LoveBot is the thoughtful husband or wife that you aren’t.
Presenting at the 2016 TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon, Guru Ranganathan was sure to specify once he got onstage that his LoveBot doesn’t do what you probably think it does.
Instead of making robot love, this chatbot speaks the love language by sending messages to designated contacts telling them how much you love and… Read More
Too much choice makes it harder to make a decision (a phenomenon that was detailed in “Modern Romance” from Aziz Ansari). So at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon, a team of hackers developed PickMe, a Facebook-integrated chatbot that helps you decide which local restaurant to go to. Just message the bot with what you’re looking for, such as French restaurant, and it will… Read More
You’re organizing a get-together, but getting input from your friends about where to go and when to meet feels like an exercise in herding cats. Enter Full Circle, an app built off a Twilio API that enables a host to text numerous contacts simultaneously and survey them via a short poll (think: karaoke or dancing). A polling SMS-based app isn’t an original idea, of course. Among… Read More
The anti-muslim, anti-hispanic and increasingly xenophobic tenor of the debate – especially on the Republican side — is bound to scare smart entrepreneurs from coming to America. Innovation depends on tolerance and openness. Read More
Pepper, the humanoid robot, is coming up with all sorts of ways to serve its human overlords, including in eldercare. The little rolling robot took to the stage at the Disrupt SF Hackathon today to show how it could help our aging parents, should they fall and not be able to get up. According to PepperHealth creators Ethan Fan and Angelo Hizon – both Battlefield NY 2015 veterans for… Read More
There’s plenty of information online to help people figure out whether their plants are healthy and what they need to do to make them better. But they can be distributed far across the Internet and sometimes hard to find, and aren’t necessarily available on demand, according to Martín Capeletto. That’s why the team, a bunch of plant nuts (though they wouldn’t tell… Read More
At the TechCrunch Hackathon today in San Francisco, Torrey Nommesen showed off Fake Number Club, the easiest way to someone down if they ask you for your number. If you call or text a particular number, a robot will explain that your hopes and dreams of a long, loving and meaningful relationship have been crushed mercilessly like an ant marching across a kitchen counter. Read More
Today, Tesla revealed Version 8 of its Autopilot software, going live in one to two weeks. Version 8.0 includes updates to the signal processing tech used to interpret images received from the onboard radar. The update focuses primarily on the radar component of the Autopilot sensor system, turning it from a supplementary part of the overall tech, designed to complement the cameras, into… Read More
At the Disrupt SF Hackathon today in San Francisco, a team of seasoned software engineers unveiled Pepper the Inflight Service Bot, a robot flight attendant that doesn’t hate picking up barf bags, can circulate in a plane even when there’s turbulence, and can speak to passengers in their own language. The robot is built using the Pepper companion robot, IBM Watson’s… Read More
Each Saturday during the college football season ESPN hosts College GameDay, an pre-game show with a bunch of football experts and hundreds of screaming college kids in the background. Today one of those screaming college kids was Sam Crowder, a student who brilliantly decided to hold up a sign with his Venmo username asking his mom to send him beer money. Cue the Internet, and instead of… Read More
This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone. The popularity contest that has become the election is diluting our time, attention and ability to think critically. Which is ironic, given that we are more connected to information than we have ever been before, and the computation necessary to model problems has never been cheaper. Read More
With Congress’ approval ratings in the single digits, and in the midst of an ugly political season, our legislature might not appear as a hopeful place to start putting U.S. democracy back on track. Shows that depict Congress as sinister and conspiratorial don’t help its dismal reputation. The truth is less dystopian, if not as entertaining: Congress isn’t organized enough to… Read More
Many have interpreted Facebook’s move to “block the blockers” as a sign that Facebook is prioritizing its relationship to advertisers over users. It’s actually far more subtle. Facebook is trying to find — and own — the middle ground that neither advertisers nor publishers have been able to inhabit successfully. Read More
There’s all manner of advice and guidance on the web for online publishers looking to optimize their social media efforts: CoSchedule, Fast Company, HubSpot, ShortStack, Forbes, Hootsuite, QuickSprout and others all claim to have the answer. However, many of the strategies used by publishers for optimizing engagement and boosting referral traffic from social are flawed. Read More
Box CEO Aaron Levie has been at it for more than a decade. For a guy barely past 30, that means it’s all he’s done professionally for his entire adult life. You could forgive him if he were thinking about another challenge, but even after all this time, the fire still clearly burns for Levie. When I asked him about possibly getting bored in an in-person interview this week at… Read More
Kinetise, an app building platform and Disrupt hackathon favorite, aims to democratize the the the process of creating native mobile apps for iOS and Android in the enterprise. Using a drag-and-drop interface, the system essentially lets you build and deploy native apps, visually. In this way, non-developers are able to create and deploy mobile apps. The company originally focused on selling… Read More
When Amazon CTO Werner Vogels talks about his company’s philosophy around innovation, it’s probably a good idea to listen. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has always found a way to capitalize on technology trends, whether being an early online retailer, seeing the future of cloud computing and forming Amazon Web Services, or developing delivery drones and commercial… Read More
The Enterprise Gang — Paul Greenberg, Esteban Kolsky, Brent Leary, Denis Pombriant, and Steve Gillmor. This enterprise-focused show features leading independent analysts discussing the changing nature of industry influencers, thought leaders, and the media. Realtime social networks are changing the nature of television, politics, and business as mobile intersects with the digital economy. Read More
While the Camorama promo video is a bit, shall we say, racy I think the product is pretty solid. It’s basically a 4K action cam that doubles as a 360-degree camera. This means you can record 360-degree videos for a mere $239 for early birds.
Who would want such witchcraft? 360-degree video is pretty cool stuff and it could mean that we can expect more VR video on Youtube and other services. Read More
The most provocative book I’ve read this year is The End Of Protest, by Micah White, one of the two initiators of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Remember Occupy? Those crazy days when, giddy with the apparent success of the previous year’s Arab Spring, independent, decentralized groups of protestors, connected by cell phones and social media, seized public spaces across… Read More
