There’s trouble in China for ride-sharing services after authorities in Beijing and Shanghai instituted new regulations that forbid people not officially registered as living in either city from working for services like Didi Chuxing or Uber. Read More
Mario Run Breaks App Store record with 40 million downloads, OurMine hacks Marvel and Netflix Twitter accounts, Snap opens R&D office in China, SARA is Facebook’s new innovation advantage and Uber loses up to $3 billion in 2016. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Uber has confirmed that it will stop its self-driving pilot in San Francisco, following a meeting today with the California DMV and Attorney General’s office. The DMV revoked the registration on 16 self-driving test vehicles Uber was using in its pilot.
The DMV tells TechCrunch that it invited Uber to complete its permitting process at the same time it revoked it the vehicle registrations. Read More
Five years after burying the hatchet with Apple, Nokia’s back at it again. The one-time phone-making juggernaut announced this week that it’s ready to go back to court in a big way, filing multiple lawsuits aimed squarely at Cupertino.
The company celebrated the filings with a press release detailing the claims, which stem from 32 patents related to a wide range of related… Read More
The holidays are almost here and there is still a little time left for last-minute shopping. Instead of sifting though all your discount emails, we found some apps that will help you save money and make both your online and in-store shopping experience easier. Slice Online shoppers may want to check out Slice, which makes it easier to monitor shipments. There’s no need to input any… Read More
Cable companies rule TV because they control the expensive wires and satellites that can deliver low-latency live content at scale. Cable companies can then dictate how much per monthly paying subscriber they offer the channel owners for access because there are few alternatives for live distribution. And the cable companies can charge consumers exorbitant prices because they’re… Read More
As consumers get their first taste of voice-controlled home robots and motion-based virtual realities, a quiet swath of technologists are thinking big picture about what comes after that. The answer has major implications for the way we’ll interact with our devices in the near future. Spoiler alert: We won’t be yelling or waving at them; we’ll be thinking at them. That answer… Read More
It was only about a month ago that Apple finally added the iPhone to its refurbished online offerings, along with iMacs and MacBooks, and now the company’s got another key addition. Starting this week, the company has added Apple Watches to its official refurbed store, with prices starting at $229 for the 38mm version of the first-generation model. That puts the watch at 14 percent below… Read More
Former Google self-driving car project Waymo is wasting no time demonstrating its readiness to enter into commercial agreements — the Alphabet-owned autonomous driving technology company is in formal discussions with Honda on partnering up to use Waymo self-driving software and sensors on Honda vehicles. Honda announced the discussions, which preface a potential collaboration between the… Read More
Disney’s ABC TV group is embarking on a journey into Snapchat original programming creation, and it’s starting with The Bachelor, its storied 21-season franchise that chronicles the epic romance of a random person and a selection of around two dozen potential matches selected for their potential to generate interesting TV.
I say that like I don’t watch The Bachelor, The… Read More
I’ve been mostly enjoying my time with the Phase, thus far. It might be all the time I spent with the Gear S3 of late, but it feels good having a relatively reasonably sized watch on again. Something that’s not flashy like the Apple Watch Nike+, something that, honestly, you forget you even have until you need it. The Misfit Phase isn’t a groundbreaker. That path has already… Read More
I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today’s machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles’ heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current… Read More
When a movie is more CG than it is real — think movies like Avatar or any of Pixar’s stuff, where all or nearly all of the environment is rendered — a new challenge appears: the camera. Getting a fake camera (like the one in a rendering program) to move and behave like a real camera (like the one that the camera guy is traditionally holding) can be a pain. Testing a scene from… Read More
Neither public markets nor tech giants offered any solace in 2016 for the ever-growing list of private unicorns. There are 180 tech companies circling the runway with valuations over $1 billion, the most in history. While interest in an all-expenses paid trip to the NYSE valuation guillotine was at an all-time low, non-traditional Fortune 500 companies did pluck a lucky few from the skies at… Read More
Researchers at North Carolina-based Locus Biosciences think they have a potential cure for antibiotic resistance using CRISPR’s lesser-known Cas3 enzyme. Most of the interest in CRISPR technology centers around the enzyme Cas9, which acts as a type of genetic scissors, allowing scientists to snip out, edit and replace DNA at certain intervals along the genome. However, Cas3 goes beyond… Read More
GM has made a number of big acquisitions and investments in the past few years. It picked up self-driving company Cruise earlier this year and dropped $500 million into Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor. For the most part, GM acknowledges that it needs to figure out how to tap into new aspects of the automotive experience, CTO Jon Lauckner said. But all these companies start somewhere. And… Read More
Mark Zuckerberg gave new insights about how he sees Facebook’s role in informing the world today during a Live video one-on-one year-end chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s CEO also lent support to employees trying to fight fake news today, though reports indicated some employees were dissatisfied by his initially tepid response to the issue. “Facebook is a new kind… Read More
Drug production is generally a matter of big factories churning out millions of aspirin or ibuprofen tablets a day, but there’s a lot to be said for manufacturing common drugs on a small scale, close to where they’re used. Researchers from the Netherlands have created an efficient and simple method for doing so that uses a method much like plants have for making their own resources. Read More
