Brian Heater
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.
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Ripcord’s $40 million Series B will pay for more file digitizing robots and human jobs
Bay Area startup Ripcord just scored a $40 million Series B, following its successful launch earlier this year. By all accounts, the company has apparently hit the ground running with its decidedly unsexy goal of using robots to digitize paper records for large corporations and organizations. According to CEO Alex Fielding, Ripcord already has a number of Fortune 100 companies on board… Read More
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Samsung Galaxy Note 4 refurbished batteries get recalled due to overheating concerns
This is probably the last bit of news Samsung wanted to pop up in headlines in the weeks leading up to the Note 8 launch. Though, to be fair, this latest battery recall isn’t on Samsung. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a recall for refurbished Galaxy Note 4 batteries. However, the fault appears to fall at the feet of potentially counterfeited batteries supplied by FedEx. Read More
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What Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are doing to tackle hate speech
For all the talk about the internet as a great uniter across geographical and ideological divides, it’s just as often used as a tool to deepen divides, as many users are content to stay within their ideological echo chambers. There’s no easy fix, but when hateful rhetoric begins to manifest itself as real-world violence, a failure to take a stand moves beyond theoretical. Read More
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Intel CEO Brian Krzanich will discuss the future of artificial intelligence and more at Disrupt SF
From smart assistants like Alexa and Siri to the latest bleeding edge advancements in robotics, there’s no buzzier buzzwords in the tech world than artificial intelligence. The topic of AI has been a primary focus for Intel’s Brian Krzanich, as he works to expand the chipmaker’s scope from PCs to the next generation of technology breakthroughs. Intel’s Chief Executive… Read More
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Qualcomm’s new depth-sensing camera tech is designed for VR and face scanning
Qualcomm’s Spectra Module camera program is getting a few key new members set to arrive in the latest generation of Android handset. Most notable among the new options are depth sensing and biometric authentication, letting users unlock their phones with an iris scan. The Spectra system essentially gives manufacturers a way to swap out different sorts of camera functionality during… Read More
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Canary finally brings two-way talk to its security cameras
Security startup Canary is bringing a handful of new features to its camera products, the all-in-one and Flex. Most notable here is the addition of two-way audio, which has been conspicuously absent from the company’s products and ranks as their “most demanded feature,” according to Canary. The feature lets users speak through the camera, using a mobile device with the Canary… Read More
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Video evidence is meaningless without accountability
Some had guns and some carried sticks and shields. Some carried homemade pepper spray and mace. But one thing nearly everyone on all sides carried: a camera. There were television cameras, DSLRs, 360-cameras and, most commonly of all, simple smartphones. It was the one constant in the crowds of yesterday’s showdown between politically emboldened white nationalists and counter-protesters… Read More
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Don’t turn comics publishers into IP factories
This past week’s news that Netflix would purchase independent comics publisher Millarworld is hardly an outlier. It echoes larger moves made by Warner Brothers and Disney, when they purchased the two largest comics publishers, DC and Marvel, respectively, cementing their own cinematic comics universes. And while the specifics of those deals differ, both have kept their comics… Read More
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Mighty fills an iPod shuffle-sized hole for Spotify subscribers
The company launched a Kickstarter last year with the promise of “streaming music without your phone,” delivering the still-tangible benefits of devoted music hardware for the Spotify generation. The startup built up enough excitement to hit $300k on the crowdfunding site, and the recent end of the iPod shuffle and nano have only furthered that interest among consumers. CEO… Read More
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Don’t ruin streaming by turning it into cable
Technology was going to free us from cable. It’s right there in the phrase “cord cutting” — a liberation from the bonds of traditional television. This is supposed to be the era of on-demand entertainment, when we don’t have to subscribe to some bloated cable package in order to get the content we want. But the golden age of television has yet to meet its… Read More
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Consumer Reports pulls Microsoft Surface recommendation, citing high breakage rates
The Surface line has been a surprising hit for Microsoft in recent years. What many regarded as little more than proof of concept for Windows 10 has become a leader in the two-in-one tablet category in its own right. But according to a new survey conducting by Consumer Reports, the devices have proven far more unreliable than much of the competition. In fact, things are so bad, the publication… Read More
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Wearables are still growing globally, thanks to Xiaomi
The burst of the wearable bubble may have been overstated — on a global scale, at least. The category has been struggling here in the U.S., but internationally, it’s still seeing growth. Wearables are up eight-percent year-over-year, according to new numbers from Canalys — not exactly exponential, but at least things are trending in the right direction. It’ll come as… Read More
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Carpool Karaoke debuts on Apple Music for some reason
Even the best shows take time to hit their stride. Who had high hopes after watching the first episode of The Office, a virtual shot for shot remake of its UK counterpart, defanged for American audiences? It seems unfair to judge Carpool Karaoke from a single episode, but there isn’t a whole hell of a lot present to give the viewer hope that the series might someday become more than the… Read More
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Anker announces its own $35 version of the Echo Dot
Given the fact that the Echo Dot runs $50 a piece or three for $130, I suspect price isn’t a major factor hampering Alexa adoption. But leave it to the folks at Anker to undercut the price of Amazon’s cheapest Echo by offering up a $35 smart speaker with Alexa built-in. Essentially, it’s an off-brand Dot with all of your standard Echo/Alexa functionality. The Genie is… Read More
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Mophie’s MacBook-charging battery pack is indispensable but overpriced
Every time we do a gift guide here, one editor suggests the same thing: external battery packs. Every time, like clockwork. And it’s true, everyone in your life probably needs one. We all wander through our days tempting fate by porting around gadgets with sub-par battery life. The other big upside of gifting a power bank: they’re generally pretty inexpensive. Though that… Read More
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TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 is all in on artificial intelligence and machine learning
As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We’ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on stage and Disrupt San Francisco in just over a month. Read More
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Researchers use radio waves to wirelessly monitor sleep patterns
MIT researchers have unveiled a new method for wirelessly monitoring sleep. The whole thing works a bit like echolocation — radio waves are beamed off a sleeping subject and changes in the body are detected when they bounce back. The research is the latest in a number of different activities the team has been monitoring using low-power radio waves. Read More
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Personal Audio loses its appeal for podcasting patent
A year after taking up the case, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled in favor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in its challenge against podcasting patent troll, Personal Audio. The decision is a massive relief for the vibrant and ever-growing medium, which has been operated under the threat of lawsuit for a number of years. It’s also part of the… Read More
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Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Active ditches the Infinity Display for ruggedness
After weeks and months of leaks, the Galaxy S8 Active hasn’t left much to the imagination. We’ve already seen the phone from virtually every angle and got a sneak peek of a prematurely launched carrier page last week, to boot. The only thing left was for Samsung to officially make the thing official. The company’s doing just that this morning, a day before the rugged… Read More
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A smartwatch won’t fix what’s broken with Fitbit
Fitbit’s Q2 earnings could have been worse. Unlike Q4 of last year, the company didn’t use the opportunity to announce that it would be laying off six percent of its staff. Still, things are bad. As we pointed out earlier in the week, the company’s stock price is little more than 10 percent of its 2015 high. Read More
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