Animation Throwdown is a new game from Fox Entertainment that pits the company’s popular adult cartoons Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, King of the Hill, American Dad and Futurama against each other. One hundred and twenty thousand people have rated this game. It has a four and a half star rating. 4.5 stars! Is it that good? I’d say so. You start the game by choosing a character… Read More
In case you were wondering when you’ll stop receiving those “please turn off your Samsung Galaxy Note 7” warnings before takeoff, well, we’re halfway there. Samsung announced today that “about half” of the affected phones — they mean to say, the exploding ones — have been exchanged. Read More
We’re still in the early days of the hardware renaissance. Driven by decreased development costs, shorter times to market and a shift in hardware business models away from commoditized consumer electronics to recurring revenue and software services, VCs have poured money into hardware startups. Last year, investment was up more than 30x versus four years prior. What has happened since then? Read More
Pretty much 100 percent of my generation is obsessed with Instagram. Unfortunately, I left the platform (sorry all) back in 2015. Simple reason, I am way too indecisive about which photos to post and what pithy caption to give them. Fortunately, with ample spare time, those who share my problem can now use an image captioning model in TensorFlow to caption their photos and put an end to… Read More
One of the first consumer genetic testing companies, 23andMe says it aims to be at the forefront in gathering genetically diverse data throughout the world. The company just launched a standalone $99 ancestry service today as a way to offer those interested in their genetic lineage the ability to trace ancestors and relatives just by spitting into a tube. Ancestral DNA is something founder… Read More
It’s hip to be square — well, cubical, really. That’s the feeling I got from the amount of voxel-based offerings on the show floor at PAX West — and these 3D pixels fit the bill whether they’re powering a stylized dungeon crawler or simulating a whole planet. Read More
Airbnb formally filed a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission this afternoon announcing that it had raised $555,462,180 in an equity deal. Last month, TechCrunch independently verified that Airbnb had filed a 28-page document with the State of Delaware indicating that it had intentions to raise additional late-stage capital. At the time, Equidate speculated that the company… Read More
Rolling robots will soon be making U.S. house calls, beginning with a trial run in Washington, D.C. this fall. Municipal regulators have approved use of Starship Technologies’ rolling delivery drones for urban delivery via sidewalk, reports Recode, giving the Estonian startup a vector for its first states-side public tests. You might remember Starship Technologies from the launch of… Read More
In a particularly clever if destructive hack, a maker named Zach cleared out the guts of an NES cartridge and stuck in a Raspberry Pi Zero and an Amazon USB hub to create the ultimate retro NES emulator. It even fits back into its original sleeve for easy storage. The project is surprisingly simple. All you really need to do is crack the cartridge case and position the parts. Then… Read More
A startup called Gfycat (which is pronounced “Jiffy Cat”) has raised a mammoth $10 million seed round to turn its already popular user-generated content platform into a revenue generating concern. On the content creation side of its business, the startup reports that 2.5 million unique users have already created 25 million “Gfycats,” or short, silent, looping animations… Read More
As indicated by an earlier report, Yahoo today confirmed it’s working with law enforcement to investigate a data breach which affected the account information of “at least” 500 million users. The company says that the user account information was stolen from its network in late 2014 by what it now believes to be a state-sponsored actor. The stolen information includes… Read More
Instacart COO Ravi Gupta will say that a bad day working in the on-demand economy can be plenty demoralizing even if offset by good well-paid days, and Instacart is going to be making some changes in order to even things out. Today, the company said it is removing its tipping option in favor of raising guaranteed delivery rates for its shoppers. Instead of shoppers relying on something around… Read More
Google’s VR platform Daydream is now ready for developers’ full attention, thanks to the release of the new Google VR SDK, which exited from beta today. The kit will allow developers to build VR experiences for Daydream-ready phones and headsets, the company says, and now supports integration with Unity and Unreal game engines and tools. The company first revealed Daydream at… Read More
AutoMobility LA, the new name for the press days before the public LA Auto Show in November, has announced the ten startups competing for visibility and mentoring opportunities. The board that chooses the finalists includes executives from companies small and large, new and old: Lyft, Google, NVIDIA, Local Motors, and General Electric, among others. The startups that made the list cover a… Read More
YouTube might be one of the only communities on earth more eccentric than Silicon Valley. You can find videos of cats pretending to be people, people pretending to be cats, and whatever the hell this is. That said, the site has been home to some incredibly moving and world-changing content. While most of us immediately think of videos like the pepper spraying of students protesting at UC… Read More
Intuit’s TurboTax stores highly detailed financial data for millions of users who import their W2s, their banking data, info about their mortgages and more. Right now, all of this data is locked into TurboTax, but the company is now thinking about how it can do more with it by giving its users the option to share this data with reputable third parties. As TurboTax EVP Dan Wernikoff,… Read More
Apple is on a machine learning company buying spree. After buying Perceptio at the end of 2015 and Turi just a few months ago, Apple has now acquired an India/US-based machine learning team, Tuplejump. We’d been hearing rumors of another acquisition in this space by Apple for some time. While Apple won’t outright confirm it, when asked about Tuplejump this morning, a… Read More
As the number of cord cutters in the U.S. continues to grow, The CW is doubling down on its own, subscription-free, over-the-top streaming service, which will now become the only way to watch in-season episodes of the network’s shows. The service will also expand across platforms, including support for Roku, Chromecast, AirPlay, Apple TV, Xbox, and Amazon Fire TV, in addition to… Read More
Elon Musk is pumping up our expectations again: The Tesla CEO and founder said that he’s planning an October 28, Bay area unveiling of Tesla and SolarCity’s new solar roof product, which will be directly integrated with version 2.0 of the Tesla’s PowerWall solar storage battery for the home, as well a Tesla car charger.
Aiming for Oct 28 unveil in SF Bay Area of new… Read More
After failing to get their startup Udemy off the ground in their native Turkey, Eren Bali and Oktay Cağlar headed to the U.S. in 2009. Both knew that in the U.S., specifically Silicon Valley, they could gain the support and traction Udemy needed. Yet Udemy was not enough to get them into the country: The U.S. doesn’t have a visa specifically for entrepreneurs eager to launch businesses. Read More
