There’s a new remote-controlled Star Wars droid on the way, but it might not be the one at the top of most people’s gift lists. The R/C Mouse Droid (via Gizmodo) is about as basic as a bot can get, but the tiny scene stealing droid will be very familiar (and possibly even cherished) by fans of the original series, where it had a pivotal role expressing very animal-like terror… Read More
Two taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) have docked to the Chinese space station, Tiangong-2, kicking off the nation’s longest human spaceflight mission to date. Watch LIVE: #Shenzhou11 and #Tiangong2 set for orbital docking #Today at 19:30UTC https://t.co/6LJ8qJnY0O cc: @Astroguyz pic.twitter.com/hOsiWR3BWX — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 18, 2016 Over the course of 30 days,… Read More
Who’s copying Amazon? Everyone! But especially Walmart. Speaking of which, the retailer giant announced today the launch of its own video streaming service, called Vudu Movies on Us. The service at launch will include thousands of titles, which will be available in HD and can be streamed for free. To generate revenue, Vudu Movies on Us will be ad-supported. While Amazon’s Prime… Read More
Intel today reported its Q3 earnings, and while the company beat estimates on both revenues and earnings, it also said that it would be raising its restructuring charges to an eye-watering $2.3 billion, as it continues to shift its business away from PC processors and into chips for the next generation of computing in devices like drones and self-driving cars. It also provided a forecast for… Read More
Yahoo made slightly more money than Wall Street expected — and no one cares at this point. The company reported its third-quarter earnings, basically falling a hair above what everyone was looking for on its earnings and in line with revenue. But at this point the company is in the process of getting acquired by Verizon. As such, stock prices and whatnot like that don’t… Read More
It’s a red-letter day at Microsoft Research: a team working on speech recognition has hit a serious symbolic goal with a system that’s as good as you at hearing what people are saying. Specifically, the system has a “word error rate” of 5.9 percent, on par with professional human transcribers. Read More
On September 7, 2016, Evercar sent out a press release announcing that it had expanded from its Los Angeles home base to San Francisco and Oakland and had financing for buying up to 3,000 vehicles in the next year. Almost exactly a month later, the service that rented EVs and hybrids to drivers for ride hailing services shut down. The company had launched at the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show,… Read More
Last week, when we reported on how PayPal has considered acquiring crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, we noted that the startup was on a growth tear and “printing money”. Today, GoFundMe is releasing some numbers that speak to just how big that is for the company right now. GoFundMe has now passed the $3 billion mark in terms of funds raised on its platform — an impressive… Read More
Well-received TV series including “Orange is the New Black,” “Casual,” “The Royals,” “Mad Men,” and “Weeds” are now available for sale on Vimeo, which today launched its own television storefront in partnership with Lionsgate and STARZ. The store will feature nearly the entire Lionsgate catalog of TV shows, which includes the above,… Read More
Update: The NFL and Microsoft both issued statements to TechCrunch, which are at the bottom of the post. Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, really hates the Microsoft Surface tablet. Belichick hates these tablets so much he’s even thrown them at things before. These are the tablets provided by Microsoft that the NFL arranged for teams to use on the sideline… Read More
If you’ve been looking for cycle clothing, chances are you’ve seen some of Rapha’s items. Rapha isn’t just a utilitarian clothing company and focuses on design to make cycle clothing a bit more sylish. And interestingly, Rapha’s head of design Alex Valdman has become a big Apple Pencil advocate. Apple has jumped on this opportunity to produce a good-looking short… Read More
More than seven years after the financial crisis began, economies worldwide are growing. Much of the recovery has been led by government spending, including massive sums on infrastructure projects, which typically involve interaction between governments and local partners, especially in emerging markets. While that has helped those economies grow, it has also driven worldwide growth in compliance. Read More
Tesla has updated its Model 3 website, letting new pre-order customers know that any orders placed from now on will ship by mid-2018 or beyond, as noted by Kyle Russell on Twitter. The pre-order page has previously listed late 2017 as a start date for shipping. We’ve confirmed that this new timeline for shipping applies to orders from now onward, and does not impact estimated shipping… Read More
Microsoft has long offered U.S. government agencies a special version of its Azure cloud computing platform that has all the necessary certifications to allow federal, state and local agencies to use its services. Today, it’s expanding this service with the launch of a Department of Defense-specific version of Office 365 and Azure, and the launch of two new Azure Government regions is… Read More
Joy, hardware startup and resident positive emotion, today announced the launch of its first product, the Joy Album — an interactive photo frame designed from the ground up. Joy has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Obvious Ventures, The Chernin Group, BoxGroup, and Maywic Select Investments. At first glance, the tablet-like device seems to have a lot… Read More
Today, it’s not enough to get users to download an app, you have to keep them coming back, or the app will soon be abandoned and forgotten. To address developers’ needs on this front, Facebook is today is taking a tool for creating customizable push campaigns out of beta, which will allow any developer to narrowly target specific audiences via their app.
The tool is a part of… Read More
Facebook is helping broadcasters plan and promote their Live streams ahead of time, and assemble their audiences in a waiting room so they have viewers the second the camera starts rolling. Today Facebook is rolling out Live video scheduling, scheduled broadcast sharing, and pre-broadcast lobbies to verified Pages. The plan is to roll out Live scheduling to all Pages in the coming weeks, and… Read More
One of the world’s leading facial recognition outfits, Russia’s NTechlab, is looking to tap into the growing need for the technology among major businesses. Its new product, FindFace.Pro, is basically facial recognition as a service, with the usual conveniences of the “_aaS” model. Read More
Nintendo’s got a gift for repurposing. In the 30+ years since it was first released, the NES and its beloved range of intellectual properties have been repackaged in just about every way imaginable – and heck, even that system’s most beloved protagonist was on-loan from a platformer about a giant ape with a princess-stealing problem. Mind, none of this is a criticism, really.… Read More
