Companies and students who want to test an autonomous vehicle at the University of Michigan have the excellent Mcity simulated urban environment. But if you wanted to test a drone, your options were extremely limited — think “at night in a deserted lecture hall.” Not anymore: the school has just opened up its M-Air facility, […]

Uber has reportedly come to a fast settlement with the family of 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was fatally struck last week by one of the company’s self-driving vehicles as she crossed a darkened street, pushing a bicycle. Terms of the settlement are not being disclosed; Uber declined to comment when we asked the company for further […]

SpaceX has a green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed 4,425 satellites within six years. The approval of […]

In a week of harrowing city-level cyber attacks, New York is taking some precautions. While the timing is coincidental, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced that the city will introduce the first tools in its suite of cybersecurity offerings to protect residents against malicious online activity, particularly on mobile devices. When it […]

Under Armour, the fitness company that owns MyFitnessPal, disclosed today a data breach that affected about 150 million users. MyFitnessPal, a food and nutrition application, became aware of the breach, which took place late last month, earlier this week. The breached data did not include any social security numbers, driver’s license numbers of any other […]

When Hernan Lopez, the former chief executive of Fox International, started the podcast network Wondery roughly two years ago with a seed investment from his former bosses at Fox Networks Group, podcasting was still emerging as a media platform. Now, with voice ascendant, and podcasting proving to be a breeding ground for new narratives that […]

Tim Cook took a break from criticizing Facebook on Tuesday to present the next step in Apple’s big education plans. But the CEO is back at it. Sitting down with MSNBC and Recode at a town hall event, Cook was once again asked about consumer privacy in the wake of fallout over Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica quagmire. […]

Actress-turned-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow is getting more capital to accelerate her startup’s growth. Goop, the lifestyle brand which she founded ten years ago, is announcing a $50 million Series C round from NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Felix Capital. It brings the total outside investment to $82 million. A source close to the situation tells us […]

There’s a lot about snow we don’t know. Where does it come from? Where does it go? What does it taste like? Admittedly there are tentative answers to these questions. But there are yet more complex ones like how exactly, on a microscopic level, snow melts in mid-air. That’s the focus of one project at […]

[embedded content] As HBO prepares itself to end Game of Thrones, it’s apparent that they’re putting weight on Westworld to take over as the dominant fantasy epic. A new trailer dropped today for the show’s second season and it’s clear that the robot uprising is going to take the brutal, violent spirit of the season […]

Hulu has added the live, linear version of the CW to its Hulu with Live TV platform. Hulu has had a deal with the CW to offer streaming on-demand content from the network, but this is the first time that the CW will be available live on Hulu. The company first launched Hulu with Live […]

Tesla has reportedly asked its Model 3 factory workers to prove the “haters” wrong by stepping up car production. In a memo obtained by Bloomberg, Tesla engineering chief Doug Field told staff it would be an “incredible victory” to exceed the production of 300 Model 3 vehicles a day. Field’s memo, reportedly sent on March […]

Disney is building a real-time, ultra-high-res flight simulator for the Millennium Falcon and they’re powering it with eight daisy-chained high-end Nvidia GPUs. The experience, which is destined to arrive at Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts next year, was done in partnership with Nvidia, Epic Games and Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB. When it’s finished, guests at the […]

Jake Bright Contributor More posts by this contributor Africa Roundup: Uber says it’s staying, Konga could be epic startup fail Harley Davidson’s EV debut could electrify the motorcycle industry The African venture firm TLcom Capital is betting on Africa’s data analytics markets with a $5M investment in Nigerian based Terragon Group, the developer of a software analytics service for […]

A racial slur GIF slipped into GIPHY’s sticker library earlier this month, prompting Instagram and Snapchat to drop their GIPHY integrations. Now Instagram is reactivating after GIPHY confirmed its reviewed its GIF library four times and will preemptively review any new GIFs it adds. We’re awaiting a response from Snapchat about whether it too will […]

