It wasn’t so long ago that venture capital was a suburban California phenomenon. Los Angeles didn’t have much in terms of a real tech scene — and even San Francisco only had a few VCs or tech companies. Now, VC offices have sprung up in San Francisco, moving more of the investment energy up there. That great migration of companies and activity touches upon what is now… Read More
I’ll be in Chicago this week and I’d love to meet some startups. I’m thinking about holding a micro-mini-meetup on Tuesday, July 26 at a location to be determined. Here’s what I need from you all: Email or tweet me with recommendations where we can meet. I like to just hang out in bars but I could do a co-working space. I know there are a few in town but I’ve… Read More
Researchers and companies have been exploring new ways to improve buildings through analytics software, prefabrication, connected devices, new materials and construction automation. It’s striking that most of these efforts are trying to patch problems within the legacy framework of “permanent” construction. Could it be that the one thing that is taken for granted is the… Read More
Last year around this time, NASA released the first image of Earth taken by the EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite. Since then, that camera has captured a full year of our planet from its location at Lagrange Point 1 about one million miles away. Compiling over 3,000 images, NASA put together a video showing a sunlit Earth age one full year. EPIC takes at least one set of images… Read More
One might ask why we would ever want to create robots that can do human work when we have so many people who need jobs. The goal of robotics should not be to replace humans with robots, but rather to improve productivity and safety, removing humans from harm’s way and enabling them to focus on things that humans should be doing. Read More
While I acknowledge and appreciate the role of governmental agencies to protect its citizens from harm, I encourage the NHTSA to be rational and measured in their response. Today, the United States has a significant lead in the autonomous vehicle and self-driving car industry. The NHSTA would be wise to not set us back years or even decades by inappropriately overreacting. Read More
WikiLeaks publishes a ton of democratic national committee emails, a bunch of employees leave reddit, Pokemon Go is live now in Japan, Verizon is close to buying Yahoo assets, Gravity4 CEO Gurbaksh Chahal has violated probation. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
It clogs systems, causes accidents, wastes energy and makes people unhappy. It’s more than a bad experience on a website — in cities, bad user experience (UX) design can actually kill. We’re talking about signage, public spaces, civic and emergency communications and other forms of urban design that influence our daily routines and, in some cases, are there expressly for… Read More
The future is small in space: picture Cubesats the size of toasters and Femtosats an inch across crowding the skies. A newly invented motor that’s both tiny and powerful goes hand in hand with that vision, providing compact spacecraft with the ability to adjust their position without using a drop of fuel. Read More
Dots & Co., the follow-up to the popular puzzle games Dots and Two Dots, launched on iOS and Android earlier this week. If reading about the new game isn’t enough for you, you can watch me try it out in the video above. In many ways, Dots & Co. should feel pretty familiar to fans of the previous games. Your goal is to clear as many dots as you can by connecting dots of the… Read More
After unceremoniously putting the old kibosh on it Instant service back in 2014, your friendly neighborhood DVD dispenser Redbox is ramping up to give streaming another go. The movie distributor, whose vending machines have become a supermarket mainstay across the US, is taking another shot at Netflix with a small beta roll out for “a small subset of [its] customers” From the sound… Read More
Today there is enough data available to bring people of similar or adjacent profiles closer, and inform them about signals and contexts where they could either help, pay it forward or seek help. Over a period of time, a community (a micro-market network) will form that will prospect for each other — be it for a job or a deal or funding. Read More
“What are they doing?”
That was the question an older woman, probably around 70 or so, asked me yesterday. She was pointing to a group of 18-ish boys and girls near a YMCA, the biggest (and, so far, only) Pokestop in the city where I live. Without exception, the teens were all staring at their smartphones.
“They’re playing Pokémon Go,” I replied. The lady… Read More
A San Francisco judge ruled today that adtech CEO Gurbaksh Chahal violated his probation in a domestic violence case. Judge Tracie Brown ordered Chahal to surrender his passports to the court on Monday and will determine his sentence on August 12. Chahal’s legal woes began when he was accused of attacking a woman inside his penthouse apartment in August 2013. Prosecutors said… Read More
3D sound, it’s, ahem, all around you. From the look (or, rather, sound of it), hardware startups are convinced that the effect is set to be the next big thing in consumer audio, and Kickstarter, accordingly, is littered with headphones that promise a more immersive listening experience akin to the recent VR boom. Most companies went ahead and built the technology directly into a pair… Read More
In spite of the progress of car tech overall, the number of vehicles breaking down is actually spiking. According to Fortune, the American Automotive Association (AAA) tended to a record-high 32 million drivers with vehicle breakdowns last year. The main causes? A lot of flat tires, but also electronic keyless ignitions that sapped batteries and more. AAA also found that relatively… Read More
History was made this week in tech as Peter Thiel wowed the crowd at the RNC, Elon Musk exposed Master Plan Part Deux and we saw yet another iPhone 7 leak. Read More
Toronto entrepreneur David King learned something over the past four months, doing random bringing people together for random dinners at restaurants in Toronto: Many of the people participating were freelancers and entrepreneurs, and many of them wanted somewhere to work more often than they wanted a dinner party. He already had the two ends to his double-sided marketplace, he just… Read More
WikiLeaks has put online a searchable database of thousands of emails sent to and from top figures in the Democratic National Committee — many of which contain personal and financial information of private citizens. Transparency in government affairs is one thing, but this seems careless — and callous. Read More
Let’s start with the obvious: Star Trek Beyond is a pretty good movie, but it doesn’t quite make it into the top tier of Trek films like The Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country and First Contact. Beyond, which opens today, starts with the crew of the Enterprise in the middle of its five-year, deep space mission. This is exactly what Captain James T. Kirk (played by Chris… Read More
