Peter Thiel, a very high-profile tech investor, has started to face some backlash about reportedly planning to donate $1.25 million in support of the Trump campaign. This has put a lot in the tech community in a very precarious situation. Thiel currently sits of Facebook’s board, and the tech community is largely outspoken against Donald Trump. However, many executives —… Read More
Amazon today officially launched the updated version of its $40 Fire TV Stick, which now includes the power of Alexa, thanks to the included voice-controlled remote. This is the most notable addition to the new streaming TV dongle, which also sports upgraded internals, like a quad-core processor and faster Wi-Fi. With Alexa built-in, you can search across not only Amazon’s own video… Read More
Slack is still growing fast, about 33% in daily users and paid seats in the last 5 months. But not as fast as before, when it saw 50% DAU growth and 63% paid seat growth in the 5.5 months from December 15th to May 25th. This aligns with rumors TechCrunch has heard about a slight dip in customer retention at Slack, as the casual, GIF-filled workplace chat app can get noisy and distracting… Read More
As we approach the coming robot apocalypse it helps to know your enemy. In most cases our enemies will be made by other robots and their alien engineering will be very difficult to understand. But if they use the Husarion Core 2 at least we’ll vaguely understand what we’re up against. The Polish-made Husarion Core 2 is basically a brain for a robot. It has connectors for sensors… Read More
Network effects in venture capital are no joke. Sure, people want to close rounds with brand name funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz because they validate startups. But perhaps more importantly, companies become more likely to succeed after closing high profile rounds because of their newfound access to the friends and connections of prominent investors. Alex Mittal, CEO of… Read More
Health tech startup Cardiogram has raised $2 million in a seed round led by the a16z Bio Fund for an app that screens users’ cardio health and gives them help improving or maintaining it. The company started out with an Apple Watch integrated app, initially. But it is ultimately planning to be a “device agnostic” business, and to make its app utilizable with all manner… Read More
Salesforce has a history of staying close to the cutting edge of technology, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it announced an artificial intelligence initiative recently, it dubbed Einstein.
We caught up with some key members of the Einstein team at Dreamforce earlier this month and asked them to explain the new technology for us.
Einstein isn’t a product so much as a set of… Read More
With a women’s fertility declining just as they enter the full flush of their careers alongside their male counterparts (usually from the mid 20s to 30s) egg freezing has been on the rise. In 2014 only 6,200 women in the US opted to freeze their eggs to preserve their fertility. It took Apple’s and Facebook’s announcements of egg-freezing benefits — and perhaps a few… Read More
CRISPR is like graphene. It’s one of those exciting new technologies science nerds will invariably invoke as a sort of game changer for every industry imaginable. And indeed, the gene-editing tool has already been unleashed on an impressive range of life-altering tasks, from the removal of malaria from mosquitos to a potential treatment for HIV. But there’s one job even those… Read More
Thanks to the Childrens’ Internet Protection Act, schools in the U.S. that provide internet access to their students must also generally use web filtering systems that block them from accessing obscene or harmful content online. The law, enacted originally in 2000 and updated in 2011, left school districts’ IT departments scrambling to adapt enterprise solutions that were built… Read More
We first learned that Nintendo was working on a new console (codenamed “NX”) over a year and a half ago. Since then, though, they’ve said pretty much nothing.
Nintendo broke their silence this morning with a 3 minute preview trailer packed with details. In 3 minutes, we went from knowing nothing to knowing a whole friggin’ lot.
Here’s everything we now know. Read More
With its latest title, educational game-maker Osmo is tackling a subject that’s close to CEO Pramod Sharma’s heart — entrepreneurship. Co-founded by Sharma and Jérôme Scholler (both former Googlers), Osmo makes iPad games that combine touchscreen gameplay with real-world objects and physical activities in front of the screen. Past games have covered topics like coding,… Read More
Automatic went for a more expensive, but more full-featured offering with the 3G-enabled Automatic Pro earlier this year, but the new Automatic Lite delivers a more affordable connected car device with Bluetooth connectivity, at a lower price point than any previous hardware they’ve released.
The new Automatic Lite is $79.95, and will sell at Best Buy, Amazon and Automatic’s own site. Read More
Earlier this year, former Braintree founder Bryan Johnson publicly announced his plans to forge Kernel, a company with the sole purpose of building hardware and software to augment human intelligence. Today, Johnson is investing $100 million of his own money into the concept, looking to rapidly double the size of his team, shore up a portfolio of intellectual property and prepare for animal… Read More
Sequoia Capital has brought aboard Jess Lee as its eleventh investing partner in the U.S., becoming the firm’s first senior female U.S. investor in its 44-year-old history. Lee was a former Google product manager turned CEO of the fashion site Polyvore, which was acquired for $230 million in cash by Yahoo last year. She had stayed on with Yahoo, which is now being sold, maybe, to… Read More
Does your ghost need more “Oooooo?” Does your zombie need a foot scraping against a dirty floor? Do you need some ambient sounds to cover up the screams of the damned? Sample Focus has what you need for free. The interface is simple: you look for a sound – baby, drumbeat, crickets – and download it. You’ve got normal sounds like this one and then weird sounds… Read More
Drones and pilots legally permitted to fly them are here in spades. So American businesses are scrambling to figure out how to use drones to gain a competitive advantage. Recent examples saw Travelers Insurance using drones to inspect properties after Hurricane Matthew, and Hahn Estate Winery using drones to monitor the health and density of vegetation on their vineyards, and forensic… Read More
The Anita Borg Institute, the organization responsible for the annual Grace Hopper Women in Computing Celebration taking place right now in Houston, has a problem with racial diversity and not practicing what it preaches, according to several current and former employees. These critics see this as problematic because ABI positions itself as a leader in efforts around diversity and inclusion… Read More
It was pretty easy to lose sight of the bottom line in all of the hype and neon lights and childhood wish fulfillment. But at the end of the day, the extremely limited number of self-lacing Mag sneakers Nike was raffling off were supporting a really great cause The shoe giant is releasing 89 pairs (a nod, it seems, to the release year of the Back to the Future sequel that inspired them), 88… Read More
A developer has found a hidden gem inside the iOS code base, by hacking the iOS Simulator: a one-handed iPhone keyboard. Designed to improve reachability – something that’s often an issue on larger-screened phones – the keyboard is activated by either left-swiping or right-swiping from the edges of the standard iOS keyboard. The gesture shifts keys to the side, reduces… Read More
