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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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