After launching in Seattle in April, BMW’s car sharing service ReachNow is expanding down the I-5 corridor to Portland, Oregon. In Seattle, more than 13,000 people signed up in the first month, and ReachNow was able to add 150 vehicles and expand its service area by late June. It’s likely the Portland expansion will follow the same plan, with a fleet of vehicles in the city center… Read More
YouTube Kids, the child-friendly version of YouTube’s service that launched last year and faced criticism for the way it handled advertisements, has today launched a version of the service that will offer parents the option to pay for an ad-free experience. Now, YouTube Kids will be bundled into the YouTube Red subscription program, a paid membership that offers a variety of… Read More
Comma.ai, the startup that George Hotz (aka Geohotz) founded to show that making driverless vehicles could done relatively cheaply using off-the-shelf components and existing vehicles, has open-sourced a dataset of 7.25 hours of highway driving. Read More
This is going to be fun. I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, next week, Wednesday, August 10, and I’ll be holding a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270.
We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8 p.m. we’ll have an open stage with live music… Read More
Take a tour of Facebook’s new 22,000 square foot hardware lab where it’s building drones, satellites, lasers, VR headsets, and the machines that store the world’s biggest collection of photos. Click the arrow to the right or scroll down on mobile to see what’s behind the Area 404 security doors. Read More
There is much talk of “cloud native” these days, and people are taking liberties with the interpretation — as they do with everything else associated with the cloud. Cade Metz put it right: “The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco and other companies that don’t want to… Read More
About one year ago, Apple unveiled a diversity site featuring its employee representation data and a letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Today, Apple has revealed its latest diversity numbers, showing slight but consistent improvement year over year.
Worldwide, Apple is 68 percent male and 32 percent female (last year, Apple was 69… Read More
Car component supplier Lear is hoping to ride the wave of connectivity to new heights, with plans to develop and ship a unit for its car-maker customers that lets their vehicles communicate with other cars on the road, city infrastructure including connected roads and traffic lights, and with cloud-based services. The part would also be modular, letting OEMs easily install physical upgrades. Read More
Following yesterday’s launch of a new version of the Skype Windows 10 application, Microsoft today announced an expanded collection of its “Skype bots,” the automated chat assistants that it introduced earlier this year in a limited preview. The new bots include those that can help you make travel arrangements, locate event tickets, pull in information from other… Read More
After a few months of testing the waters, Kik is still bullish on chatbots and has quite a few reasons to be.
Just last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Kik CEO Ted Livingston divulged that developers had built over 6,000 chatbots on the platform. Fast forward a few months and the popular messaging app has announced today that more than 1.8 billion messages have already been exchanged… Read More
Many executives and employees have need for a role that’s basically a “chief of staff” — someone who keeps track of all the details about everyone they encounter and are headed off to meet in their professional careers. But there’s plenty of information that they might be missing out on, and as you head downstream to smaller companies those roles are just as… Read More
It’s an interesting time for Dropbox’s document-building tool, Paper. Quip, in a similar vein to Paper, was bought for a whopping $750 million by Salesforce earlier this week. This deal surprised a ton of people, but made a lot of sense given that Salesforce has seemingly been dipping its toes into collaboration software. So Quip is a great, and natural, fit for Salesforce and… Read More
Ripple has acquired Hoodline, a deal that combines two different approaches to covering local news.
Founded by former Viki CEO Razmig Hovaghimian, Ripple launched earlier this year and taps community contributors for its coverage. Hoodline, meanwhile, has an editorial team (led by TechCrunch’s former co-editor Eric Eldon) taking advantage of local data to cover neighborhood news. Read More
In recent years, venture capital has poured into food companies, from meal kit and grocery delivery services to the makers of environmentally sustainable, or health-promoting food products.
Now, investors and entrepreneurs from tech, food and the restaurant industry have launched a firm, and closed a $42 million debut fund called Powerplant Ventures, to invest specifically in… Read More
It’s hard standing out in the smartphone market. Of late, ZTE’s primary focus has been on pricing – a strategy epitomized by the recent launch of the company’s $99 Android phablet. But that’s become something of a race to the bottom as manufacturers rapidly work to undercut one other.
Now the Chinese smartphone maker is looking outward for inspiration. Today it… Read More
Google today released a new application designed to get kids to explore the world using maps and 3D imagery. The new app, which the company describes as “an experiment,” takes advantage of Google Maps’ 3D imagery of the Himalayas but combines it with a bit of gameplay to make the idea of zooming around the 3D scene more fun and engaging.
Called “Verne: The… Read More
This is where Facebook will prototype its solar drones, Internet-beaming lasers, VR headsets, and next-gen servers. The problem with moving faster than most companies is that Facebook was plagued by delays whenever it had to outsource prototyping and testing of its gadgets and gizmos. With so much hardware on its 10-year roadmap, and quarter after quarter of profits stacking up, it made sense… Read More
Pepper has been picking up retail work all over Asia, including a high profile gig working at Pizza Huts in Japan, but Softbank’s humanoid robot hasn’t had too much luck finding work here in the States. But now that the company is working toward a US release timed for later this year (following its first overseas launch in Taiwan), we’re likely to see it start popping up… Read More
Polar goes back. Way, way back. Back to the early 80s, when the Finnish company launched its first portable heart rate monitor, the Sport Tester PE 2000. Back when wearable fitness devices weren’t really a thing.
Of course, being the first doesn’t mean you’ll always be on top. While the company has had a longstanding relationship with professional athletes (with Olympics… Read More
Not to be outdone by Twitter – who, yesterday introduced followable Moments and other means of tuning into Olympics news via its network – Facebook is rolling out a number of ways for its users to show support for their favorite teams plus track the Olympics news they care about in a dedicated section of the News Feed, the company announced this week. Naturally, the social… Read More
