Amazon’s virtual assistant just got a much wider audience. The company announced it’s integrating Alexa into its main shopping app on iPhone, starting today with a full rollout expected by next week. The assistant can do more than just provide a voice interface to Amazon’s retail store, however – it can also control your smart home, play your music or Kindle books,… Read More
BMW says that the car it intends to field with self-driving tech by 2021 will have Level 3, Level 4 and Level 5 capabilities, according to the automaker’s SVP of Autonomous Driving Elmar Frickenstein, who shared the info during a panel in Berlin on Thursday, Reuters reports. Level 5 autonomy would mean that the vehicle requires zero input from a driver to navigate city and highway roads,… Read More
Right, so robots! TechCrunch is pleased as punch to announce our first-ever robotics event: TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics, on July 17 in Boston at MIT’s stunning Kresge Auditorium. We are also happy to announce that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a key sponsor. Our event is absolutely global, but there is no better place to stage the… Read More
At a moment when it’s hard to be bullish about smartwatches, Swatch isn’t just embracing the category. It’s going all in. Swatch, Switzerland’s biggest watchmaker, isn’t just planning to launch a smartwatch, the company is actually developing its own operating system in hopes of competing with the likes of Apple and Samsung (which uses a forked version of Tizen).… Read More
Hulu’s live TV service is just around the corner, and will enter a competitive market where rivals like AT&T’s DirecTV NOW, Dish’s Sling TV, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and YouTube TV are now battling for cord cutters’ dollars. To date, Hulu hasn’t offered a ton of information on how its service will differentiate itself from others, but it has added a… Read More
Eight years ago, WeWork didn’t exist. But since 2010, Adam Neumann and his cofounder, Miguel McKelvey, have been taking over the world — literally — with what sounds like a deceptively simple business model: to rent office space from landlords wholesale, splinter it into smaller pieces, make it cozier and more attractive (think mosaics, exposed beams), then sublease it at… Read More
As music streaming platforms continue to compete for subscribers, one of the biggest suppliers of premium music video content is adding new features to focus on its own platform as a destination. Vevo — the premium music video hosting company that sees 21 billion views of its content each month globally from some 300 million consumers, powering more than 40% of all traffic on YouTube in… Read More
Nvidia’s already going deeper down the self-driving vehicle rabbit hole in partnership with Bosch, but it’s also moving further into autonomous trucking with a new partnership with PACCAR, one of the world’s largest makers of transport trucks.
The PACCAR arrangement has already resulted in the production of one proof-of-concept vehicle, a Level 4 autonomous truck that uses… Read More
It was a direct reply, but when the world’s second largest restaurant chain slides into the Trump’s mentions to call him “a disgusting excuse of a President,” people are going to take notice. And screenshot the hell out of it. Billions and billions served, indeed. McDonald’s has since deleted a tweet reading, “@realDonaldTrump You are actually a… Read More
This an exciting excerpt from the new book Thinking Machines by Like Dormehl. The book offers a detailed history of primitive machine learning and a dense and fascinating look at the future of true artificial intelligence. The book is available now. Marius Ursache wants you to live forever. It’s not a shock to find out that, in an industry that skews as young as tech, few people spend… Read More
When the iMessage App Store first launched, it was touted as the next big platform for apps – a new way for developers to gain users and make money, and was followed by an initial surge of iMessage app downloads. Now, however, the excitement is fading as is the app store’s growth. During the first few months after its debut, the iMessage App Store was seeing growth of over 100… Read More
Benjamin Ufaruna and Asehinde Oladipo met at one of Nigeria’s emerging technology development services companies in Abuja. In the hard-charging startup world that the two men entered there was little time to remember the minutiae of everyday life — like paying bills on time. “In the midst of our busy schedules we would try to find time to dash down to the electricity company… Read More
Lucid’s first electric vehicle doesn’t cost what you think it does – the company revealed basic pricing information for the Air on its blog, basically just to mute speculation that its price tag would begin north of $100,000. The Lucid Air’s actual price will start at $60,000, hitting $52,500 once you apply the federal tax credit for EV buyers. That’s for the… Read More
Take note, tech writers: as of this morning, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors are no longer processors. Henceforth, the company would like you to refer to Snapdragon as a “platform.” In a post this morning, the San Diego-based chip – sorry processor – maker has detailed why it’s replaced one p-word with another. And why it thinks you ought to… Read More
Cubspot: come for the “EdTech SaaS marketplace” but stay for the opportunity to find camps and classes for your kids this summer. Cubspot is the brainchild of Rachael Shayne, a former brand manager for Nestle, The North Face, and Oakley. Over a bottle of wine she and her friends talked about how hard it was to find classes for their kids in the summer.
“We talked about how… Read More
At some point, everyone has an ‘Aha!’ moment when it comes to the importance of high-quality bed linens. For Brooklinen founders, Rich and Vicki Fulop, that moment came on vacation at a hotel, where the sheets were too good to be true but unfortunately not for sale. As the couple searched for some nice sheets, everywhere from Bed Bath & Beyond to ABC Home, they realized that… Read More
SpaceX launched an EchoStar communications satellite into orbit on Wednesday, completing a mission for its client on a second try, after the original launch on Tuesday was scrubbed due to weather conditions on the ground. The SpaceX mission put EchoStar’s XXIII satellite into orbit 22,000 miles up, after launching 2 AM ET on Thursday.
The EchoStar XXIII payload was a remarkably heavy… Read More
Additive manufacturing startup Carbon is on a mission to help manufacturers and designers cut their costs, waste less energy and materials while speeding up the time it takes to get from concept to product on the market. The company, which has raised $221 million in venture capital, is firing up a new service aimed at contract manufacturers, and other high volume manufacturing businesses,… Read More
Nvidia’s new partner in bringing AI-powered self-driving tech to the masses definitely has the experience needed to go truly mass-market – it’s Bosch, leading tier one auto industry supplier. Bosch will build an AI supercomputer designed for use in vehicles using Nvidia tech, which means Nvidia now has a partner that works as a tier one supplier to all major car makers in… Read More
Medtech startup AliveCor announced this morning it has pulled in $30 million from Omron Healthcare and the Mayo Clinic and is launching an artificially intelligent stroke prevention platform for doctors called KardiaPro. AliveCor already has an FDA-cleared mobile app called Kardia to accompany its $99 standalone EKG reader device. However, a partnership last year with the Mayo Clinic… Read More
