Japan-based tech startup ITK has brought us one step closer to the Robocalypse. Roboticists around the world are working on manufacturing “sensitive” hands for robots suitable for touching humans or handling breakable objects, a problem that’s notoriously difficult to solve.
ITK is now throwing their hat into the ring with Handroid a new model that seems to be one of the most advanced robot… → Read More
I’ve never really been a fan of all the special add-ons and accessories sold alongside electronics. In my opinion, a nice solid case is as far as phone/tablet accessories should go. But at a meeting with Logitech recently, a couple of iPad accessories definitely caught my eye.
Both are very different in nature — one’s for gaming while the other is more of a utility device — but… → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
It’s been a camera-ish day today. Canon released its new Powershot cameras early this morning, Sony just updated its Alpha and NEX lines, and now here we have a bundle of Nikons just coming out. Do they plan it like this, to make things difficult for us bloggers just trying to relax on a warm Tuesday night?
Well, let’s get on with it. I’ll make it quick for you. Some of these are actually quite… → Read More
This afternoon Y Combinator kicked off the summer session of Demo Day, the twice-a-year event where the prestigious startup incubator showcases its latest batch of companies in front of a throng of investors.
And wow, was this one a doozy. 63 companies — easily besting Y Combinator’s previous record of 43 — took the stage today for rapid-fire, 2 minute presentations that lasted three and… → Read More
It’s been difficult to avoid news about Sony’s new line of digital cameras these past few months. Leak after leak has exposed body designs, lenses, sensor sizes, and other specs. They’re all official now, though, and while I won’t subject you to a case-by-case analysis of which rumors were on and off, I will say they were mostly on the money. The new gear looks very promising, as well.
Let’s… → Read More
The latest version of Yahoo Mail opened up to users a few months ago and the company is announcing a new milestone today—100 million monthly active users.
Additional features in the new version of Yahoo Mail include integrated notifications and messages from Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and other email providers within the interface. Yahoo has also made the client more customizable with 50… → Read More
The threat of corruption is ever-present in areas like government spending, where miles of red tape, billions in assets, and a legitimate need for secrecy at times presents a potential trifecta for would-be defrauders. Slovenia, only a few notches lower than the of course upstanding USA on 2010′s corruption perceptions index, is no nest of vipers, but as a country in transition from communism… → Read More
An anonymous blogger known only as S.H. has been posting detailed daily descriptions of the robot-based disaster response effort at Fukushima. The blog included technical details and personal anecdotes, but nothing sensitive to national security. In early July, however, the blog was discontinued and later deleted altogether. The videos S.H. had uploaded to YouTube were made private. The origin of… → Read More
Curious to find out the possible thinking behind HP’s recent actions, we began to look at the parallels in past behavior by tech giant HP. The most interesting example comes from VoodooPC, one of the first high-end gaming PCs for the mass market. Led by Rahul Sood, HP bought VoodooPC in 2006 and the last product to come out of that branch was launched in 2009.
In short, we wanted to know if HP… → Read More
Personal profile startup About.me, which is owned by our parent company AOL, is looking for the ‘face of About.me’ and is kicking off a contest to feature profiles housed on the site in a new ad campaign.
For background, About.me offers people free profile pages. On your dedicated profile page, can include your name, bio and links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites that have… → Read More
Earlier today, for reasons too egotistical to go in to, I found myself looking back at the columns I wrote for the Guardian back in 2003.
Inevitably, with industries as fast moving as media and technology, my 23-year-old self made a whole load of terrible predictions. I dismissed the fad of “cameraphones”, for example, but was bullish on red-button Interactive TV.
One prediction I’m happy to… → Read More
After spending far too much time with far too little support from their owners at Condé Nast, Reddit is on a bit of a roll lately. They’ve gone on a handful of hiring sprees this year, moved into a bigger, better office… and now, they’ve made their first acquisition: RedditGifts.
For the non-Redditors out there (yeah, yeah, Narwhal bacons at Midnight and all that), RedditGifts is a… → Read More
In what might (really) be the last Why Is This News before Sarah’s baby gets out of private beta, we’re talking about democracy.
Specifically, we discuss the news that India wants to monitor its citizen’s private messages while Brazil is freezing Google’s local accounts in a tussle over anonymity — and we ask: “wait, aren’t those countries supposed to be democracies?” It’s almost as if privacy… → Read More
MakerBot Industries, creator of home 3D printers, has announced a total of $10 million in funding from a number of investors, the bulk coming from Foundry Group. Also included in the round were Bezos Expeditions, True Ventures, and RRE, along with a dozen or so angel investors.