We are excited to announce the launch of Salesforce User Sync! With Salesforce User Sync, Pardot Admins can better align and manage users in Pardot and Salesforce. By making Salesforce the system of record for synced users, admins can save time on user management, enhance security, and eliminate user redundancy. Salesforce User Sync is a […]

Apple just released an iOS update for your iPhone and iPad. 11.3 introduces a ton of bug fixes but also a bunch of new features. If you forgot about Animjois, today is your lucky day as Apple is adding four new Animojis — a dragon, a bear, a lion and a skull. But that’s not […]

Twitter today is introducing a new feature that will make it easier to share a key moment from a live video, so those viewing the tweet don’t have to scroll to the part of the broadcast you want to talk about. The feature, called “Timestamps,” is something Twitter says it built in response to existing […]

Analyst Gene Munster is predicting Tesla will likely miss its Model 3 production targets Bloomberg reports. In an interview with Bloomberg, Munster said investors expected to see Tesla produce 2,500 to 3,000 cars per week, but it’ll more likely be 1,500 to 2,000 a week. Despite this predicted miss, Munster says he’s still optimistic about […]

Cubigo, a tech startup aimed at addressing the senior living market, recently closed a $4.5 million Series A round led by Urbain Vandeurzen with participation from Transvision. Cubigo is also rolling out its services in five senior living communities in Florida, California and Ohio. Across those five communities, Cubigo’s platform will reach 100,000 residents. To […]

A blockchain company called Coinfirm has announced a partnership with PKO BP, a major Polish bank, to provide blockchain-based document verification using a tool called Trudatum. The project is a an actual implementation of one of the primary benefits of blockchain-based tools, namely its ability to permanently and immutably store data. This announcement brings blockchain […]

Food security is one of the grand problems facing the planet this century. The UN has estimated that food supplies need to increase by 50% to cover the population growth expected over the coming decades, while climate change is expected to cut crop yields by a quarter. Nearly a billion people today lack sufficient food. […]

Excel is the workhorse of many industries and if you love your spreadsheets, the following news will likely make you unreasonably happy: Excel is getting smarter, thanks to a fresh infusion of artificial intelligence. As we previously reported, the Excel team has spent the last few months adding new machine learning-powered features to the application […]

Amazon has been in discussions with banks to create a product aimed at teens and other younger users who don’t have their own credit cards, or an interest in applying for one, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The company reportedly has held early stage talks with banks including JP Morgan Chase and Capital […]

TuneIn, the free radio service that allows you to stream news, sports, music and podcasts, is today rolling out a new subscription offering for Alexa customers in the U.S. TuneIn Live, as the premium live audio subscription is called, will offer play-by-play calls from thousands of live sporting events, plus access to premium news stations, talk […]

Big changes are afoot at Microsoft. The company has announced that Terry Myerson, the longtime Microsoftie who headed up the company’s Windows and Devices businesses, is leaving the company, and along with that the company changing up its executive management. The full memo from Satya Nadella is below, but here are the basics: Terry Myerson […]

As Pinterest tries to double down on becoming as sticky as possible for users, it’s going to be making a pretty significant design change by adding a tab focused on who a user is following that will exist in addition to the basic discovery feed. The tab will fall on the bottom of the app’s […]

Emmanuel Macron and his government are launching a big initiative around artificial intelligence today. They want to turn France into one of the leading countries when it comes to artificial intelligence. “[Artificial intelligence] is a technological, economical, social and obviously ethical revolution,” Macron said in a speech. “This revolution won’t happen in 50 or 60 […]

Snap Inc is laying off around 100 employees within the advertising and sales department, according to CNBC. This is the second reported round of layoffs this month, with the company laying off around 100 people from the engineering department in early March. Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan told CNBC the following: Over the past two […]

TechCrunch is returning to Tel Aviv on 7 June 2018 for a day-long conference, where we will be digging into one of Irael’s biggest tech strengths: mobility and everything that implies, from computer vision to autonomous driving. Israeli tech is at the forefront of this new industry and we plan to bring industry leaders together […]

