Discussions around diversity and inclusion in the tech industry are not going away. Not on my watch. Earlier today, I sat down with Erica Baker, an engineer at Slack, and Ellen Pao, formerly of Reddit, to talk about their nonprofit organization for diversity, Project Include, as well as the systemic racism that exists in the United States. In the last couple of days, two black men have… Read More
After finding success on Kickstarter, ZUtA Labs is piecing together its mobile robotic printer. Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, the four-inch wireless device makes it easy to produce images on the go. The printer rolls back and forth over a piece of paper, until the on-screen image is recreated in about a minute. The ZUtA Robotic Printer integrates with an app, which enables… Read More
For Amanda Kahlow and 6Sense, one of the most important aspects of the company is its culture. The values of the company have been baked into the operations of the team, how it interacts with itself and its customers. Kahlow says it boils down to family — an acronym for fun, accountability, mindfulness, integrity, love and yes. And as a company, before they start meetings, Kahlow and… Read More
Earlier this year, Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote who is now a venture capitalist at General Catalyst, laid out plans to fund and support (and maybe even build?) his own startups in the burgeoning world of bots — services that use conversational interfaces and varying degrees of artificial intelligence to provide users with information, products and more. Now those… Read More
If you’re going to show off the follow-up to your well-loved mirrorless camera two years after release, you might as well do it in style — classic cars, rail-thin models, terrible music, the whole nine yards. Fujifilm’s X-T2 interchangeable lens camera made its flashy Manhattan debut at the borough’s Classic Car Club, with a slew of different accessories and a number… Read More
Mimicking nature’s most elegant designs has become a popular method for creating equally elegant robots (close, anyway) — but using nature’s raw materials, too? That’s what researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have done, creating a tiny light-controlled stingray with a solid gold skeleton that moves using reconstituted rat muscles. O brave new world! Read More
If you’re Toronto-based startup MagniWare, you’ve learned some hard truths about the realities of what people will bear in terms of keeping tabs on their general wellness. MagniWare began life with a focus on hardware, looking to solve the problem of wearable fatigue by making a powerful sensor that was easy to use. But the hardware focus nearly exhausted the startup’s… Read More
Auto manufacturers are realizing that the future of transportation is not going to be one person, one car. It’s going to be ridesharing, ridehailing and public transit — and these vehicles may not even require drivers. So most major manufacturers have made a turn toward becoming “mobility companies.” It’s been a quick turn, though. In just the first half of… Read More
Not a week goes by without some sort of development in the world regarding self-driving cars — the subject consistently finds a place in any given news cycle. But if you’re waiting for a self-driving car revolution, you better keep waiting. Sure, the technology is there, but there are plenty of legal and regulatory battles that will have to take place before consumers are being… Read More
You may have noticed whenever you hop into a Lyft, more times than not, the driver asks what you want to listen to. You, like us, might tend to say you don’t have a preference, even though you most definitely do because you don’t feel like racking your brain or going through your SoundCloud to communicate to the driver some obscure track you’ve been listening to.… Read More
That 3…2…1 on a 24-second shot clock never looked better than this. On Thursday, the NBA announced that it has tabbed Tissot for a sleeker and more efficient shot clock, which will debut during Summer League action Friday, before being integrated into all 29 arenas for the tip-off of the 2016-17 season. The new shot clock uses innovative LED glass technology. In fact, it… Read More
The internet of things, and wearables in particular, may not be quite living up to the hype, but it turns out they may be just the thing for people suffering from Parkinson’s disease. A pair of engineering students from the University of Pennsylvania have started their own company to pursue the possibility. Read More
Manish Chandra is founder and CEO of Poshmark. As a serial entrepreneur, he also founded Kaboodle in 2005, one of the industry’s first social shopping sites, that was acquired by Hearst, and prior to that, he served in executive roles at several foundational technology companies. Read More
Google is getting deeper into the tech side of the video and broadcasting business. The company today announced that it has acquired Anvato, a platform for encoding, editing, publishing and distribution video across platforms. The company says Anvato will join its Cloud Platform team and that Anvato’s technology will complement its efforts “to enable scalable media processing… Read More
Samsung today showed off its successor to the microSD card, the UFS – that’s Universal Flash Storage. And the specs on the removable storage look pretty impressive at first glance. With capacities running 32- to 256GB, the slim little cards are focused on the increased storage/bandwidth needs of high-res capture devices like DSLRs, VR cameras and the like. Along with the storage… Read More
Android co-founder Rich Miner is leaving GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) to start an education project within Google Inc., the investor announced today. Miner will be running his mysterious new edtech initiative from Cambridge, Mass. with the bulk of his team in Silicon Valley.
GV representatives declined to confirm whether the project would be for-profit or part of a philanthropic… Read More
The WaterIsLife charity discovered a Venmo loophole, enabling it to blast its message to a thousand unsuspecting people earlier this week. By sending $0.01 to folks who were appearing in the Venmo feed, it was able to advertise the charity to hundreds of people. Their shitty marketing stunt kicks open the floodgate for yet another channel of spam coming at you from all sides. Yay. Read More
There was a laptop found in the Tesla Model S involved in the deadly May 7 crash using Autopilot, Florida investigators confirmed with CNBC on Thursday. Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Kim Montes told the news outlet that a laptop and DVD player were recovered amongst the crash wreckage, but that they couldn’t determine whether Joshua Brown was using either device at the time of the… Read More
There is, to be sure, nothing new under the horological sun. However, by putting all of the old pieces together in new ways you end up with a watch that is both interesting and unique. Art Mécanique is a Swiss company that is crowdfunding a watch with a face made of concentric circles. The bottom half of the face is covered by a metal plate and you tell the time by looking at the top of… Read More
Cracking encryption is a topic of perpetual fascination. Congress has made several efforts to legislate it. The FBI tried to force Apple to do it. New messaging apps constantly debut with claims about strong encryption, and controversy bubbles when they neglect it. Read More
