Between the portal to hell opening in our comments section, Elon Musk’s AI demons, and metallic 3D printed guns, it’s been a scary Halloween week here at TechCrunch. We give you our best stories of the week (10/25-10/31).
1. During an interview at an MIT symposium, Elon Musk answered a question that took an unexpected turn. When asked about his views on artificial intelligence, Musk replied that AI is “our biggest existential threat” and that by building AI, we’re “summoning the demon.” But is he really that crazy for encouraging regulation of AI tech?
2. CurrentC is the big retailers clunky attempt to kill Apple Pay and credit card fees. Oh, and they got hacked. Unauthorized third parties obtained email addresses of some of CurrentC pilot program participants and other individuals who had expressed interest in the app. Consequently, there are now a slew of 1 star App Store ratings for CurrentC came.
3. More than four years ago, Steve Jobs declared war on Flash and heralded HTML5 as the way to go. It was just this week that the W3C declared HTML5 standard officially complete. Now, the W3C will immediately start fixing bugs, but most importantly, work on HTML 5.1.
4. Virgin Galactic spaceplane SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight due to an “in flight anomaly.” SpaceShipTwo was designed primarily for space tourism, meant to carry passengers high enough to experience near-weightlessness – however this flight only carried two pilots; one of them unfortunately died in the crash [Story still developing].
5. Andrew Conrad, Google’s head of life sciences, took to the stage at the Wall Street Journal Digital conference to reveal a wearable device that couples with nanotechnology to detect disease within the body that the Google[x] lab has been working on. This could make detecting cancer as easy as popping a pill in the future.
6. Earnings came in for a number of companies, and GoPro’s shares were pretty for company investors. Twitter fell 10% in after hours trading – and no amount of short-term growth will make up for slower long-term potential revenue growth. For the ninth consecutive quarter, Facebook beat earnings projections, but user growth rates are slowing down. The most interesting part of Facebook’s earnings call was the first public release about WhatsApp’s financials. Things are looking good for Apple as its stock prices hit a record high. Alex Wilhelm also did a thorough analysis of Microsoft.
7. Apple CEO Tim Cook contributed a thoughtful piece to Businessweek, stating that he is “proud to be gay.” He explains that even though privacy is something he values in his personal life, he is happy to be publicly open about his own sexuality if it helps others struggling with their identity or discrimination based on sexual orientation.
8. A lot of news happened on the wearable tech front. Google released its Fit App for Android devices, which allows users to see all of their collected health and fitness data in one central location. We introduced you to the latest from Fitbit, the Charge, Charge HR, and the Surge, and Microsoft leaked its own fitness band, the Microsoft Band.
9. Solid Concepts, a company known for 3D printing with metal has released their second 3D printed gun, called the Reason, sparking the guns and 3D printing debate once again. The model has part of the Declaration of Independence written on the barrel, and seems more rugged and safer to fire.
10. We’ve known that Google was working on updating its bookmarking service, previously called Google Stars, for some time now. This week, Google launched the Stars interface for the “Chrome Bookmark Manager” extension on the Chrome Web store. Users can now use Google’s search tech to find bookmarks within their starred pages and folders, and share these bookmarks with friends.
11. Kyle Russell wrote about Kim Kardashian West’s on-stage interview at the Code/Mobile conference that detailed oversharing, adopting new platforms and the reality TV and social media star’s affinity for BlackBerry. And the portal to hell opened on our comment section – which Alexia responded to in her article “Why Is Kim Kardashian At A Tech Conference?!”
In other news, a number of job openings at Magic Leap shed some light on the hardware they are using, we were able to visualize what the Apple Watch interface looks like on an iPhone, and we took a look at a smart coffeemaker that can remember your order and prepare your coffee through an app. To wrap things up, check out the Ambulance Drone with a built-in defibrillator that can fly to the rescue.