John Biggs

East Coast Editor

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch.

Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.

posted 4 hours ago

Why MakerBot Is Like Apple

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When we first discovered that Makerbot was looking to partner with Stratasys I was a bit non-plussed. Makerbot, as I’ve noted before, has a certain indie cred that makes this move a bit unpalatable. → Read More

posted 12 hours ago

The Open Source RepRap Simpson 3D Printer Design Reduces Friction, Uses Less “Vitamins”

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This is the Grounded Experimental Delta 3D printer aka the Simpson, a project built by computer science teacher Nicholas Seward that does away with the excess frames, pulleys, and hardware associated with earlier models. Seward wanted a machine that could print itself and used “less vitamins,” namely metal parts that the machine couldn’t create from scratch. There are still motors and controllers… → Read More

posted 13 hours ago

A $100 Watch Can Tell If You’ve Had Too Much To Drink

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The Japanese watch company Tokyoflash has long turned heads with their odd (if unreadable) designs but in a first they’ve added a breathalyzer to their Kisai watch, thereby allowing you to see just how drunk you’ve gotten at la Jetée. → Read More

posted yesterday

The Offline Glass Ensures You Talk, Not Text, At The Bar

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Tired of your friends texting on their phones while they should be getting schnockered? This clever hack is called the Offline Glass and it’s designed to ensure that you and your friends don’t sit at the bar checking Wikipedia for who starred in The Greatest American Hero and whether Tabitha will totally come out tonight oh my god she won’t she and Christian just broke up oh god she’s with Raul… → Read More

posted yesterday

Reminder: TechCrunch Is Hitting The Balkans In Less Than A Month

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Dobro utro, zdravo, and pozdravi, friends! In an effort to spread the good word about TC to the rest of Europe, I will be rolling through Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana at the beginning of July for a series of informal meet-ups. If you’re in those cities, I want you to attend! → Read More

posted yesterday

Goji Is A Smart Lock For Your Home That Has Nothing To Do With Berries

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Welcome to the era of the round, shiny in-home automation system. While Nest led the charge early on, a new device, called Goji, is taking up the mantle. The Goji is an automatic deadbolt that looks like HAL 2000′s eye and can take pictures of folks who come to your door and allows you to lock – and unlock – your door anywhere in the world. → Read More

June 17th, 2013

If You Watch One Daft Punk Remix Performed By Robots (And Jack Conte) Today, Make It This One

Jack Conte, musician and founder of Patreon, has been on a tear lately with a set of unique music remixes performed by him and a group of pneumatic robots that fire off audio sequences to create some amazing music. → Read More

June 17th, 2013

Living In The Future With The Form Labs Form 1

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” wrote William Gibson. He’s right. Luckily, the future is mostly in my attic workshop.

I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a Form 1 3D printer for the past week and have come away with a better sense of the platform, the way forward of 3D printing in general and Form 1 in particular. In short, the Form 1 is one of the… → Read More

June 17th, 2013

Meet DotEEBubble, The Mysterious Estonian Startup Critic Who Throws Cold Water On Government-Backed Ventures

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DotEEBubble is one of the most controversial startup blogs in the world and you’ve probably never heard of it. In the rah-rah world of entrepreneurs, accelerators, and incubators, it’s rare to see much talk about the problems with the government funded VC model and how the biggest players look more like scamsters than bootstrapping entrepreneurs. That’s just what this blog is – a cold, hard look… → Read More

June 16th, 2013

Thanks, Dads

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My father put together a Heathkit shortwave radio in his youth. The radio is still there in my childhood home. He’s still alive so this isn’t saccharine reminisces of a man who passed. Dad still sits in that room with the radio, the radio still works, his hands pound away at the Internet all day now, the radio forgotten but still as vital as the day he built it. My Dad is a little less vital, but… → Read More

June 15th, 2013

Up Close With Casio’s Latest Edifice Surf Watch

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With summer coming and surf season in full swing, I thought I’d take a closer look at the Casio EMA100-1AV Edifice watch with tide graph and moon-phase data. Casio is best known for their G-Shock line of beefy (and some would say ugly) plastic sports watches so this steel-cased model is a departure for the brand. Casio announced the watch in April and it is on sale now for $250. → Read More

June 14th, 2013

Teenage Musician Uses The Crowdfunded Loog Guitar To Crowdfund Her Album

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When we last left off with the Loog Guitar by Rafael Atijas it had blown past its funding goals on Kickstarter in early 2011 and shipped with much fanfare making it one of the first successful Kickstarter projects on our radar. In the interim it’s become a mini-phenomenon and, most important, people have started using the three-stringed instruments to record albums. → Read More

June 14th, 2013

Disrupt SF Is Around The Corner So Submit Your Startup Battlefield Applications By June 19th

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TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back! We’re very excited to announce tickets are on sale and that companies in stealth mode can apply for Startup Battlefield for until Wednesday, the 19. After that, we’re pulling the plug on submissions. You have less than a week.

