Category: Tech news

 TechCrunch invites you to our annual Crunch By Crunch Fest party in Austin, Texas. RSVP to come meet our writers while enjoying free drinks and musical performances by live electronic pop wizards Autograf, digital RnB drummer Mobley, angelic songwriter MIEARS, and yacht dance DJs Glassio. It’s going down from noon to 4pm, Sunday March 11th. We’re teaming up with Splash to take over… Read More

 These days, home movies aren’t recorded with handheld video cameras, but rather with our smartphones. Unfortunately, there’s a downside. Our iPhones default to lower quality video so recordings won’t eat up storage space; and while you can adjust that all the way to 4K on newer devices, that would drastically increase your storage consumption. You’d soon receive… Read More

 Sometimes a buzzword gets so overhyped that it deserves some light-hearted mockery. That seems to be the case with “blockchain.” While it’s true that not every industry can benefit from a distributed-ledger technology, the trucking industry most certainly can. Here are the three things I think must happen to make blockchain viable in trucking. Read More

 Researchers took part in the Ski Robot Challenge last month and the resulting videos – essentially quick cuts of robots in ski jackets totally whanging off the gates and spinning out in the powder. The Challenge, run by the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement, is sort of a Winter Olympics for wonky androids. The rules are pretty complex. According to Spectrum: Each robot must… Read More

 The initial hype around bots — applications that run partly or entirely using natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and other AI tech to help consumers ask and answer questions, buy things and get other stuff done — may have waned a bit, but a startup building the equivalent for the enterprise world, in a fast-growing field called robotic process automation,… Read More

 Amazon Prime Video just added a heaping helping of reality TV to its catalog, including multiple seasons of Hell’s Kitchen, River Monsters, Whale Wars, Miami Ink, Survivorman, Hoarding: Buried Alive and a whole lot of other shows that have ruined the once sterling reputations of networks like TLC, A&E and others (via Variety). These shows are pure, unadulterated trash and… Read More

 It’s become a standard part of my Amazon shopping trips that I check the reviews and merchants carefully to make sure I’m not buying a poor-quality counterfeit of the item in question. But not everyone is as suspicious as me — especially when Amazon sells the counterfeit under the official listing for the original. The creators of a popular doodad had this happen to them,… Read More

 When the FCC rolled back net neutrality protections in December, advocates for the free, open internet came out en masse. Although the decision has been made, the fight isn’t over yet, and that’s what FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn reiterated today at the fifth annual Lesbians Who Tech conference at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. “What the FCC did was to depress… Read More

 More intimate than text but easier to record than video, Facebook hopes voice could get people sharing more on its aging social network. And internationally, where users may have to deal with non-native language keyboards, voice lets them speak their mind without a typing barrier. Read More

 I’ve been messing around with LED-embedded guitars since the original GTar. Designed to help beginners learn and players look like all supersonic freakadelic on stage, they have quickly become commonplace if expensive. Now Fret Zealot has something that can turn your guitar into a laser light show in a few minutes. Designed as an $199 add-on to any acoustic or electric guitar, this… Read More

 Earlier this morning Samsung’s Galaxy S9’s camera was awarded the highest-yet score from DxOMark, and now its screen gets the best-of-all-time nod from DisplayMate and display wonk Ray Soneira. The margins between the victor and the vanquished, however, are growing thinner every generation. Read More

 The growing popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will lead to an explosion in voice-based shopping, according to a new market research report from OC&C Strategy Consultants out this week. The firm is bullishly predicting that voice shopping will grow to a whopping $40 billion-plus in 2022, up from $2 billion today across the U.S. and the U.K. This sizable increase… Read More

Everything you need to know about the struggle to treat information on the internet the same—ISPs shouldn’t be able to block some sorts of data and prioritize others.

The Tesla-fighting sports car will be able to charge its battery using a network of 800-volt fast chargers Porsche is installing around the country.

Assuming the 11,500-pound spacecraft makes it into geostationary orbit safely, it’ll go by GOES-17.