Category: Tech news

 We’re excited to announce the launch of our first artificial intelligence-powered news bot on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. We teamed up with Chatfuel to build the bot, and after a month of development we’re thrilled to show it off to the world. If you are already on Telegram, you can check out the bot by following this link (or search for “techcrunchbot&#8221… Read More

 This past week I made it my mission to see what was going on in downtown Manhattan. A well-timed email here, a hastily caught train there, and I found myself at the headquarters of Priority Cycles — a NYC-based bicycle startup that got its wheels on Kickstarter back in 2014. Read More

 Just in time for “Mega Tuesday,” Google has rolled out new features to Google Search that will allow you to better track the primaries and learn more about the candidates. One new addition provides easy-to-understand campaign finance information, so you can see things like which percentage of funds come from SuperPACs versus individuals, or which industries are more heavily backing… Read More

 Google reportedly is working on building its own Uber competitor, and while some believe this will come in the form of a fleet of autonomous cars, there is a more immediate option for how Google can position itself more prominently in Uber’s world: by searching and aggregating everything that the wider on-demand transport landscape has to offer. Today, Google announced its… Read More

 French startup Prêt d’Union is one of the biggest fintech startups in its home country, but it has yet to expand its crowd-lending services outside of France. Prêt d’Union is about to go all in on European expansion, a source told me. The company could expand to Italy as soon as tomorro Read More

This micro four thirds camera is bigger than most in its class, but its fantastic image quality is an acceptable tradeoff for the extra bulk. The post Review: Panasonic Lumix GX8 appeared first on WIRED.

 New domain extensions have accumulated some pretty big numbers over the last couple of years. Collective registrations for the new GTLDs (generic top-level domains) have now surpassed 13 million, according to NTLD stats. This number is not small by any means. Read More

 The World Economic Forum, the Detroit Auto Show and CES all occurred recently, and each has driven a great deal of discussion around self-driving cars. The expectation is that within a decade we will begin to see autonomous vehicles on the streets and a correlated reduction in accidents, traffic congestion and demand for parking. Read More

 While internet connects us and unites us, it also has the potential to facilitate a kind of imperialism and monoculture. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Daniel Ilkovich, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 11, 2016. The Gang joins the hybrid world of thin media, where bots masquerade as us and vice versa. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Elisa Camahort Page, Rebecca Woodcock, Francine Hardaway, Mary Hodder, and Tina Chase Gillmor.
Producer/director… Read More

 Fifty years ago, when someone heard the word ‘vice,’ they may have thought about the seven deadly sins: envy, wrath, lust, pride, sloth, pride and gluttony. Twenty years ago, they may have thought of the genre-defining television show Miami Vice. Today, you might think about the $4 billion millennial media outlet, Vice Media. Read More

 The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. We’re all familiar with HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, C-3PO from Star Wars and, more recently, Samantha from Her. In written fiction, AI characters show up in stories from writers like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Isaac Asimov. Sometimes it seems like it’s touched on by every writer who has… Read More

 Is the tech industry partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s what John Robb, who’s always worth reading, suggests in a series of recent posts, citing the great Nassim Taleb in support. His vision: “The nation-state as we’ve known it is rapidly hollowing out … this century’s spike in globalization, financialization, and technological change… Read More

 Michael Goguen, a longtime partner at Sequoia Capital who joined the tony Sand Hill Road firm roughly 20 years ago, has been named in an extraordinary breach of contract lawsuit that accuses him of sexually mistreating a woman he met in 2001, then refusing to honor a financial arrangement they made in more recent years to keep her from suing him. Read More

 Living communities and the people who build them are unique, but they share many common threads: a mix of private and community spaces, a set of shared rules and a commitment to friendliness and warmth rather than the anonymity and awkwardness of a typical residential high-rise. Changing the way people live together is an incredibly difficult but high-reward proposition; several groups have… Read More