Based on a predicted model that takes into account your previously expressed views and data on voters in your state, your AI assistant recommends how you vote. A message on your phone asks if you want your AI assistant to cast the vote on your behalf. You tap “agree” and get on… Read More
Tesla’s new Gigafactory opened at the end of July, with much excitement from both the media and the general public. Only 14 percent of the massive structure has been built, with the rest of the $5 billion project to be concluded by 2020. According to Tesla, battery cell production will start in 2017; by 2018, the Gigafactory should be cranking out cars to the tune of 500,000 Model 3s… Read More
Every company has a board of directors — but few founders and entrepreneurs give the matter of board composition much thought. We’d like to offer some advice to founders and CEOs seeking to learn more about their boards, as well as to people who have been invited to sit on a board. Read More
Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is experimenting with a new Status feature that lets users share mood-setting pictures and videos overlaid with other custom elements such as emoji, with the content disappearing 24 hours after it’s shared — so basically a copy of Snapchat Stories. Read More
As the Internet of Things evolves toward becoming one of the fastest expanding sectors in the tech industry, a lot of focus is being given to greenfield development, the process of creating new devices from scratch. The greater potential lies in brownfield development, the integration of connectivity and data collection into things and designs that already exist. Read More
Video is eating the internet. It accounts for nearly 75 percent of internet traffic, with Americans consuming more than an hour of online videos each day — more than three times as much as in 2011. Established platforms like YouTube and Netflix capture a large portion of this traffic, but there are also a number of new players exploiting the video opportunity. Read More
Good news, my friends! The day we have all ostentatiously longed for has arrived. I come to announce that the days of sugar water are over. The era of SoLoMo photo apps, messaging copycats, new niche social networks, “Uber for X”, and on-demand delivery of artisanal civet coffee is behind us at last. No more trivial apps and web services. At long last it is time to solve the… Read More
Facebook Messenger is preparing to launch a new “Instant Games” platform that will let people play lightweight games against friends. Candy Crush maker King.com is already testing one of these Instant Games called “Shuffle Cats Mini” in New Zealand, TechCrunch has discovered. And other studios including Big Viking also appear to be prepping for the Instant Games… Read More
Remember when Pokemon GO got a new system for finding nearby Pokemon (to replace the one that’d broke almost immediately after launch) … but it worked pretty much exclusively in San Francisco? Well, good news/bad news time. The good news: more people outside of San Francisco are getting it now! The bad news: its still not for everybody. The company just announced a small roll out on… Read More
Google Capital has rebranded to CapitalG, Facebook hub gives its election hub top billing in hopes of making you a more informed voter, Wish is rumored to be raising $500 million, Lucas Matney was really impressed by Doppler Labs’ Here One device and the NFL is launching a virtual reality series on YouTube. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
AIs have more or less mastered chess, Go and a number of other highly cerebral games — how will they do on something like StarCraft II, which combines high-level strategy with the need for quick reaction times and tactical thinking? Probably great, honestly. And this collaboration between Google’s DeepMind and Blizzard will ensure it. Read More
When cities are designed and deployed as a single unit, they don’t carry the cultural vibrancy of a city built organically in response to the needs and desires of its denizens. The piecemeal approach to integrating smart city technology is more appealing than the built-from-scratch approach — it’s the only way to preserve the character of the city. Read More
The Happy Home Company is the latest home services startup to call it quits. The company was founded by Doug Ludlow, who sold his previous startup, Hipster, to AOL (which also owns TechCrunch). Its goal was to take some of the confusion out of the home maintenance process — when something broke in your home, Happy Home’s “home managers” would help you find the right… Read More
This morning Samsung announced that it was issuing a voluntary recall to address some 700-plus reports of malfunctioning top-loading washing machines, including one very unfortunate case of a broken jaw. It was the cherry on top of what has already been a rough few months for the hardware giant, driven mostly by the prolonged saga of the Galaxy Note 7. Heading into the weekend, the… Read More
This week, Facebook’s Trending Topics system was notably late to a huge social media protest, Elon Musk announced new solar roof panels that the company hopes will change how we consume electric power and Instagram tested shoppable tags. These are some of this week’s top stories in tech. Want to receive the Weekly Roundup in your inbox? Well, turns out you can. Read More
Do you, like many others, wake up each morning, gaze upon your Amazon Echo, and think, “Damn it, Echo. Instead of a shiny cylinder, why can’t you be a singing fish?”
Good news, friend. Your dreams have come true.
On his Facebook profile, artist Brian Kane briefly demonstrates what happens when you take one of those oh-so-classy singing fish — “Big Mouth Billy… Read More
