In Boston this weekend, software developers, hardware engineers, artists and entrepreneurs gathered for the Hacking Arts 2016 conference and hackathon at MIT. Of twelve finalists, the following teams took top honors. Best All-Around Hack: Harmony Space Best All-Around Hack, First Runner-Up: Revive Best All-Around Hack, Second Runner-Up: möbel Hackers’ Choice: Inkfinity A list of… Read More
Not even 24 hours after we got the last Snapchat Spectacle vending machine location, there’s a new one: near the Grand Canyon in Arizona, closest to the small town of Meadview. The new spot is striking distance from Las Vegas, and should provide a beautiful road trip for anyone adventurous enough to make the drive. The Grand Canyon location follows hot on the heels of the Rose Bowl… Read More
It was October 2011. Verena Rentrop and Elsie Parumog, two Nokia staff stationed on opposite sides of the world, were having a routine work chat when something more pressing came up. With another wave of restructuring underway, which would see Nokia lay off thousands of employees over the next few years, the close but remote relationship that the two had established might soon come to an end. Read More
Last week I caught up with Matt Robinson, co-founder and CEO of London-based property tech startup Nested. Prior to this he co-founded GoCardless, a fintech company also based in London.
During our call we discussed why he left GoCardless to start Nested, how too many bad ideas are being funded, why not everybody should do a startup, and Robinson’s top fundraising tips. Read More
President Obama recently re-affirmed America’s commitment to sending a manned mission to Mars. Think your data science challenges are complicated? Imagine the difficulties involved in mining data to understand the health impacts of a trip to Mars. When sending humans “where no one has gone before,” there are a multitude of variables to consider, and NASA is hard at work… Read More
The Skyscraper Art Deco Watch is a new crowdfunded piece by horologist Mark Carson and designer Richard Paige. Based on Art Deco skyscraper decoration – think the Empire State Building’s handsome arches or the swooping buttresses of Gotham city – this watch is interesting for a few reasons. First, this team has made some nice watches before. Their DouFace dual face watch… Read More
Another day, another Spectacles vending machine location. This is the fifth place the Snapbot has appeared, to sell its first-person video capturing sunglasses to droves of willing Snapchat fans (or at least people hoping to turn a tidy profit by reselling them on eBay). Today’s spot is in Pasadena, at the Rose Bowl Stadium where there’s a USC/UCLA game later today.
The previous… Read More
The precise information you need, delivered exactly when and where you need it. Personalized engagement and experiences. Easy step-by-step navigation. These are just some of the things you get with indoor location-based services. Similar functions have existed outdoors for years, but indoor location services have seen much slower adoption. But that’s about to change. Read More
Tesla revealed it would be building all vehicles complete with all the hardware onboard they need to achieve full self-driving in the future, and also published a short demo video of the prototype software in action at the time. Now, a new video shows a self-driving Tesla making its way through a city neighbourhood complete with a lot of traffic and quite a few intersections. The video provides… Read More
He’d been dismissive about the reach of misinformation on Facebook, saying that false news accounted for less than one percent of all the posts on the social media network. But a slew of media reports this week have demonstrated that, although fake posts may not make up the bulk of the content on Facebook, they spread like wildfire — and Facebook has a responsibility to address… Read More
When the folks at Cirque Du Soleil invited us to check out some of the technology behind its latest show, Luzia, I just couldn’t say no. They’ve built all kinds of incredible stuff for this show. Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 29, 2016. Mainstream meets streaming media as we await the transition to the new administration. The Gang tackles the fake news pandemic with a requiem for truthiness scheduled for January 20.
@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @fradice, @kteare
Producer… Read More
Hitman is a weird video game franchise. You incarnate an assassin-for-hire and you have to kill various targets in different cities around the world. But you get to decide how you want to do it. While many AAA games are putting a lot of emphasis on cut scenes, story lines and closed environments, game developer IO Interactive is taking an opposite approach by going all-in on sandbox gameplay.… Read More
When we last met Click & Grow they were selling a massive wall garden designed for indoor gardening. Their new product, called the Smart Garden, is a self-contained kit pod for growing fruits, vegetables, and “herbs” that costs $129 on Kickstarter The system is quite simple. You fill the water tank, place in small pods of soil, nutrients, and seeds and then turn it on.… Read More
A guy like Ralph Clark has a tough job: if all goes according to his business plan he’ll put himself out of business. He is the CEO of ShotSpotter, a surveillance system for cities that triangulates gunfire in 90 cities. I asked him if he’d ever have to shut down. “You know, sadly, in the US that won’t be the case,” he said. The company is coming under fire for… Read More
Twenty years from now, the most important tool for putting food on your table won’t be a harvester, combine or a plow. It will be a piece of software. Agriculture is in the process of transitioning into a fully high-tech enterprise. This is a long-overdue revolution in the way things have been done for centuries. To put it in perspective, if we keep doing farming the old-fashioned way,… Read More
Welp. I’m sorry to hear that. Whether you are Venezuelan, Zimbabwean, Russian, Turkish, or American; whether your democratic process has been fatally compromised, or your fellow citizens have knowingly voted in a monster; indeed, even whether you’re right or wrong — I feel your pain. But for what it’s worth, some technology, if used correctly, is still on your side. Read More
The FanDuel and DraftKings merger is confirmed, Amazon Prime Video goes global, Apple is looking into U.S. manufacturing, BuzzFeed is raising a $200 million Series G flat round and Sesame Street’s VC invests in Yup. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Smart technology continues to streamline and transform nearly all aspects of our lives. Consider how technology is being used in the world of professional sports. Sensors and wearables connected to the cloud are providing instantaneous access to data and analysis, providing meaningful insights that can be used to improve performance. Read More
You know you’ve been wanting to play around with that new version of Microsoft Paint — if only to see if it is, indeed, that big of an update to the long-maligned drawing application that’s been shipping with Windows since the mid-1980s. Paint 3D is unquestionably one of the biggest refreshes in the application’s history. In fact, it’s really a complete rethink,… Read More