The UK government recently passed the Space Industry Bill, covering the basics like spaceflight licensing, insurance requirements and safety commitments. It didn’t make much of a splash when it was announced, but it’s a huge move for the UK as it laid the regulatory groundwork that will be needed to create an operational spaceport, potentially […]

A little over a month since 1Password incorporated a pwned password check feature developed by Have I Been Pwned‘s Troy Hunt, the password manager service has now netted what’s being described as “a partnership” with the popular breach monitoring service. Essentially this boils down to a commercial arrangement between 1Password and the free-to-use breach check service, […]

SoftBank Group Corp., known for splashy deals involving billions of dollars (see: its Vision Fund and investments in Uber and Didi), has signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia to build a $200 billion solar power plant. Expected to reach its full capacity of 200 gigawatts by 2030, the development will be the largest […]

SF Motors has revealed its first two models, electric vehicles aiming for 2018 production and 2019 street dates. The electric vehicle technology company with a headquarters in Silicon Valley, as well as a globe-spanning R&D footprint and manufacturing facilities in both China and the U.S., and it’s aiming to distinguish itself rom the established market […]

Electric push scooters have recently hit the streets of San Francisco. Over the last couple of weeks, LimeBike deployed some scooters in conjunction with local festivities in the city. And just yesterday, Bird launched its scooters in San Francisco. Spin has also deployed some scooters in the city. As it stands today, these scooters from […]

Festo’s flashy biomimetic robots are more or less glorified tech demos, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cool. The engineering is still something to behold, although these robot critters likely won’t be doing any serious work. Its latest units move in imitation of two unusual animals: a tumbling spider and a flying fox (think big […]

While Uber makes use of Nvidia hardware in its own self-driving automotive technology, it does not employ Nvidia’s Drive autonomous computing platform, which includes the GPU-makers own real-time sensor fusion, HD mapping and path planning. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared this information today during a Q&A session attended by reporters at the company’s GPU Technology […]

On the south end of the Vegas strip, a different kind of gaming is taking root. At the Luxor casino, the Esports Arena Las Vegas just opened its doors, occupying the former home of the LAX nightclub. Following a special event on March 22, the arena, owned by Allied Esports, opened for regular operations on Monday, […]

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is moving north from Palo Alto to San Jose. The company will relocate 1,000 employees to a 220,000 square feet space in late 2018. HPE is was spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 2015 and is focused on servers and storage. This news comes months after HPE announced a different plan in which […]

Boeing has reportedly been struck in a major way by Wannacry, the ransomware that spread like wildfire last year. The Seattle Times obtained a memo from Mike VanderWel, of the company’s commercial airliner division, describing the malware as “metastasizing rapidly.” Wannacry, you may remember, spread using a Windows exploit leaked from NSA files, demanded a […]

Bernstein analysts Max Warburton and Toni Sacconaghi argue Elon Musk is overusing automation, Business Insider reports, and that’s why Tesla is unable to scale as fast as it would like. “Tesla has tried to hyper-automate final assembly,” the report states. “We believe Tesla has been too ambitious with automation on the Model 3 line. Few have […]

Michigan saw a historic amount of snowfall in 2018. And it’s not done. It’s snowing as I write this and it snowed nearly every day since I took delivery of this burgundy 2018 Lincoln Navigator. Excuse the dirty car shown in the photos. That’s life in the Midwest: half the year it’s impossible to keep […]

Lior Ron, Uber’s head of freight operations, has left the company, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. “We remain fully invested in and excited about the future of Uber Freight,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Since launching in Texas, we have introduced Freight to all states in the continental […]

DocuSign has unveiled its IPO filing, confirming our scoop from last week.  The company had previously filed confidentially and the timing of the filing revelation implies that DocuSign is hoping to go public in late April. Founded in 2003, the San Francisco-based e-signature company has been an anticipated IPO for a while. It’s raised over […]

Public places may soon be filled with secret pieces of art unlocked by looking through the lens of AR, if Artopia’s cheerily creative app catches on. It essentially lets you geocache your 3D scribbles so anyone else can find, appreciate, and share them. Artopia, currently in beta for Android and iOS, is a straightforward combination […]

