The future of urban mobility is rapidly changing as drivers look for safer and more effortless ways to move from point A to point B. While autonomous vehicles are on the horizon, ridesharing options are expanding beyond Uber and Lyft to incorporate drivers of single-occupancy cars to accept other riders on their commutes. Read More
Revenge is sweet, but irony is sweeter. Apparently, the hacker who infiltrated San Francisco’s Muni transportation system late last week fell victim to his own horrible personal cyber hygiene. According to security reporter Brian Krebs, a separate individual infiltrated the Muni hacker’s own email using nothing more than the ransom note provided by the hacker himself. Read More
Hayo’s pitch video could use some work. It’s stilted and strange and has some trouble conveying precisely what the product does, owing in part to holographic representations of the product’s functionality. It’s clear that the product is different and probably compelling — but it’s not exactly clear what it does.
Earlier this week, I sat down with the… Read More
2016 has been a very good year to bury very bad news. And political distractions perhaps explain why a bill that has been described as the most extreme surveillance legislation ever passed in a democracy has today passed into law in the U.K.. never having faced substantial opposition. Read More
Lucid Motors, a new electric car company, announced at a press conference today that it would begin building its manufacturing center in Casa Grande, Arizona, in 2017. Parts and supplies for the facility will come from the state of Sonora in Mexico, which borders Arizona. The company’s headquarters will likely remain in San Francisco. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said that the company… Read More
Apple is misplaying the hand Steve Jobs left them, making themselves vulnerable to competition for the first time since iPod. The company has always been at least one step ahead of the competition in hardware advancements and software experience. It used to be that to switch to Android or Windows, you’d have to give up functionality, user experience and access to the latest and… Read More
Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach. Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More
Starting today you can play games inside Facebook Messenger and News Feed, but which should you try? There are old classics like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, as well as modern titles like EverWing and Words With Friends you can play by tapping the game controller icon in a Messenger thread. Click or scroll through to see our quick reviews and scores out of 10 for all 17 of the launch titles,… Read More
Intel is following up on news early Tuesday about its partnership with Mobileye and Delphi on self-driving tech with more autonomous vehicle news: it’s creating a whole group dedicated to pursuit of self-driving solution development, called – you’ll never guess – the Automated Driving Group (ADG for short). The new Intel ADG will be headed up by Intel vet Doug Davis,… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division is hosting its annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas this week. Ahead of the main part of the event, the company today hosted a keynote for its ecosystem partners who sell tools and services for AWS. During the keynote, the company announced a major extension of its partner programs, as well as a few new features for vendors who want to… Read More
Before the streaming era, if you found yourself watching a movie or TV show with a great soundtrack, you may have gone out later to buy the CD. These days, at best, you may remember to look up the soundtrack on iTunes or a streaming service like Spotify. But the premium TV network Starz has a different idea: in partnership with Spotify, it’s putting soundtracks directly into its… Read More
If we’re to keep thousands of expensive satellites in working order, the job isn’t going to be done by humans — and DARPA suggests we all get on the same page before we start designing robotic systems to pick up the slack. Read More
Ford’s pushing forward in its efforts to get autonomous cars on the road, with a plan to begin testing self-driving vehicles in Europe next year. The testing is in advance of extending its plans to debut an autonomous car specifically for ride-sharing fleets in the U.S. in 2021 to Europe, sometime in the future following that initial launch.
Ford tells TechCrunch it will be testing… Read More
Should our kids learn to code? I can’t argue against the value of every child having a working knowledge of software development. But there is a difference between coding foundational technology and front-end development — and the divide is growing. Read More
Earlier this year, Amazon launched a new storefront dubbed the “Amazon Cable Store,” which focused on reselling Comcast’s internet and television service from the retailer’s site. Of course, the generic name “Cable Store” seemed to hint that Comcast wouldn’t be the only company featured on this site in the future – and that has turned out to… Read More
Lyft is launching upfront fares so that passengers won’t get any surprises once the ride ends. Although Lyft had previously offered fare estimates, you’ll now be able to know exactly how much you’ll have to pay. The feature was previously available for Lyft Line riders. To get the upfront fare, all you have to do is put in your final destination. The total price you’ll… Read More
I’m a gamer, you’re a gamer, she’s a gamer, we’re pretty much all gamers these days. But we probably aren’t the same kind of gamer. Here are a few ideas on what games you should get friends and loved ones whose playing preferences differ from your own. Read More
Look, it’s 2016. A cereal bar, pet grooming station, nap pod, and ping pong hovel aren’t enough to get a young programmer’s guts boiling. You need something unique. You need a flip disk system. This system, created by a BreakfastNY, is basically a modern version of those massive analog-digital signs you used to see in airports. Each pixel flips from dark to light (or dark… Read More
One of the challenges of Internet of Things is the poor availability and high price of mobile data. Twilio announced it was going to have a stab at changing that earlier this year. Today Soracom showed off its solutions to ease the pain of IoT adaptation across the industry. The company’s slightly byzantine pricing plans are optimized for a number of low-bandwidth, high uptime applications. Read More
Yahoo has quietly launched a native mobile app for Yahoo Answers, one of the web’s largest Q&A sites which attracts over 3.1 million U.S. monthly visitors. The app, which was previously being tested under a different name, Yahoo Hive, was rebranded to Yahoo Answers Now at the beginning of the month. Like the web version, Yahoo Answers Now lets you view, ask, answer and track… Read More
