Two recent survey reports came in with news on positive traction in VR adoption by two very different segments of the industry: academic institutes and the 3D modeling community. Read More
Things aren’t looking great for Hawkeye. It was a valiant effort, but the first result of ZTE’s crowdsourcing Project CSX is presently at just around $35,000 into its $500,000 goal after the project launched on January 4, at the height of CES. The company’s admitting it made some key errors along the way, with VP Jeff Yee taking to the company’s forum to apologize… Read More
As a process development engineer, Ryan Chan was used to trying to make incremental improvements to the development process in manufacturing. Those changes would improve efficiency by around one to three percent, which would net hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Chan wanted to figure out how to get things moving even more efficiently. So he left, and he became an iOS engineer. That led him… Read More
Research conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge University in the UK, and Yale and George Mason in the US, offers a potential strategy for mitigating the spread of misinformation online — involving the use of pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance. Read More
Have you ever wanted to feel a dragon breathe on your wrist? A tiny reindeer paw at your palm? A virtual robot skitter up your arm and burrow into your chest? Axon VR is about to let you.
IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman checked out the Axon VR device at CES a few weeks ago and it looks like the sleeper hit of the show given how little it was covered and how amazing it looks.
The box, a… Read More
A badge of pride among frequent travelers, the battered passport could become a relic of the past, as sophisticated technology aims to replace more traditional means of identifying passengers. Australia is steadily working to update its own international processing, with a sort of self-service check out involving face, iris and/or fingerprint scanning designed to take some of the pain out of… Read More
Snapchat’s major redesign, which introduces a universal search bar to the top of the app, among other features, has today hit iOS. The refreshed user interface was first announced earlier this month, but was only available to Android users at the time with a promise that it would reach iPhone users “soon.” The app has long been criticized for being too hard to navigate… Read More
Confirming reports from earlier this month that a Google Voice update was in the works, Google today has launched a refreshed version of its VoIP calling service on mobile and the web. Largely, the update is about giving the product a more modern look-and-feel, after having not received a major upgrade in years. But the relaunch also includes a few new features, like support for… Read More
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open source group that’s also the home of the popular Kubernetes container management system, today announced that it has added Linkerd as its fifth hosted project. Linkerd (pronounced linker-DEE), which was incubated at Buoyant, follows in the footsteps of other CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing and Fluentd. The… Read More
My, my, hey, hey lossless audio is here to stay thanks to JustBoom, a set of Raspberry Pi “hats” that connect to the mini computer and offer high fidelity audio playback and amplification. The $24 hats include a lossless DAC, a mini-amplifier, and a high-resolution audio output with COAX and optical audio out. If you, like Neil Young, require the utmost fidelity in your music… Read More
Supersonic airplane startup Boom has just completed a key step on the way to building a production supersonic passenger jet; the startup finished its wind tunnel testing, verifying its first two years of aerodynamic design work and setting the stage for building the airframe that will eventually become the basis of it first flight-ready aircraft. I spoke to Boom CEO and co-founder Blake… Read More
Hanson Robotics is making its first foray into the consumer electronics market with an educational toy called Professor Einstein. The device is a pint-sized, shuffling Albert Einstein that uses natural language processing, and other artificial intelligence capabilities, to comprehend and answer kids’ questions about science. The Einstein toy robot works as a standalone or in conjunction… Read More
A rough start to the week for Qualcomm stock following a week that brought some major bad news in the form of an FTC antitrust complaint and a one $1 billion or so suit from one-time ally Apple.
The chipmaker was already stumbling from an FTC complaint a week back that accused the company of instituting a “no license, no chips” policy that instituted higher fees and held down… Read More
More red carpet live streams are coming to Twitter, thanks to a new deal between the social network and Dick Clark Productions, announced this morning. The partners will again work together to bring live streamed programming from award shows exclusively to Twitter, including red carpet pre-shows for the 52nd Academy of Country Music Awards, 2017 Billboard Music Awards and 2017 American… Read More
IBM Security announced this morning that it has purchased Agile 3 Solutions, a San Francisco-based company that has developed a security analytics dashboard aimed at helping executives understand cyber-security risks inside an organization. The acquisition gives IBM another tool in its security arsenal to provide more insight to key decision makers, which ultimately could help them sell… Read More
All Chromebooks new in 2017 will support Android apps out of the box. An update will not be required. Owners will be able to take the Chromebook home, open it up and immediately access the Google Play Store. The news comes from a single line of text on Google’s list of Chromebooks compatible with Android apps. “All Chromebooks launching in 2017 and after as well as the… Read More
While global investment in cybersecurity startups may have shown signs of slowing in 2016, Israel – second only to the U.S. market – remained strong and showed impressive numbers yet again, as we witnessed a surge in funding and continued innovation.
Investments in Israeli Companies Continues to Rise
CB Insights estimated that the 2016 global deal activity and dollar funding in… Read More
Tricentis, a startup that helps enterprise development teams automate software testing, got a bushel of money today from Insight Venture Partners — $165 million to be exact. As part of the deal, Insight Managing Director Mike Triplett will join the Tricentis board.
In a traditional software development cycle, developers took months to create and deliver a product. Testing involved… Read More
Here’s an interesting turn of events in the ongoing story of the streaming music industry. Today, Sprint, itself owned by Softbank, announced it would take a 33 percent stake in Tidal, the streaming music startup originally founded in Norway that was majority acquired by Jay Z and relaunched in 2015 as a platform to compete against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, offering… Read More
On the heels of hiring a new CTO from Yahoo and trying to position itself either as a stronger acquisition target or standalone entity, SoundCloud is getting a lot deeper into the business of advertising. Today the audio startup — which streams both licensed music tracks and is also a go-to platform for user-generated content (similar to YouTube) — announced that it would be… Read More