The company started in 2009 with around $75,000 in seed money, and since then has put together and sold some 5200 of… → Read More
On Sunday we broke the news that Skype was acquiring group messaging service GroupMe. What we didn’t know was the price, and neither company disclosed any of the terms of the deal other than that GroupMe would remain a standalone brand for now, and the team would stay in New York.
A widely spread report said that Skype paid as much as $85 million for the year-old company. We’ve heard this… → Read More
It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.
Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round… → Read More
Surprise! Even a clever little gimmick like a dedicated Facebook button can’t save a bad phone from an early demise.
After just 36 days on the shelves, a trusted source close to AT&T tells us the carrier is already prepping to ditch HTC’s so-called “Facebook Phone”, the Status. The reason? The thing just isn’t selling. → Read More
As we once again enter the iPhone 5 breach, one would do well to keep their grains of salt at the ready, but the Business Insider reports that Sprint will be among the few carriers to sell the iPhone 5. → Read More
Back in March, after at least one high profile security incident, Twitter created an option to turn on HTTPS at all times. But you could only enable the more secure way of viewing twitter.com by manually selecting it in your profile (or typing “https://” each time you went to Twitter). Starting today, the service is beginning to enable HTTPS by default.
At first, this will only be enabled for a… → Read More
Backing up data is getting more and more important, since although much of our critical stuff is in the cloud, we’re all generating so many pictures, videos, documents and so on that it’s wise to keep a local copy. Many people use external drives to back up, which is fine, but if you want any automated stuff, or server capabilities, you have to update to a network-attached storage system, and they… → Read More
Hell has frozen over, pigs have flown, and it’s now possible to approve photos you’ve been tagged in on Facebook before they show up in your profile.
Pause. Take a drink if you need to. If you hear fireworks in the streets this morning, you know why.
In what amounts to a kitchen-sink of fixes, tweaks, and new terminology, Facebook is rolling out a new update this week that’s setting… → Read More
It was only a year ago that I first wrote about Greplin, the “other half of search” for you online life. It’s an incredibly useful search engine that indexes your online email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Calendar, Dropbox and other stuff (22 services are currently supported). Greplin is a single search box for all of this, and it’s fast.
Until now, though, you had to use the HTML5 site for… → Read More
There are now 30,000 mobile applications available for Windows Phone, Microsoft’s newest mobile operating system. That’s a huge jump from the 11,500 apps Microsoft reported back in March, but still far short of industry leaders, iOS and Android. For comparison purposes, there are 425,000 iOS apps and over 250,000 on Android, at least according to the latest official reports. But 30K apps isn’t… → Read More
Remember when the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was the hottest thing since Laserdisc? Remember when it was hailed as an iPad killer with its fancy IPS screen, low price and sweet name. Autobots, unite! Well, Walmart is currently selling it for $350, which puts it at the low-end of the Honeycomb tab price scale. Jokes aside, it’s actually a great deal for an Android tablet. → Read More
There are quite a few iOS productivity apps with handwriting recognition functionality available, for example Notes Plus, iWriteWords for kids, or (indirectly) Evernote. But recognizing handwritten text isn’t trivial, which is why a new app called 7notes (iPad: free, $8.99 premium/iPhone: free, $4.99 premium) focuses almost entirely on this problem – and does the job really well. → Read More
Flipboard-esque magazine-style aggregation apps are all the rage right now. Obviously Flipboard has the space nailed, and Pulse is a nice alternative as well. But one aggregation app seems to have caught the attention of a big name news publication — Zite.
The same company that once had a mailbox full of cease-and-desist notices from beastly publications like the Washington Post and AP… → Read More
Have you ever wanted to recreate the kitchen scene in Goodfellas from a very low angle with Lego characters? Well, here’s your chance to create your own diminished steadicam shots using a GorillaPod tripod and four wacky little wheels called CineSkates. These wheels allow for slow tracking shots, “worms-eye” views, and smooth rotations. You can also pan across a scene with the wheels.
The… → Read More
As we heard last year, Ask surrendered its search operations to its competitors and refocused on building out its Q&A platform. This seems to have paid off somewhat—the company has seen over 1 million downloads of its iPhone app. Mobile, specifically, has been a growth area for the Q&A platform, with a 100 percent increase in visits to Ask.com from smart phones over the last year (mobile… → Read More
YouWeb, the social incubator behind OpenFeint, CrowdStar, Sibblingz and iSwifter, has raised another $2 million in funding from a number of angel investors including Dave Roux (the co-founder and chairman of Silver Lake Partners, Dave Whorton (the founder of Tugboat Ventures), Praful Shah, Brett Wander, Winston Cho and YouWeb founder Peter Relan. The company had previously raised $700,000 in… → Read More
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