Category: Tech news

 The Kindle is great for linear fiction, but my biggest frustration is trying to consume content that isn’t meant to be enjoyed from first to last page. Travel books are terrible for that, for example: You’ll forever find yourself flipping between overview and local maps, the “what to do” section for where you are and the “where to stay” section for where… Read More

 Sure, it’s technologically advanced, but it lacks a general understanding of what’s socially acceptable to say, the real world and the way humans interact. In the last couple of months, Microsoft has had a couple of failed attempts with artificial intelligence. The first involved an image recognition app called Fetch!, which looks at photos of dogs to identify its breed. People,… Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 25, 2016. The Gang floats on the border between virtual fiction and greater reality. Plus, the latest G3 w/ Mary Hodder, Rebecca Woodcock, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @fradice, @kteare
Produced and directed by… Read More

 It’s long been the case that life sciences investors don’t get the attention that their more traditional tech counterparts do. They’re underrepresented on lists of top investors in venture capital. They’re also remarkably underfunded, according to institutional investors (or limited partners) who back venture firms. It’s the “life sciences guys who are smart… Read More

 Immense hype surrounds virtual currencies and distributed ledgers these days. Maybe this is inevitable if you combine an inscrutable, cutting-edge technology, its enigmatic origins, and a flow of $1 billion in venture funding thus far. But will these technologies create pathways for people in emerging economies to access and use financial services that meet their needs? Read More

 In the wake of Paris, San Bernardino, and now Brussels, the encryption debate has become such a potent cocktail of horror, idiocy, and farce that it has become hard to tease out any rational threads of discussion. There is so much stupidity that I hardly know where to begin; but let’s start with the farce. Everybody loves a farce, right? Read More

 If you think about it, money is a ridiculous concept. Without going into a William Jennings Bryan ?gold standard history lesson, let’s just say the idea that I can hold this thing, this little cloth rectangle of varying denomination, and exchange it for tangible goods and services is, at the very least, a system of belief. How we carry our money, and how we’ve evolved to think… Read More

 DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it’s not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent Robotics Challenge. The Defense Department’s R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. Read More

 Twitter, which turned 10 this week, has apparently made Live its entire organizing principle. At an all-hands meeting last month, Mark Zuckerberg declared live video a top priority for Facebook. Clearly, Zuck’s directing his fight toward Twitter’s Periscope, a mobile live streaming app which itself competed fiercely with Meerkat. Read More

 2020 is set to be a good year for Mars exploration. The United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Europe and Russia all have planned Mars missions that are scheduled to launch, or likely to launch, in that year. There have been more than 40 missions to Mars throughout history. Some of these missions were failures, while others completed their goals and are no longer operational. Today,… Read More

 Peter Thiel’s decades old Founders Fund pulled together another $1.3 billion dollars today for Founders Fund VI. Thiel, a billionaire investor in Facebook and SpaceX and co-founder of PayPal, will remain at the helm, with partners Lauren Gross, Ken Howery, Geoff Lewis, Scott Nolan, Luke Nosek and Brian Singerman. Founders Fund is known to focus on cutting-edge investments in space,… Read More

 The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft’s Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. Read More

 A recent article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled “Will Facebook Enslave Us?” captures a sentiment prevalent among companies around the world: admiration for Silicon Valley — albeit, with a dash of fear. International media outlets eagerly cover disruption developing in labs up and down the San Francisco peninsula. Boards of directors are spending hours debating how… Read More

 For human lip readers, context is key in deciphering words stripped of the full nuance of their audio cues. But a technology model for lip-reading developed at the University of East Anglia in the UK has been shown to be able to interpret mouthed words with a greater degree of accuracy than human lip readers, thanks to the application of machine learning. Read More

 Longing for the days of the sticky floored arcades of your youth and long nights spent with the the Atari 2600, but can’t be bothered to dig through your mum’s basement to find all the bits and bobs to throw yourself into a retro-gaming binge? Aren’t you in some industrial-strength luck. Available starting today on Steam, Atari Vault gives you 100 retro games to while away… Read More