Category: Tech news

Laser-shooting sensors are a key component of self-driving cars. But we can also use them to defeat our enemies.

 In a hearing today before the Senate Banking Committee, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo opened up about what the near-term U.S. regulatory fate of cryptocurrency might look like. In a week of plunging prices and bad news, the hearing struck a tone that coin watchers could interpret as surprisingly optimistic. Read More

 Placements.io says it’s helping online publishers get paid on time for ads. Placements.io offers a system for publishers to manage ad inventory, orders, payments and billing, all across multiple sales channels. It also integrates with a variety of different adtech systems. Read More

 SpaceX now has a live feed of its Mars-bound simulated astronaut, a dummy wearing the private space company’s new crew uniform. There are cameras mounted on the Tesla Roadster the dummy is “driving,” which was the primary payload for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch, which went off almost perfectly as planned by SpaceX earlier today. Read More

 David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the writers who turned George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels into a television phenomenon, will be writing and producing a new series of Star Wars films. Read More

 Netgear announced this afternoon that it plans to spin off its Arlo wing into a standalone business. The networking hardware giant’s board of directors has unanimously approved the decision and plans to have the separation to be completed by the second half of this year.
Netgear is planning an IPO as part of the process, issuing less than 20-percent of common stock in the process and… Read More

The Falcon Heavy rocket is now the most powerful launch vehicle in the world.

 Snapchat is starting to turn things around, boosting its sluggish user growth rate and beating Wall Street’s expectations for the first time with today’s blockbuster Q4 2017 earnings report. It added 8.9 million daily active users, to reach 187 million, with a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 5.05 percent percent in Q4, compared to 2.9 percent in Q3. Read More

 Evan Frank was five years old when he first knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. While attending kindergarten, Frank crafted books and sold them to his teacher at a nickel to a dime a piece. “There was always this desire to build stuff,” he explained to me, and also clearly a desire to make some money on those projects, to boot. Read More

 The actual negotiation of venture rounds remains unnecessarily murky. First-time entrepreneurs are often at a loss for mapping the business values they hold to specific terms during a negotiation. Moreover, many wonder what terms even come up for discussion and why VCs and entrepreneurs may care about a particular term, but barely mention another. Read More

 SpaceX has had a very good first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heavy-lift orbital vehicle that can carry twice the weight of its closest competition in active operation. The massive, three-booster rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as planned on Tuesday at 1:30 PM EST, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A. This is a historic moment for SpaceX, since it has… Read More

 SpaceX is test launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, the first ever launch of the new heavy-lift orbital rocket. The Heavy’s thrust is generated by its 27 Merlin engines, which is three times the number of engines you’d find in the current Falcon 9 rocket. Update: After a few delays due to high winds, the launch is currently scheduled for 12:45pm Pacific. The livestream above should… Read More

 Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung have all been working hard to create their own standard to control all the connected devices around your home. Mozilla just announced that anybody can now create an open gateway to control the internet of things. The organization also confirmed that it is still working on a set of frameworks and open standards so that we don’t end up with an internet… Read More

 Google’s Motion Stills video/gif editing app is getting an augmented reality upgrade, with the app bringing some of the fun from AR Stickers on the Pixel 2 to a bevy of Android devices. Read More

 Roc Nation, the full-service entertainment management company created by the music impresario Shawn Carter (better known as JAY-Z), is making an investment in financial trading platform Robinhood. The investment, through Roc Nation’s Arrive subsidiary, is the latest instance of a celebrity rapper plowing cash into Robinhood’s free-to-trade investment platform. Read More