This week’s tech news included dog-like robots, a high tech cruise ship and Samsung’s eavesdropping TV. These are the stories to catch you up on the world of tech from the past week (2/7-2/13).
1. SpaceX successfully launched DSCOVR, a satellite designed to go about four times further from the Earth than the moon, and then provide whole-disc imagery of Earth.
2. President Obama asked for more collaboration and the open sharing of information between the private sector companies and the U.S. government at the White House Cybersecurity Summit at Stanford.
3. Google subsidiary Boston Dynamics posted videos of a smaller dog-like robot named Spot, which weighs around 160 lbs, has an electric powerhouse and can recover from the shock impact of kicks from unfeeling humans.
4. Xiaomi President Lin Bin and VP Hugo Barra gave their pitch to Silicon Valley at the W Hotel in San Francisco. Kyle Russell covered the event live.
5. Josh Constine wrote about the potential surrounding Apple’s streaming music service that will come out later this year in “Apple, The Record Label?”
6. Facebook announced the addition of a new feature for Facebook Groups designed to make it easier for members of a “For Sale” group to list their items.
7. We covered the new Tactus Phorm, an iPad mini case that can generate physical keys from a flat surface on demand, giving you a smooth, unbroken surface for general touch-based interaction, and a physical keyboard when you need one.
8. Natasha Lomas wrote an article about Samsung’s eavesdropping TV, and how when it comes to the Internet of Things, companies building ‘smart’ services need to be thinking about privacy by design.
9. Yelp bought Eat24, a food delivery business that competes with GrubHub and Delivery.com.
10. Mattel’s venerable View-Master, the stereoscopic photo viewer so familiar to kids, is now using Google Cardboard Virtual Reality technology to bring life to those old 3D images.
11. Snoop Dogg’s tech investing career seems to have taken off recently. The rapper, youth football coach and marijuana aficionado is putting together a fund specifically to invest in weed startups.
12. TechCrunch Makers was lucky enough to be given a tour of the IT room of a high-tech cruise ship.
13. In “Startups, A Rich Man’s Game,” Danny Crichton calls attention to the topic of financial inequality when it comes to startup founders.
14. AI-powered remote control car maker Anki unveiled Anki Overdrive, the next generation of its play sets that lets you create your own tracks from various tiles.
15. Voltera, an electronics printer that allows you to print your own circuitboards and a Hardware Battlefield winner, launched on Kickstarter.
