Tesla says it told regulators about the May 7th crash involving one of its electric cars in self-driving Autopilot mode nine days after the incident, adding that there was nothing unusual in either the delay or its decision to keep quiet about the incident before a federal investigation was publicly announced last Thursday.
Tesla says the company was informed of the accident… Read More
The largest radio telescope is built in China, Blackberry discontinues its “Classic” Smartphone, there is now a China VPN ranking service, Apple builds organ donation into iOS 10, Theranos faces a congressional inquiry. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Those hoping to snag some handmade July 4th cookies and home-made vegan sunblock might have woken up to an empty stomach and sunburn after a serious payment processing outage on e-commerce site Etsy. Over the last five days, a large number of Etsy transactions have been disrupted by “third party” payment processing outages. As of 6pm PST July 5th, over 4,000 messages of… Read More
Fans of free and open-source software are rejoicing today at the news that Bulgaria will now require all software written for the government must be FOSS. But while this is a promising advance, don’t expect a major change in the way things work. Read More
The results of two new studies — one big, one really big — on what consumers want in autonomous cars have been released recently. The answer of both is, in a nutshell, we want to be able to let a car drive on its own when driving is monotonous or annoying, like during the daily commute. But we also definitely want to have the ability to take control of the car if something goes wrong. Read More
Let’s face it, you’re never going to win the HGTV Dream Home. My family has entered the maximum number of times for the last decade and has nothing to show for it. At some point every millennial has to take responsibility for the fact that their bedroom looks like a government records building. Homee is jumping into the conversational commerce trend to keep the design process… Read More
Twilio today announced a new collaboration with Amazon’s AWS platform. The company says it is “helping AWS provide the delivery of SMS messages through the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)” and notes that SNS users will now benefit from Twilio’s experience in sending bulk messages.
What exactly does that mean? We weren’t sure either, so we asked the company. Read More
NASA believes the children are our future. Why else would it ask them for ideas about how to feed astronauts in 2050? The nationwide “Star Trek Replicator” contest that began in February has spawned hundreds of 3D printable ideas, and the winners have just been announced: a housing for radiation-loving fungi and a tiny farm for Martian pioneers. Read More
Darktrace, the U.K. cybersecurity startup whose backers include Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s Invoke Capital, has closed $64 million in fresh funding. The new round was led by global investment firm KKR, with participation from existing investor Summit Partners, and new investors TenEleven Ventures and SoftBank. Read More
While noting that Hillary Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in using a series of personal e-mail servers during her time as Secretary of State, the FBI recommended the Department of Justice bring no formal charges against the presumptive Democratic nominee, FBI Director James Comey said today in a press conference. During its investigation, the FBI wasn’t able… Read More
What’s the first car you remember wanting? Was it a reasonably priced mid-sized sedan with ample leg room for passengers in the back? Was it a small, well-equipped compact SUV with room for all the kids’ bags and all-wheel drive for better control in adverse conditions? Was it even a two-door sports car with exaggerated curves and more power than any public road could ever need? Read More
Twitter announced today that Bret Taylor is joining its board of directors. Taylor is best-known as one of the founders of social networking startup FriendFeed — and then as the chief technology officer of Facebook, which acquired FriendFeed in 2009. After departing Facebook three years later, he became co-founder and CEO at mobile word processing company Quip. News!: @btaylor is… Read More
It’s not always the wisest policy in this fast-moving world of consumer electronics, but as countless competitors pushed past to bring wireless noise cancelling headphones to market, the audio company whose name has long been synonymous with active noise canceling bided its time. Announced among a trio of new products, the QuietComfort 35 is the product Bose fans have been waiting for.… Read More
Somewhere in a world full of advanced technology that we write about regularly here on TechCrunch, there exists an ancient realm where mainframe computers are still running programs written in COBOL.
This is a programming language, mind you, that was developed in the late 1950s, and used widely in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s, but it’s never really gone away. Read More
Suites are a weird thing within the hotel industry. While there are hundreds of thousands of suites around the world, most are only occupied about 20 percent of the time and sit empty the rest of the year. Plus, the nicest ones aren’t listed or even available to book on hotel’s websites. Brands are afraid to showcase their unique inventory, and assume that the suites will be filled… Read More
Tim Berners-Lee created the web in 1989. Twenty-seven years later, he’s asking for a reinvention. The web has made life easier, but it has also introduced challenges and ethical questions pertaining to personal data, access to information and privacy. Berners-Lee laments that the web has morphed into a surveillance network filled with corporate hackers and government spooks with the tools… Read More
The last of 4,450 triangular panels was installed to complete the world’s largest single-aperture radio telescope, located in China’s Guizhou Province. A monument of China’s dedication to the field of astronomy, the telescope will be used to study pulsars and search for alien life in the universe. The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is a $185 million project… Read More
Audio didn’t quite kill the video star, but it’s making a comeback. Americans are now on-demand streaming more songs as audio than they’re consuming through music videos. The shift highlights the importance of music in the battle for mobile profits, plus it could help artists get paid more.
Analytics provider BuzzAngle Music tells TechCrunch that since the start of 2016… Read More
The U.S. House of Representatives recently sent a letter to troubled blood analysis startup Theranos asking for an explanation of the company’s failure to offer accurate results to patients using its proprietary blood test technology.
Theranos developed a technique using its proprietary ‘Edison’ machine it claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using just one drop of blood. Read More
HourlyNerd, a Boston-based startup, aspires to be more than an on-demand staffing service for skilled employees. It wants to be a full-service platform for large companies to change the way they think about employees. “If you think about a company today, it’s structured in the same way as 100 years ago,” says company co-CEO and co-founder Rob Biederman. HourlyNerd sees… Read More
