It’s difficult enough already for the visually impaired to read the books and publications sighted people take for granted, but it’s downright impossible when the content isn’t even available in accessible formats. Fortunately, a global agreement aimed at alleviating the problem passed a major milestone today and may take effect before the end of the year. Read More
While more and more jobs are being forfeited to robots and artificial intelligence, is it conceivable to convey to machines a responsibility as complicated as cybersecurity? The topic is being hotly debated by security professionals, with strong arguments on both ends of the spectrum. In the meantime, tech firms and security vendors are looking for ways to add this hot technology to their… Read More
Paradox Interactive, best known for developing and publishing a series of popular games including Hearts of Iron, Stellaris and Europa Universalis, today announced it raised more than $11.8m from the crowd on the new Swedish equity crowdfunding platform Pepins. Read More
Google has had a big week around diversity. The company gifted a $2.8 million office space inside its New York City building to Black Girls Code, appointed Roger Ferguson, an African-American finance executive, to its board of directors, and released its latest diversity report.
Most of this was good news. Having a space inside Google’s office could potentially give Black Girls Code… Read More
This week, Airbnb sued the city of San Francisco, details about a fatal Tesla autopilot crash came to light, and Facebook changed the News Feed again. Here are the top tech stories of the week. Read More
Days before the Juno spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, astronomers have captured an enormous aurora at the north pole of Jupiter. The imagery, released this week, was taken back on May 19 using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as part of a program to study how solar wind affects auroras on Jupiter.
The video above was created by pairing many far-ultraviolet images from Hubble with a… Read More
Amazon Prime Video will be the exclusive subscription streaming service for the majority of PBS series for children, Amazon announced today. All episodes are now available to download and stream. Prime members in the U.S. can watch PBS episodes via the Amazon Video app for TVs, connected devices including Fire TV, mobile devices and online. The shows will also be available with Amazon… Read More
Hyperloop One co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan is out at the company and former SVP of engineering Josh Geigel will be taking over BamBrogan’s role as CTO.
The move, though abrupt, may have been a long time coming. The company has been shifting Bambrogan away from public comment for months and switched him to the CTO role, appointing former Cisco exec Rob Lloyd as CEO in… Read More
The dispute between Apple and Spotify over subscription revenues continues today with a letter from the former accusing the latter of using “rumors and half-truths” to advance “unfair and unreasonable” demands. Read More
By most standards, Knocki has had a home run Kickstarter campaign, blowing way past its $35,000 target with more than $1.1 million committed. But it sounds like CEO Jake Boshernitzan is still hoping for more support in the campaign’s final hours (it’s scheduled to end at 3am Eastern on Saturday). After all, he said that Knocki deliberately set the campaign target on the low… Read More
A vote today by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has agreed to affirm an expanded resolution on online rights. Russia and China had tabled several amendments to the text but these were rejected by the sponsor countries who argued they were an attempt to dilute its focus. Read More
For the average Amazon shopper, reviews are just a casual part of the experience. You might pay attention to a pun-filled review by George Takei or spend half an hour laughing at the parody reviews for “Fresh Whole Rabbit,” but you probably don’t thoroughly examine every review before buying a product. Read More
Football is a downright violent sport. If players aren’t injured in the games themselves, there’s a chance that they could be hurt in practice. It happens all the time.
While there’s no substitute for actual football practice, there is a technology enjoying rapid growth in the NFL and it involves taking contact-free virtual reps: virtual reality training. Read More
Tusk made his bones in Silicon Valley through advising Uber, which paid him in equity for his services while still a Series A company, dramatically boosting Tusk’s net worth (he says he hasn’t sold any), and in the process, creating a model for his newest firm, Tusk Ventures. Right now, Tusk Ventures, founded less than a year ago, has a dozen clients. Most of the 30 staffers who… Read More
Brexit. Trump. The Federal Reserve. The world threw nearly everything at Twilio for its untimely IPO. Despite market volatility, the company continues to impress. The week the world met Twilio can only be defined as positive. Unfortunately, the greatest challenges for the company lie ahead. Short Term Herd behavior fuels IPOs. Casual investors often jump in immediately because of the… Read More
Following yesterday’s news of the NHTSA’s investigation into a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S, Mobileye, the Israeli technology company helping power the carmaker’s Autopilot feature, has sent a statement to TechCrunch regarding the incident. “We have read the account of what happened in this case,” reads the text attributed to Dan Galves,… Read More
Facebook today announced a new feature that makes it easier to publish status updates in multiple languages. Until now, you either had to post long updates that included all of the translations of the text or maybe post multiple updates — one for each language. Back in February, Facebook started testing a new feature that allowed Page owners to write a status update in multiple… Read More
A curious gap has emerged in the early-stage investment landscape: While emerging startups are able to raise very small, sub-$500,000 rounds, seed and pre-A investors are requiring increasingly higher revenue and market traction milestones before they deploy capital to companies. Lately, it seems as if the single, discrete “seed” round of $1-$2 million has largely disappeared. Read More
BMW is teaming up with Mobileye and Intel to work on its first fully autonomous self-driving car, which it plans to ship by 2021, confirming Bloomberg’s report. Compared to existing self-driving technology, this new generation of cars is supposed to be able to drive itself from start to finish. This isn’t just about helping you when you’re on the highway. BMW and its… Read More
Now you can talk into your friendly little home AI tower to order toilet paper. And deodorant and batteries. And tens of millions of other Amazon Prime qualified products, because no one does synergy quite like the good people at Amazon. The retail-super-mega-giant, which had previously enabled reordering through Alexa, is now adding search/shopping to its AI voice assistant. Users with… Read More
