Category: Tech news

 Machine learning techniques excel at doing a good-enough job quickly in situations where there’s lots of data to grind through. It turns out that’s a great fit for backlogs of plant samples at herbariums and other repositories around the world, which have millions of the things waiting to be digitized and identified — including some that may be new to science. Read More

 U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is concluding his tech tour of the West Coast today with a visit to Google’s Mountain View campus. Mattis spent time at Amazon and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, earlier in the week. His key takeaway from all the socializing with tech leaders is that the Department of Defense needs to embrace technology coming out of the private sector… Read More

 In what is rapidly devolving into an all-out brawl on the board of the world’s highest-valued private company, a group of Uber shareholders have asked the venture capital firm Benchmark to step down from the board of directors. This move comes only a day after Benchmark took the aggressive step of filing suit against Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick. Read More

This week: Disney ditches Netflix, bundles await, and Facebook makes TV now.

 Facebook has acquired a German company called Fayteq that builds software add-ons for video editing that can remove and add whole objects from captured video using computer vision. The acquisition was first reported by a German startup publication (via Variety) and confirmed to TechCrunch, and could be useful as Facebook pursues additional video filter creation technology, both for its live… Read More

 Y Combinator backed Plasticity is tackling the problem of getting software systems to better understand text, using deep learning models trained to understand what they’re reading on Wikipedia articles — and offering an API for developers to enhance their own interfaces. Read More

 From Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick getting sued by his company’s lynchpin investors at Benchmark to Google’s struggles with a recently fired employee over a gender diversity screed that went viral, it’s been a wild week in tech. Meanwhile, Snap and Blue Apron both reported disappointing earnings — something we discuss in this week’s episode of the… Read More

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Intel is building its own cars, Disney owns 75% of BAMTech and Anker comes out with a $35 Echo Dot knock-off. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Nextdoor, the social media platform for neighborhoods, is rolling out a real estate listings feature, showcasing housing for sale in local communities. The idea is to formalize behavior that’s been happening organically. The feature isn’t just for those looking to buy homes — it also aims to help users assess the changing real estate prices in their respective communities. Read More

 When AWS today became a full-fledged member of the container standards body, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it represented a significant milestone. By joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and just about every company that matters in the space, AWS has acknowledged that when it comes to container management, standards matter. Read More

 Facebook has a new home for original video content produced exclusively for it by partners, who will earn 55 percent of ad break revenue while Facebook keeps 45 percent. The “Watch” tab and original shows will start rolling out to a small group of U.S. users tomorrow on mobile, desktop and Facebook’s TV apps. Read More

 Subscription streaming service Seeso will be shutting down later this year. The NBCUniversal-owned service made the announcement today on Facebook. It was revealed earlier that several Seeso originals, including HarmonQuest and My Brother My Brother and Me, will be moving to Vrv, a gamer- and geek-focused streaming video service from digital media company Ellation. Read More