In light of Dollar Shave Club’s recent sale, I started thinking about other industries that haven’t yet rethought the customer relationship by leveraging the cloud. A significant majority of FDA-approved medical devices — and their associated business models — should be rethought around the idea that the cloud is a core feature of the product. Read More
Tesla missed its Q2 earnings targets today in a report released after the close of the market. Tesla executives are not wavering on yearly targets, despite a slower than expected quarter. All of this comes amidst a seemingly never-ending wave of Tesla headlines dominating Silicon Valley over the last few weeks. The energy company born out of an automobile company reported non-GAAP Q2 revenue… Read More
Jack Dorsey really needs a hit. After Twitter’s weak second-quarter showing, and both stocks not performing well in the past year, Dorsey — as the lead of both companies — needs to show investors his strategies are working (and that he can run both companies).
Well, he certainly got one today. Square reported its second-quarter earnings, where it brought in $439 million in… Read More
Basis Peak, a fitness watch tracking your health and sleep habits, is now being recalled by the company after reports of overheating. The Intel subsidiary first sent a statement about the overheating issues in mid-June and is now asking customers to stop wearing their watches and is shutting down service “immediately.” “We had hoped to update the software on… Read More
The field of artificial intelligence is so huge, and the potential applications so numerous, that it would be folly to try to explain it all in one — no, wait, IBM just did. Read More
Lyft is seeing record ridership, including an all-time high of 13.9 million rides during July, first reported by Recode and confirmed by TechCrunch via sources familiar with the matter. In addition to the total ride increase, along with a new record for monthly active riders of over 3 million, Lyft also saw significant growth in the use of its Concierge service, a bulk booking service similar… Read More
Owlchemy Labs wants you to reach out and grab VR content with your hands. The Austin-based VR studio just secured a $5 million Series A led by Qualcomm Ventures with participation in the round also coming from HTC, The VR Fund, Colopl Next and Capital Factory. Right now the studio, founded in 2010, is best known among those in the VR community for building the game Job Simulator, which was… Read More
Many American Olympic athletes are using cutting-edge technology like motion tracking systems, wearable jump monitors and Doppler radar to help them jump higher and go farther before hitting Rio this August 5 for the Summer Games — and so can you!
So fasten your joggers and come along as we take a look at the technology our Olympians are using to help them go for the gold. Read More
After a relatively short beta, Microsoft today announced that the Excel API — a way for developers to programmatically use Excel for Office 365 for doing calculations, building dashboards and more — is now generally available. Read More
Finding life beyond Earth means combing through an incredibly vast array of potential planetary candidates, but one new study from a team of researchers led by San Francisco State University astronomer Dr. Stephen R. Kane hopes to add some additional specificity to the search. The international group of scientists behind the study examined the over 4,000 planets outside of our solar… Read More
After launching in Seattle in April, BMW’s car sharing service ReachNow is expanding down the I-5 corridor to Portland, Oregon. In Seattle, more than 13,000 people signed up in the first month, and ReachNow was able to add 150 vehicles and expand its service area by late June. It’s likely the Portland expansion will follow the same plan, with a fleet of vehicles in the city center… Read More
YouTube Kids, the child-friendly version of YouTube’s service that launched last year and faced criticism for the way it handled advertisements, has today launched a version of the service that will offer parents the option to pay for an ad-free experience. Now, YouTube Kids will be bundled into the YouTube Red subscription program, a paid membership that offers a variety of… Read More
Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving. Read More
This is going to be fun. I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, next week, Wednesday, August 10, and I’ll be holding a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270.
We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8 p.m. we’ll have an open stage with live music… Read More
Take a tour of Facebook’s new 22,000 square foot hardware lab where it’s building drones, satellites, lasers, VR headsets, and the machines that store the world’s biggest collection of photos. Click the arrow to the right or scroll down on mobile to see what’s behind the Area 404 security doors. Read More
There is much talk of “cloud native” these days, and people are taking liberties with the interpretation — as they do with everything else associated with the cloud. Cade Metz put it right: “The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco and other companies that don’t want to… Read More
About one year ago, Apple unveiled a diversity site featuring its employee representation data and a letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Today, Apple has revealed its latest diversity numbers, showing slight but consistent improvement year over year.
Worldwide, Apple is 68 percent male and 32 percent female (last year, Apple was 69… Read More
Car component supplier Lear is hoping to ride the wave of connectivity to new heights, with plans to develop and ship a unit for its car-maker customers that lets their vehicles communicate with other cars on the road, city infrastructure including connected roads and traffic lights, and with cloud-based services. The part would also be modular, letting OEMs easily install physical upgrades. Read More
Following yesterday’s launch of a new version of the Skype Windows 10 application, Microsoft today announced an expanded collection of its “Skype bots,” the automated chat assistants that it introduced earlier this year in a limited preview. The new bots include those that can help you make travel arrangements, locate event tickets, pull in information from other… Read More
After a few months of testing the waters, Kik is still bullish on chatbots and has quite a few reasons to be.
Just last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Kik CEO Ted Livingston divulged that developers had built over 6,000 chatbots on the platform. Fast forward a few months and the popular messaging app has announced today that more than 1.8 billion messages have already been exchanged… Read More
