Category: Tech news

 The first trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi reassured us that we were finally going to hear Luke Skywalker’s voice again — even if it was only so he could tell us that it was time for the Jedi to end. The new trailer (which was released on a Monday evening because football) shifts its focus to Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren — basically, the… Read More

 A report from Deadline says that Apple is walking away from a Weinstein Company-produced series on Elvis, in light of the recent harassment allegations surrounding co-founder Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein has since been fired from The Weinstein Company.
A source close to Apple confirmed the cancellation with TechCrunch.
According to Deadline, “the Elvis project was in very early… Read More

 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that his company is working with the American Red Cross to target aid efforts in Puerto Rico using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to identify areas to deliver aid. Read More

 Who loves a good niche? We sure as hell do. And we also love niche products that address those niche problems — especially tech niches. So here we are, with Today in Good Niche Things. This time it’s a small little thing on the internet that sends you a rejection letter from Y Combinator before you even had a chance to apply to Y Combinator. It, instead, will send you a… Read More

 AMP — Google’s collaborative project to speed up the loading time for mobile web pages — is getting an interesting acceleration of its own today. Relay Media, a company founded by an ex-Googler that had developed technology to help covert web pages to the AMP format, has been acquired by Google. Read More

 Following a mass shooting in Las Vegas earlier this month that left 58 people dead and hundreds injured, YouTube is removing video tutorials demonstrating how to make rifles more deadly using a device called a “bump stock.” Read More

 TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield Australia (Nov. 16 in Sydney) is approaching fast, and the fifteen finalists, selected from 272 applicants, have just received the good news. The names of those companies will remain under wraps until the day of the show, and over the next five weeks TechCrunch’s Battlefield team and our partner Elevacao will be working closely with the founders… Read More

 Microsoft signed an agreement with GE today to purchase every last bit of the wind energy from GE’s brand-new 37-megawatt Tullahennel wind farm located in County Kerry, Ireland for the next 15 years. This is a big deal on several levels. First of all, it means Microsoft will be using a clean energy source to power at least some of its cloud data centers in Ireland. That will likely result… Read More

 Amazon is buying a lot of companies and spending many billions of dollars. The above is a brand, which sells burgers, that apparently wants some money from Amazon. We think.
We’re not ENTIRELY sure this is a great or efficient way to deploy capital. We also think Jeff Bezos should buy a coffee shop before it buys anything else. Read More

 The tech which enables the iPhone X’s new Face ID feature may be coming to the 2018 iPad Pro line, a report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests. The note sent to investors and reported by MacRumors and 9to5mac suggests that the TrueDepth Camera system will be available on all of the “high-end” iOS devices by year’s end. This is more of an inevitability… Read More

 Researchers at the Imperial College London’s Aerial Robotics Laboratory have created the SpiderMAV – a robot that stabilizes itself by shooting out multiple strands of rope that can stick to magnetic surfaces. The drone, which is a standard quadcopter, has a built-in rope gun that blasts out little connectors. The drone then pulls against the ropes, stabilizing itself in flight.… Read More

 On this week’s Technotopia I talked to Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante, the co-creators of Arduino. This pair of Italian artists saw their little single-board computers as a gateway to high-tech art but they’ve essentially created a world in which anyone – from an 11-year-old hacker to a huge corporation – can make amazing hardware in a few hours.
The pair recently… Read More

 Zume has long had grand ambitions for its food automation service, and the Mountain View-based startup is now $48 million closer to that goal, courtesy of a new series B. The funding, first spotted by CNBC, was detailed in an SEC filing, alongside the company’s plans to raise a total of $50 million. Cofounders/co-CEOs Julia Collins and Alex Garden confirmed the round this morning with… Read More

 Waymo is working with a number of organizations on a new self-driving education campaign to help answer questions the public has about autonomous vehicles and technology. The program is designed to provide easily accessible info that offers answers to questions including “are self-driving cars safe?” and “how do they know what to do?” and it includes participation… Read More

 Laundryheap is a London-headquartered laundry on-demand startup that has taken a different path to competitors such as Laundrapp and Rocket Internet’s Zipjet. Rather than raise VC funding, the company, which claims to already be break even and is operational in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Dublin and Dubai, has been entirely bootstrapped over the last three years. Read More