Scotty Labs, a tele-operations company that is working on technology to enable people to remotely control self-driving cars, has raised a $6 million seed round from Gradient Ventures with participation from Horizon Ventures and Hemi Ventures. Gradient Ventures is an early-stage venture fund housed within Google. “Usman and I founded Scotty on the belief that […]

A report by CSOOnline presented the possibility that Microsoft would be able to ban “offensive language” from Skype, Xbox, and, inexplicably, Office. The post, which cites Microsoft’s new terms of use, said that the company would not allow users to “publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, […]

Google today announced a small but important update for its Google Home devices: you will now be able to control all of your Bluetooth speakers and stream music to them right from your Google Home devices. Until now, you could only use your Google Home’s Bluetooth capabilities to stream music to them (from your phone, […]

It’s been seven months since a major data breach sent shares of Equifax tumbling, and the company is still pulling itself together. On Wednesday, the credit bureau announced it was appointing former GE exec Mark Begor to take over the troubled company’s affairs. The hire comes six months after Equifax’s former CEO Richard Smith resigned and […]

It really is Go Time for GoDaddy. Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now […]

We’re exactly 28 days away from the premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2. That may seem like a long time, but Hulu has mercifully released a new trailer. The first season ended on the same note as Margaret Atwood’s novel by the same name, with Ofred in a van not knowing whether she was […]

Diving into VR on PS4 is continuing to get cheaper and cheaper. Sony has slashed the prices of PSVR bundles by $100. The Camera bundle and the Doom VFR bundle now stand at $299 while the Skyrim VR bundle which also includes the Move controllers retails for just $349. It hasn’t really been too difficult […]

Docker founder Solomon Hykes today announced that he is leaving the company he started. Docker, the open source project and eponymous company that kickstarted today’s container hype, was founded by Hykes in 2010 (at the time, it was called dotCloud). Hykes quickly hired a CEO and for the longest time, he remained the company’s CTO. […]

Neighbor is another startup with designs on your spare space. Not for letting to guests to bed down in, like Airbnb, but for self-storage. The 2017 founded, Salt Lake City based startup is announcing $2.5 million in seed funding today, raised from Peak Ventures and Pelion Ventures. The core business idea is to build a […]

Hire by Google, the company’s service for recruiters and hiring managers, is getting a couple of new features today that’ll make it easier to find the right candidates among the pool of potential employees who previously applied to a position at a company. The idea here is to make better use of a company’s existing […]

Siren, a startup that has develops fabric with embedded microsensors, has unveiled its product, a sock for people with diabetes. Siren also announced a $3.4 million investment from DCM, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. Powered by its Neurofabric technology, the diabetic sock can monitor foot temperatures with the idea that those with diabetes will be […]

Credit Karma, which once started as a simple credit report system and is now looking to expand into a true financial assistant, announced today it is getting a massive $500 million secondary investment from Silver Lake. As part of the investment, Credit Karma says it is getting a 23% bump in the valuation from its […]

Salesforce hasn’t wasted any time turning the MuleSoft acquisition into a product of its own, announcing the Salesforce Integration Cloud this morning. While in reality it’s too soon to really take advantage of the MuleSoft product set, the company is laying the groundwork for the eventual integration into the Salesforce family with this announcement, which […]

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state […]

Over 13 million augmented reality apps built using Apple’s ARKit have been downloaded since the release of iOS 11 on September 19, 2017, according to new data from app intelligence firm, Sensor Tower, which took a look at the state of the AR app ecosystem, now that it’s had time to become more established. It […]

Volkswagen debuted a concept pickup truck at the New York Auto Show this week, and the Atlas-based design features a short bed design, based on VW’s MQB platform. It’s basically the Atlas 7-seater SUV with the back cut off and a small (but versatile) truck bed in place of the SUV’s cargo storage and third […]

