Uber VP Sherif Marakby told attendees at the SAE Convergence conference in Novi, Michigan today that it will open a new facility in the metro Detroit area in the “coming months,” in order to better partner with car companies and tier-1 suppliers, according to The Detroit News. Marakby is actually an ex-Ford employee, having worked for the company for 25 years prior to joining Uber,… Read More
Google today is launching a new mobile application, aimed at helping you better plan your vacations and other travels. Called Google Trips, the iOS and Android app pulls in a combination of data from Google Maps and crowdsourced contributions from other travelers, in order to offer a personalized travel guide that helps you keep track of your day trips, reservations, points of interest,… Read More
Google’s further expansion into travel services isn’t limited to trip planning via the launch of its new Google Trips mobile app – the company has also quietly launched its “Destinations” trip planning feature in Google Search on the web. Originally designed for mobile users only, Google Destinations is focused on connecting web searchers looking for travel… Read More
GoPro needs a hero. And then some. The action camera company hasn’t issued a major release to the flagship device that bears its name in a couple of years. Of late, it’s been making a big push into the world of VR, through new software and the Omni camera rig. But is that enough to keep the company moving into 2017 and beyond? This morning at 9:00AM PT, from the mountains high… Read More
In launching its Keymission series of cameras, Nikon is bringing the fight to the doorstep of action cameras and VR camera makers. The cameras range from chest-wearable cams, borderline GoPro clones and the most interesting item of the bunch: 360-degree cameras. Read More
Anyong Haseyo! TechCrunch is South Korea-bound and we’re going to do some Seoul searching for the greatest tech in the East. We’re bringing the legendary TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off to Seoul on October 27, but when we get down to the heart of it, the event starts now. We’re looking for ten incredible South Korean startups to present their wares on stage at the event, to… Read More
Tesla has said that its acquisition of SolarCity could be delayed because of shareholder lawsuits which have been filed to challenge the merger, according to an amended regulatory filing published by the SEC today spotted by Reuters.
The lawsuits include four filed in Delaware during the first half of September, which accuse Tesla and SolarCity board members of having violated their… Read More
Company founder James Dyson created the first vacuum cleaner without a bag, and he also created the ball-based design that made it easier to negotiate complicated room layouts. A couple of years ago, Dyson also eliminated the need for a filter with its Cinetic range. Along they way the company has also been working on improving battery life, power and ergonomics, and other pieces of the… Read More
In the ‘old days’ there were plenty of messaging apps and aggregators, but they survived in an open source world. Today, business models dictate that platforms like Slack must keep their messages to themselves. It would be nice if open-source alternatives could bring back the days of flexibility, combined with today’s world of excellent user experience. What if Slack were… Read More
Airbnb has bought a Barcelona-based travel startup it was advising and partnering with: Trip4real offers a marketplace of experiences for tourists to browse and book ahead of time to lend their trip a little local color/flavor. Read More
Waterloo’s Thalmic Labs has raised a new $120 million (U.S.) Series B round from investors including Intel Capital, The Amazon Alexa Fund and Fidelity Investments Canada. The fresh funding will add considerably to the company’s coffers, and should help it with its goal of expanding its product line beyond the original Myo armband it currently offers. Thalmic’s Myo is a… Read More
As I began my career in higher education in the late 1990s, technology seemed poised to upend the entire academic enterprise. The zeitgeist was that a star system was about to be born, with million-dollar online courses starring celebrity faculty. Read More
As Barack Obama’s second term comes to an end, an increasingly loud chorus of voices are calling for a dramatic final presidential act: the pardoning of Edward Snowden. Authoritarians are horrified by this, and, as usual, they are wrong. A pardon really isn’t enough. As I’ve argued before, Snowden deserves a medal. Read More
New technologies have constantly changed the way we’ve worked. And continued investments have come as corporate demand for worker productivity drives tech spending. We should expect augmented reality and virtual reality to eventually attract increased spending in the enterprise as they combine with new mobile network advancements to make an emerging trend called “productive… Read More
Say what you will about Salesforce, the company is always looking ahead. This afternoon, it announced Salesforce Einstein, its artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. The timing, which comes just ahead of rival Oracle’s Open World keynote address, is probably not a coincidence. Regardless, the larger AI theme is something Salesforce has been working on across various pieces of its… Read More
Oracle is kicking off a big customer confab in San Francisco this week, and to mark the event, it’s announced an acquisition. Oracle is buying Palerra, a cloud security startup co-founded by Oracle alums Rohit Gupta (its CEO) and Ganesh Kirti (CTO). Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we will try to find out. Palerra was founded in 2013 (originally called Apprity) and raised… Read More
Crisis has a history of dictating government technology disruption. But innovators don’t wait for crises. They imagine a different path, whether it’s a new approach to solving an old problem or a moonshot. They observe the world, realize potential, and fund and build engines of change. Forward-thinking, optimistic entrepreneurs and investors are starting to do this with… Read More
The Adblock Plus crowdsourced hacker militia can’t keep up with Facebook’s disciplined army of engineers. When Facebook first announced it would circumvent ad blocking software, Adblock Plus (ABP) built a workaround in two days, boasting that “We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon…This time that community seems to have gotten… Read More
Lyft’s response may not be autonomous cars in active duty, but it is a lengthy, detailed treatise on how Lyft sees the future of transportation over the next ten years, as penned by Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer. The Medium post from the Lyft exec articulates a vision of the future that would see most of the rides on Lyft’s network of cars handled autonomously by 2021.… Read More