This September 7-11, we’re bringing Disrupt back to San Francisco to welcome an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential… → Read More

June 13th, 2013

Makerbot Updates Their Design Software And Firmware To Make 3D Printing Easier

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Makerbot, besides making a darn nice printer, offers some amazing software for laying out and printing objects. Their product, Makerware, is free to download and use and supports some other 3D printers including the FlashForge. The new software adds some interesting features to the package including improved support structures and rafts. → Read More

June 13th, 2013

Disrupt Darling Trustev Wins Europe’s Top Startup Award

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An EU Commission has named Trustev as the EU’s Top Startup, a prestigious honor that places the company head and shoulders above thousands of applicants. They announced the win at the Finder’s Forum in London. → Read More

June 13th, 2013

Amazon Creates A 3D Printing Store, Vaulting The Technology Into The Mainstream

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If you thought you and your RepRap were safe from posers, you’re sunk: Amazon has just opened a store for 3D printers and printer accessories that seems to, at the very least, allow smaller manufacturers to get a foothold in an increasingly tight market. → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Alabama-Based CMR Demos Programmable Magnets That Changes Polarity And Strength On A Whim

Magnets are pretty basic – some poles attract, some repel, and you can use them to hold stuff up on your fridge. However, what happens when magnets can be “programmed” to react in different ways? Huntsville, Ala.-based Correlated Magnetics Research has some magnets that can do some amazing – and slightly spooky – things. → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Reminder: Sign Up For The Balkans Mini Pitch-Off

tc balkans

Are you in Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia? Have I got a treat for you. In an effort to spread the good word about TC in the rest of Europe, I will be rolling through Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana at the beginning of July for a series of informal meet-ups. If you’re in those cities, I want you to attend! → Read More

June 11th, 2013

Is PRISM Precipitating A Bitcoin Sell-Off?

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Bitcoin has experienced a fairly massive drop in value over the weekend and into this week, moving from a peak of $118 on June 7 to a low of $89 on June 9. While precipitous drops and dizzying highs aren’t unusual for the cryptocurrency, BTC watchers are pointing to the PRISM and NSA leaks as a cause for this weekend’s massive dip. → Read More

June 11th, 2013

This Mechanical, 3D-Printed Entabulator Is An Amazing Tribute To The Power Of Clockwork

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As a lover of all things mechanical, I’m in awe of Chris Fenton’s Entabulator. Using an old book on mechanical loom-making, a 3D printer, and some serious patience he engineered a computer that can read a program off of punch cards and, in this case, calculate the Fibonacci sequence. The machine runs using a hand crank (Fenton notes you can overclock it by cranking faster) and it is quite finicky… → Read More

June 11th, 2013

Who Won E3?

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By now we’ve heard most of what the big three have had to say. Nintendo is holding the line with the Wii U, Microsoft has announced an always-on box for $499, and Sony has made nice with gamers by offering a $399 device that allows users to share and sell games. All of the consoles are HD, all of them support multi-player, and the console wars are essentially over. Each console is a permutation of… → Read More

June 10th, 2013

Are You Ready For The Seattle Meetup And Pitch-Off On July 18?

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You may associate TechCrunch with the sunny climes of Northern California, but we’re ready to make it rain. We’re bringing our TC Meetups + Pitch-Off to the great, tech-centric city of Seattle. You can expect beer, great conversation, and a battle to the death to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under sixty seconds. I mentioned there would be beer, right? → Read More

June 10th, 2013

Apple Slips Default Bing Integration Into iOS 7

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In an odd, throwaway line, Apple’s Eddy Cue mentioned that Siri, the voice control app for iOS 7, will let you search directly in “Bing.” In fact, the absence of Google was quite noticeable, reduced to a mention in the iWork portion of the event that the new web apps would work with Chrome. → Read More

June 10th, 2013

Apple (Finally) Updates The Mac Pro

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In a dramatic reveal on stage at WWDC 2013, Phil Schiller brought forth a new Mac Pro saying to the assembled faithful: “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” This new Intel Xeon machine with up to 12 core configs has a central thermal core and superfast memory support. It is double the performance of the previous Mac Pro generations. → Read More

June 10th, 2013

Apple’s iBooks App Comes To The OS X Desktop

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Apple has just announced the availability of iBooks, Apple’s 1.8 million title online bookstore, on their new version of OS X, Mavericks. The new app will allow you to read purchased books and textbooks right from the desktop and purchase titles on the fly. → Read More

June 10th, 2013

Microsoft Announces Updated Xbox 360 And Vows To Maintain Gamer Support Through The Xbox One Launch

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Microsoft announced their Xbox 360 in 2005 and has maintained the console for most of a decade. Today the company announced an updated version of the console that mirrors the look and feel of the upcoming, next-generation Xbox One. The new console is “small, sleek, and quiet” and eschews some of the curved surfaces of the original model. → Read More

June 8th, 2013

We Asked For This

happyface

There is a certain jollity in the reactions of the webby class to news that the NSA has been, first, spying on Verizon communications for years, and second has approached multiple information-gathering startups, hat in hand, asking for access to their data stores. It is indeed funny: faceless bureaucrats who, we are certain, can barely click the Start menu, are horking down data from America’s Can… → Read More

June 8th, 2013

Zazzle Pulls Fake NSA PRISM Program T-Shirt For Intellectual Property Infringement

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Turn on your radio-activated tooth fillings and cover your windows in aluminum foil because someone – no one knows who, for sure – has asked that Gawker writer Max Read’s homemade NSA PRISM t-shirts be removed from the Internet. Read created the t-shirts as a joke, selling a grand total of three items before Zazzle shut down his store after citing “infringement claims.” → Read More

June 7th, 2013

The Deep Space Tourbillon Is A One-Off, Handmade Watch That Will Take You To Infinity And Beyond

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As you may well know, the tourbillon is one of the hardest (and most expensive) complications to build and only the very rich and very obsessed can afford them. This watch, however, may be just the ticket if you’re a hardcore Trekkie and you just hit a liquidity event. → Read More

June 7th, 2013

Your Arduino Is In My Android Device! UDOO Mixes It Up With An All-In-One Solution

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For most beginning hardware hackers, Arduino is hard and Linux/Android is easy. The folks at UDOO, a Kickstarter project that ends tonight, aim to solve that by mixing the best of both worlds. The UDOO device contains an ARM processor (dual or quad core) as well as an Arduino microprocessor. This allows you to program the Arduino using the tools you’re familiar with including a standard embedded… → Read More