Since the industrial revolution, economic advancement has been achieved by increasing efficiency and reducing human labor through greater mechanical autonomy driven by technological innovation. For many, commercial drones represent the next enabler of economic benefit using robotic platforms. Read More
The Turkish military has deployed in Istanbul and Ankara, and the government has apparently blocked social media in response to what is being reported as an attempted coup. Read More
Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, which also makes a security-focused Android smartphone called the Blackphone, has announced it’s closed a $50 million Series C round of financing, led by Santander Bank. Read More
Legion Analytics is looking to make your sales team more productive with the help of artificial intelligence. We covered the startup last year when it was part of Y Combinator’s fellowship program and offered to help companies find sales leads. CEO Jamasen Rodriguez told me that the company’s vision has expanded — it’s not just focused on lead generation anymore, but… Read More
Let’s just push past the whole inherent irony of naming a product category “smart dumbbells,” shall we? This is 2016, we’re living in the future. And really, if something isn’t connected to a smartphone, does it really exist? No. Of course it doesn’t. BowFlex has been showing off it ST560 Smart Dumbbells for a couple of years now, and, much to the chagrin of… Read More
The rover NASA plans to send to Mars in 2020 is taking shape, and today its near-final design was revealed, along with details on several of its cool new instruments. The computer-generated image of all the rover’s components is too cool to be missed. Read More
Just in time for the weekend, Netflix today announced the launch of a new service called Flixtape, which the company describes as a way to make short playlists of your favorite Netflix titles. “It’s like a mixtape, but for Netflix,” the site explains. The new tool lets you create these lists based on a genre or theme of some sort, then share them with friends or family… Read More
A team of scientists from Oxford University used a virtual prototype to demonstrate how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, showed that the chaotic swarming effect of bacteria can be organized into biologically driven power plants, similar… Read More
The team behind project management service Wrike spent the last few years building a general-purpose project management service that businesses can adopt to their own needs. That clearly worked, because as Wrike CEO Andrew Filev told me, the company’s revenue grew 120 percent last year and it now has about 400 employees and 12,000 businesses on its paid platform. Now that this platform… Read More
In the past, Elon Musk has rejected Lidar, saying it’s unnecessary to achieve full driving autonomy. But in taking to his Twitter account between late Thursday night and early Friday morning, the Tesla CEO couldn’t help but announce improvements to the automaker’s radar … which isn’t Lidar, even though the end results sound awfully Lidar-like. So, if the… Read More
With a tweet from The Donald himself, it’s official that Governor Mike Pence of Indiana will be Donald Trump’s running mate. But Gov. Pence’s record in the tech industry has been clumsy at best. Perhaps knowing he needed to step up his tech efforts, the Governor has been loudly parading his “new” innovation and entrepreneurship plans for the state of Indiana in… Read More
New data released this morning on the mobile phenomenon Pokémon Go shows that the popular game isn’t only the biggest in U.S. history – it’s also breaking records when it comes to its ability to monetize and retain its users, as well. According to a report from SurveyMonkey, Pokémon Go is seeing retention rates at more than double the industry average, and is pulling… Read More
Airtime, the online video chat company from Sean Parker, is getting into the game watching segment after it added support for live-streaming service Twitch. Read More
The UK government has explicitly confirmed that a surveillance bill now making its way through the second chamber could be used to require a company to remove encryption. And even, in some circumstances, to force a comms service provider not to use end-to-end encryption to secure a future service they are developing. Read More
“Today’s computers are so amazing that we fail to notice how terrible they really are,” Meta CEO Meron Gribetz said as he kicked off the TEDx talk he gave in February. It was a fittingly grandiose opening statement, but one for which the Israeli-born entrepreneur feels he has a solution: neuroscience.
That’s not coincidentally what Gribetz was studying at Columbia… Read More
Soon we’ll all be mumbling to everything in our homes, calling up microwave popcorn and vacuum cleanings like befuddled Scotties in the Voyage Home. Until then Dish is giving us the option of chatting with our TV remotes with the new $30 Voice Remote.
The squat remote has a button on the side that activates voice commands like “Watch ESPN,” “Record this,” or… Read More
BitTorrent’s name may still be associated with piracy, but BitTorrent the company has been working to legitimize the peer-to-peer technology as a tool that can be used to distribute content in legal ways. Its products have over 170 million users, the company claims. Today, its streaming application BitTorrent Now is launching on iOS and Apple TV, in order to allow content creators to… Read More
A new company, Quilt is launching in the U.S. and setting its sight on fixing the incredibly, painfully, broken experience of getting insured in America. For consumers new options for insurance can’t come fast enough. A recent exposé by 60 Minutes of the life insurance business found that several firms are failing to pay out to beneficiaries of policy holders. And that’s… Read More
Most of us think of website hacks as illicit activities aimed at siphoning critical information or disrupting the business of website owners. But what happens when your site becomes hacked, not for the purpose of harming you but rather to further the ends of other parties? Most likely, the attackers would manage to feed off your resources and reputation for months or years without being… Read More
How many times have you wanted to throw your phone out the window of your car because Siri couldn’t understand the most basic phrases? Call Cheryl, no Vyshakh. Siri calls Cheryl anyway. Then a 20-minute argument develops with a series of “Hey Siri” commands followed by a string of unwanted Google searches and maybe even an iTunes song. I personally gave Siri a British accent… Read More