Einride’s T-pod all-electric, self-driving transport vehicle will use the Nvidia Drive AI platform to provide its autonomous smarts, the Swedish technology company revealed today. Einride also announced that the very first customer deliveries of its production T-pod truck will begin this fall, meaning it could be making actual deliveries sooner rather than later. The Nvidia […]

Smartphone AR is available on hundreds of millions of devices but it doesn’t really seem like many of those devices are making regular use of the feature. A lot of people in the industry see this as a shortcoming of the platform’s technical shortcomings especially in regards to enabling social experiences. Ubiquity6 is approaching some […]

You don’t hear of many $2 loans in the United States, where $2 won’t buy you more than a chocolate bar. But in cities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya, $2 has the buying power of roughly $40, making such “micro” loans useful when you’re running a small business. And borrowing $2 from a startup […]

As Google builds out its cloud platform, it has been continually taking tools and services it has created in-house for its own team and putting them out in the world for its customers as products. Today, it added a key ingredient for developers building applications on the Google Cloud Platform when it announced a suite […]

With the launch of Waze Local, Google-owned navigation app Waze is offering small businesses a way to market themselves to consumers  on the road. Waze has allowed larger brands to buy ads for years, and it’s been beta testing Waze Local since 2016. “It’s been a gradual strategy,” said Matt Phillips, who leads the Waze […]

It’s been hinted at, but Daimler and BMW are officially bringing together their mobility services business groups into one combined company, with a 50 percent stake owned by each automaker. That means tying up all their on-demand mobility offerings, including care share services Car2Go and DriveNow; ride-hailing like myTaxi, Chauffeur Privé and Clever Taxi; parking […]

The crypto industry is often criticized from the outline for creating wealth that exists only in digital form, is unstable and driven by greed. That’s why a new charity initiative from top figures inside the Ethereum community might make a few non-believers sit up for a moment. GiveDirectly, a charity that provides no-strings-attached grants to […]

CardUp founder and CEO Nicki Ramsay (front, second from right) with her team CardUp, a Singapore-based startup that enables users to make large, recurring payments by credit card even to recipients that don’t accept cards, has raised $2.2 million SGD (about $1.7 million) led by Sequoia India and SeedPlus. This is CardUp’s first institutional investment […]

Tesla has shed some more light on the fatal crash and fire involving a Model X car last week. In a blog post tonight, Tesla said it’s not yet clear what happened in the time leading up to the accident. Tesla also said it does not yet know what caused it. Tesla did note that, […]

If you thought the Oracle v. Google saga was over at last, we have some bad news for you. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit breathed new life into the case, ruling that Google violated copyright law when it used Oracle’s Java APIs to create the Android mobile operating system. […]

Oscar Health, the startup run by Josh Kushner (yes, brother of Jared), has raised $165 million at a reported valuation of $3.2 billion, CNBC’s Christina Farr reports. The funding comes from Alphabet’s Capital G investment company and Verily life sciences corporation, Founders Fund, and others. Oscar’s goal is to outpace existing industry-leading insurers including UnitedHealth […]

Life360, the app for networking families together via mobile devices, has acquired the developer team behind PathSense, responsible for the creation of a location-based mobile application toolkit, to build out its location based offerings. The San Francisco-based Life360 will see all of PathSense’s employees joining the its staff, while the tech that PathSense developed will […]

Today’s Apple event in Chicago was about more than just showing off new hardware and software in the classroom — the company was reasserting itself as a major player in education. The category has long been a lynchpin in Apple’s strategy — something that Steve Jobs held near and dear. Any ’80s kid will tell […]

Take a break from the dumpster fire that is 2018. This electric Mini will make you smile. Built as a show piece, the car features an electric powertrain in a restored 1959 Mini Cooper. Of course it’s red with a white stripe, and of course, there are rally lights across the grill. This is how […]

Stephen Colbert will get an extra segment on his show tonight, funded by a sponsorship from Google. Variety reports that CBS and Google have struck a deal that will reduce commercial time on Colbert’s Late Show. He’ll fill that extra time with a new segment (it’s not clear where it will fall during the show, […]

Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to reapply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber’s current permit in California expires March 31. “We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Given this, […]

As companies gather increasing amounts of data, they face a choice over bottlenecks. They can have it in the storage component or the backend compute system. Some companies have attacked the problem by using GPUs to streamline the back end problem or Flash storage to speed up the storage problem. Pure Storage wants to give […]

If this is the future of hybrids, I’m all in. Volkswagen just took the cover off its Atlas Cross Sport SUV, which features a plug-in hybrid drive powertrain that features two electric motors and a V6 engine. Together, they produce 355 horsepower. And it looks great, too. The inside and out of this concept is […]

Apple didn’t livestream this morning’s education event at Lane Tech High School in Chicago, so reading along live was the next best thing. Thankfully, for those who weren’t crammed into the auditorium seating with the rest of us, the whole shebang is now online and viewable through Apple’s site. The event was, as expected, focused […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang faced a number of questions regarding Uber’s recent self-driving test vehicle accident, in which an SUV equipped with Uber’s autonomous technology struck and killed 49-year old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. Earlier on Tuesday, Reuters broke the news that Nvidia was suspending its own autonomous testing programs around the world. Huang […]

There’s currently a shortage of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia’s CEO pointed to Etherium distributed ledgers as the cause. Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference he spoke to a group of journalists following his keynote address and addressed the shortage. Huang simply stated that Nvidia is not in the business of cryptocurrency or distributed ledgers. As such, […]

Just a day after General Catalyst, the 18-year-old venture firm, revealed plans in an SEC filing to raise a record $1.375 billion in capital to shower on startups, another firm that we’d said was likely to file any second has done just that. According to a fresh SEC filing, Lightspeed Venture Partners of Menlo Park, […]

The smash dockless scooter rental startup, Bird, is expanding beyond its Southern California nest with a new rollout in San Francisco, San Jose, Calif. and Washington, DC, the company said today. And as his company makes its migration across the country, Bird chief executive Travis VanderZanden is determined not to make the same mistakes that […]

Ahead of Equal Pay Day on April 10, Lyft is committing to conducting yearly equal pay audits to ensure there are no pay discrepancies across race and gender. Last year, Lyft said it found pay discrepancies for less than 1 percent of its employees, and spent about $100,000 to adjust their salaries accordingly. Lyft has […]

Rumors of a new ASIC mining rig from Bitmain have driven Ethereum prices well below their one-week high of $585. An ASIC – or Application-specific integrated circuit – in the cryptocurrency world is a chip that designers create for the specific purpose of mining a single currency. Early Bitcoin ASICs, for example, drove adoption up […]

Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference the company unveiled a wild technology demo and it’s straight out of Black Panther. Simply put, a driver using virtual reality was remotely controlling a car in real life. “He’s not with us,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said pointing the driver on the stage. “He’s looking at this virtual […]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed a forthcoming generation of the company’s self-driving Drive PX supercomputers for use in vehicles – the successor to the current Drive Pegasus, which will be called the Drive Orin and which will use essentially two Drive Pegasus computers combined into one, much smaller packages. This should ramp up the self-driving […]

Well, at least it’s not another subscription service. Turner today announced the forthcoming launch of its new live sports streaming service, Bleacher Report Live, which is expected to roll out in April. The service, which can also be referred to as B/R Live, takes its name from the popular online destination for sports fans that […]

This has been a long time coming, but during his GTC keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang today announced support for the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration system on Nvidia GPUs. The idea here is to optimize the use of GPUs in hyperscale data centers — the kind of environments where you may use hundreds or thousands […]

Google will be acquiring Tenor, which powers a variety of GIF keyboards on phones and messengers like Facebook Messenger, the companies announced today. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand within Google, the company said in a blog post. Tenor has increasingly positioned itself as a search company, using that as a metric […]

Nvidia and Arm today announced a partnership that’s aimed at making it easier for chip makers to incorporate deep learning capabilities into next-generation consumer gadgets, mobile devices, and Internet of Things objects. Mostly, thanks to this partnership, artificial intelligence could be coming to doorbell cams or smart speakers soon. Arm intents to integrate Nvidia’s open-source […]

