Category: Tech news

 Want to watch March Madness in VR? You’re in luck. Six games — including the Final Four national semifinals and National Championship game — will be streamed in VR. The games will be available via the new NCAA March madness Live VR App available on the Oculus Store, which will work with Gear VR devices. Read More

 Apple and Samsung have refreshed their flagship tablets for the first time since 2014. Much has changed in the space — mostly for the worse, as overall sales have continued to slip. There’s room for debate as far as precisely how down the overall market is, but there seems to at least be a consensus that early predictions of the tablet space eclipsing PCs missed the mark. Read More

 Twitter has revealed it suspended a total of 376,890 accounts between July 1 through December 31 last year for violations related to promotion of terrorism. It says the majority of the suspensions (74 percent) were surfaced via its own “internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools.” Read More

 GDAX, the cryptocurrency exchange run by Coinbase, has added margin trading to the platform. Eligible traders can now trade up to 3X leveraged orders on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin order books. Read More

 First drones took to the air. Now they take to the sea! The Gladius is basically a remote-controlled submarine with a 4K camera that can dive to 100 meters. A big, yellow double-barreled monster, the beast is controlled via a phone-connected remote and it is semi-tethered, which means it can roll out about 500 meters with the right gear. Read More

 After the U.S. today instituted a ban on bringing any electronics larger than a smart phone into the passenger cabin of direct flights that leave from 10 airports in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.K. today followed suit with a very similar ban. Read More

 It’s been just about a year since Google unexpectedly announced the first preview of Android Nougat. Today, the company is launching the first developer preview of the next version of its mobile operating system, currently code-named Android O (but we’re really hoping it’ll become Android Oreo once it’s released). Read More

 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is pretty much a non-stop source of amazing things, and the latest is the PUFFER, or Pop-Up Flat Folding Robot. The design of the robot is inspired by origami, and folding is its specialty. Read More

 Alexa voice control and Prime’s subscriber base have suddenly made Amazon a real contender in music alongside Spotify, Apple and YouTube. But what does it really take to come out on top in the crowded space of streaming music? At TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference in May, we’ll ask that very question to the most aptly named executive in tech, Amazon’s VP of Music… Read More

 Automakers are scrambling to develop cars with advanced driver-assistance systems that are so good they’re “crash-proof,” or fully autonomous vehicles, each safer than the next. But automakers are somewhat limited by the computational resources onboard their vehicles. DeepScale has raised $3 million to help automakers use low-wattage processors to power more accurate perception. Read More

 Most hedge funds don’t make money. This hasn’t stopped a growing list of startups from trying their hands at employing machine learning to tip the scales in their favor. But Pit.ai, a new machine learning-powered hedge fund, adopted into the YC W17 class, thinks it can best Numerai, Quantopian and others with its own unique recipe for automating money making. Read More

 Twitter officially announced the launch of a new tool for live video aimed at larger media publishers and broadcasters. The Producer API, as it’s called, will allow professional publishers to connect their equipment to Twitter in order to stream live video directly to its network. Read More

 Google plans to give its advertising clients more control over where their ads appear on YouTube and the Google Display Network, which posts advertising to third-party websites.
It announced the move in a blog post from its European business after major brands pulled ads from the platform because they appeared against offensive content, such as videos promoting terrorism or anti-Semitism.
The U.K. Read More

 For websites we had Google. For videos, YouTube. For products, Amazon. For general reference, Wikipedia. For Gifs, Giphy. Well when VR and AR devices become mainstream, imagine all the new types of content that will be out there to explore. How will we find what we’re looking for in a brave, new, 3D world? In an interview for Flux, I sat down with Sophia Dominguez, co-founder and… Read More

 That’s why over the past few years, Spotify has been pushing five different paths to putting pressure on the labels to cut it a better royalties deal. They all hinge around the idea of making the labels need Spotify as much as it’s historically needed them. When Spotify launched in 2008, it had no power in the relationship since it had so few listeners. It needed to raise over… Read More