NASA has always embraced emerging technology for visualization, even if that tech was seemingly developed for frivolous entertainment. We recently covered its holographic Mars exhibit, and the many 3D resources that NASA makes available to developers and educators. Now, the US space agency has partnered with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space… Read More
The smartwatch era has done nothing so much as renew my interest in real watches, which have their own type of special intelligence, albeit laid out in intricate arrays of gears and springs rather than written in silicon. Few watchmakers express this intelligence site so wonderfully as Nomos Glashütte, the German manufactory that produces exquisite timepieces with house made movements in… Read More
Apple has bigger fish frying in the world of intellectual property. But it must be a relief that an IP court in Beijing has handed the smartphone pioneers a win. On Friday, the courts overturned a May 2016 ruling that said Apple had violated design patents of a small, and now defunct, Chinese company called Shenzhen Baili. The disputes were over the exterior design of the iPhone 6 and 6… Read More
Are we living in historically unprecedented times for job loss? Or is this part of a cycle that predates even the Industrial Revolution? Is it possible to retrain our workforce for these changes? Or will the gap between educated and non-educated workers only continue to grow? Read More
If the camera is the new keyboard, then the future of social media will look more like a slideshow than a Word document. So while Snapchat invented Stories, we’ll have to get used to using them everywhere. Read More
A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of the Drupal community, “to leave the Drupal project.” Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in response — not least because the reason clearly has much to do with Garfield’s unconventional… Read More
Lyft is looking at one of its biggest potential opportunities to make up some ground on its rival Uber, given the latter company’s ongoing and worsening PR crisis. So it makes sense that Lyft would go even further in the opposite direction, with a new program that lets riders top off their fare to the nearest dollar, and donate the difference to one of a group of selected charities. The… Read More
Uber has now grounded its entire autonomous test fleet in the U.S., following an accident in Arizona which left one of its Volvo SUVs flipped on its side earlier today. Read More
Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But it’s inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier… Read More
Next week in New York, Samsung will finally reveal the Galaxy S8. The handset has a lot riding on it — not simply because it’s a brand-defining flagship or because it’s seemingly been pushed back at least once. Next week’s Unpacked event will have even wider ranging implications for Samsung as its first major phone announcement since last year’s Galaxy Note debacle. Read More
Six years ago, a massive earthquake, consequent tsunami and nuclear crisis struck Japan. International organizations rushed to help the country’s devastated residents, and to figure out how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi, the wrecked nuclear power plant. Robots offered a ray of hope amid unfathomable loss. At least they did, until recently. As the Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday, members… Read More
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth that times the frame rate. Matroid, a computer vision startup launching out of stealth today, enables anyone to take advantage of the information inherently embedded in video. You can build your own detector within the company’s intuitive, non-technical, web platform to detect people and most other objects. Reza Zadeh, founder… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Michael Arrington, Keith Teare, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 24, 2017. Twitter ponders subscription services, Medium gets $5 from Steve and maybe Doc, Keith and Kevin offer their 2 cents from across the pond, and Mike holds down the fort from Crunchfund HQ.
@stevegillmor, @arrington, @dsearls, @kevinmarks, @kteare
Prod/Dir… Read More
In this episode of Technotopia I walk to Tobias Stone, a writer, entrepreneur, and academic. Tobias has been writing on Trump and Brexit and worked with Identity.ee, a workgroup focused on cryptographically proven citizenship.
Stone believes that the Estonian model of e-idenity is the future and that the mission for every country should be to make their workers, citizen, and expats digital. Read More
UK biomimetic engineering startup Animal Dynamics is being funded by the military to build a microdrone with wings inspired by the flapping flight of a dragonfly. Read More
More bad news for Uber: one of the ride-hailing giant’s self-driving Volvo SUVs has been involved in a crash in Arizona — apparently leaving the vehicle flipped onto its side, and with damage to at least two other human-driven cars in the vicinity. Read More
Tesla’s long list of updated updates, Instacart agrees to settle class-action lawsuit and SB Drive pulls in $4.6 million. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
This week, Apple and Amazon both made big acquisitions, the U.S. Senate voted to repeal broadband privacy rules created by Obama’s FCC and Uber lost its president. These are the top tech headlines from this week, plus some good long-form weekend reads. You can also receive this post as a weekly newsletter in your inbox, if you’d like. 1. Apple acquired Workflow, a tool that… Read More
TOTALLY PANIC. Just kidding; please don’t do that. Google regularly issues warnings to people whose accounts are or have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers, and every time it does, users get really nervous that their emails are going to wind up on WikiLeaks. Don’t freak out if you get one of these notices — it doesn’t necessarily mean that your account has… Read More
Earlier this week, Apple announced a red version of its iPhone to support HIV/AIDS charity (RED). This is the first time that Apple has supported the charity through its flagship phone. The phone was made available today in select countries, and we got our hands on one. Take a look at our pics from this limited-edition Apple phone. Read More