Nvidia has taken the AutoSIM virtual environment for testing autonomous cars it originally showed off at CES, combined it with its Drive Pegasus AI in-car computer and created a virtual testing and validation loop that can handle billions of virtual driving miles in hyperrealistic environments, with the ability to model edge cases and recreate conditions […]

When it comes to augmented reality technologies, visuals always seems to be a pretty essential part of most people’s definitions, but one startup is offering an interesting take on audio-based AR that also calls on computer vision. Even without integrated displays, glasses are still an important part of the company’s products which are designed with […]

After rocketing to a $250 million valuation in 2015 amid a massive hype cycle for on-demand companies, on-demand startup Shyp is shutting down today. CEO Kevin Gibbon announced that the company would be shutting down in a blog post this afternoon. The company is ending operations immediately after, like many on-demand companies, struggling to find […]

Google today announced that Google Maps is getting support for 39 new languages. The newly supported languages are Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, […]

Apple’s ebook creation tools – first launched in 2012 – have long played an interesting if minor role in the ecosystem. While Amazon has the indie book world sewn up with Kindle Direct Publishing, the desktop-based iBooks Author has always been the multimedia alternative and a favorite for folks creating one-off texts. Although there are […]

With the explosion of streaming services now available, it’s becoming more difficult to figure out not just what movie or TV show to watch next, but where you can actually watch it. Google today is rolling out its solution to this problem with a significant revamp of its Google Play Movies & TV app and […]

Lytro, the light-field imaging startup focused on virtual reality, is shutting down. In a blog post, Lytro said it’s going to begin winding down and will not be taking on any new productions or providing new services. Earlier this month, we heard Google would be acquiring Lytro in an “asset sale.” Word on the street […]

Nvidia is temporarily stopping testing of its autonomous vehicle platform in response to last week’s fatal collision of a self-driving Uber car with a pedestrian. TechCrunch confirmed this with the company, which offered the following statement: Ultimately [autonomous vehicles] will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are […]

Most investors don’t like to admit that they’re chasing the latest buzzwords or fads or hot companies, but a new firm called Bedrock Capital says it’s on a mission to do the exact opposite — founders Geoff Lewis and Eric Stromberg told me they’re searching for “narrative violations.” So rather than just writing a check […]

Amid a flurry of educational-related announcements at Apple’s press event this morning, the company also unveiled a new feature in its learn-to-code app Swift Playgrounds, that will help teach a younger generation of iOS developers how to build AR-enabled apps. Apple has been heavily pushing augmented reality and its ARKit for developers, as the technology […]

Surprise! You don’t have to pay $5,000 or more to get a Space Gray Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard or Magic Trackpad 2. You can now buy those devices separately. And because this is Apple, you’ll have to pay more to get the dark items. The Magic Mouse 2 costs $79 in silver and $99 […]

The United States National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model X car. On March 23, a Tesla car crashed into a freeway divider, killing the driver, causing a fire and shutting down two lanes of Highway 101 near Mountain View, Calif. It’s not clear if […]

Udacity is hosting its annual Intersect conference this week, and the online learning platform is introducing some new programs and features for students at the event. Those include two new ways for students to practice and hone their practical skills – in both real and virtual worlds. For robotics education, Udacity is teaming up with […]

Udacity is intruding three dedicated new nanodegrees (its own accelerated learning program) in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become part of its new School of AI. AI has been a subject Udacity has taught nearly since its inception, beginning over five years ago, and the field has changed a lot since. It’s seen […]

Braintree, the division of PayPal that provides payment services to e-commerce and other online businesses, is making its latest move to help raise its game against competitors like Stripe. It is launching a new solution called Extend, a set of tools to integrate Braintree payments more closely and easily with other services that online companies […]

Apple is bringing its pencil to the masses. The pencil tool will now work across Apple’s suite of iWork tools — including the popular Pages (document creation) Numbers (its spreadsheet app), and Keynote (for presentations) apps — on the low-cost iPad that Apple first brought to market last year. At an event today in Chicago, Apple announced its latest […]

Apple is holding a press conference right now in Chicago. And the company unveiled a brand new device — well, sort of. Apple is going to sell a brand new 9.7-inch iPad that works with the Apple Pencil. Before today, only (more expensive) iPad Pro models could take advantage of the Pencil. The company said […]

Apple held an education focused event in Chicago today at Lane Technical High School. CEO Tim Cook took the stage and began his announcements with a nod to the student marches that occurred this week in support of gun control. Cook praised Lane Tech High for having more PHDs coming out of it than any […]

Last September, Atlassian launched Stride, it’s take on a Slack-like real-time communications platform for text, audio and video chats, into beta. Six months later, Stride is now generally available to any and all teams that want to give it a try. While Atlassian is a bit cagey about providing exact user numbers, so the numbers […]

LA-based space startup Relativity has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Playground Global, and including existing investors Social Capital, Y Combinator Continuity and Mark Cuban. The funding will help the startup expand its automated, 3D-printing process for manufacturing rockets quickly and with greatly reduced complexity, with the ultimate […]

This morning at Chelsea Piers in NYC, Waymo CEO John Krafcik announced a new model of car powered by Waymo’s self-driving technology. Dubbed the world’s first premium fully self-driving car, Waymo has partnered with Jaguar Landrover to bring the Waymo-outfitted Jaguar iPace to market. These self-driving cars can serve a million trips in a single […]

Mozilla this morning launched a Firefox browser add-on for those users not willing to delete their Facebook account, but also wanting some control over how much of their data Facebook can access. The “Facebook Container,” as the new extension is called, isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of the web. That means Facebook will […]

Huawei just unveiled its brand new flagship phone — the P20. It’s a solid, well-designed Android phone with a shiny design, an iPhone X-like notch and some extravagant features, such as not one, not two but three cameras on the back of the P20 Pro. I’ve played with the phone for a few minutes yesterday, […]

Meet the Huawei P20. It’s a pretty nice phone. I played around with it, and I can confirm that it is, indeed, a solid flagship with some suitably over-the-top features — what’s that you say? Three rear-facing cameras?! But all of this is kind of a moot point if you live here in the States. […]

Late last year, TPCast announced an adapter that cut the HTC Vive cords. The company is back with an enterprise version that delivers 2k content to several HTC Vive units with sub 2ms latency. Unveiled at Nvidia’s GTC 2019 conference in San Jose, California, the product is aimed at VR uses cases where multiple people […]

Marshall makes some of the best sounding and yet affordable headphones on the market and the company today is announcing its first set with active noise cancellation. Called the Marshall Mid ANC, the $269 wireless headphones feature the classic Marshall look but sports Bluetooth aptX wireless tech. Four microphones measure ambient noise and block out […]

MariaDB is best known as a drop-in replacement for the popular MySQL database. But the MariaDB Corporation, which was founded by MySQL founder Monty Widenius and which offers all of its software under an open source license, clearly has its sights set on a bigger market and to expand and better challenge the likes of Oracle, […]

Massachusetts-based Soft Robotics has already shown us some pretty impressive capabilities for its rubbery robotic grippers, but the demos have mostly been straightforward picks off of a conveyor belt. The startup’s latest trick if the much sought-after activity of bin picking. It’s a surprisingly tough task, given the complexity of picking up even several of […]

While pregnant, I imagined I’d spend maternity leave making elegant baby albums with detailed captions each month. That didn’t happen and now I have thousands of baby photos on my phone and no idea how to even begin organizing them. Created for parents who, like me, are overwhelmed by their digital memories, Precious uses artificial intelligence […]

For years, the goal of marketers was to understand the customer so well, they could respond to their every need, while creating content specifically geared to their wishes. Adobe Cloud Platform has long acted as a vehicle to collect and understand customer data inside the Adobe toolset, but today Adobe took that a step further. […]