Devin Coldewey
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He first wrote for TechCrunch in 2007. He has also written for MSNBC.com, NBC News, DPReview, The Economist/GE’s Look Ahead, and others.
His personal website is coldewey.cc.
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Latest from Devin Coldewey
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Literacy XPRIZE starts field tests of semifinalist apps in LA, Philadelphia and Dallas
Literacy is a serious problem all over the world — even in our little utopia. While a touch-up of our education and support systems would probably be the best fix in the long term, we all know that’s not likely. So in the meantime we have creative private attempts to alleviate the issue: Today, a $7 million XPRIZE for literacy-improving apps enters the field-testing phase. Read More
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Comcast’s FCC filing pits pet economists against net neutrality rules
Comcast has filed its official commentary on the FCC’s proposal to roll back 2015’s Open Internet Order, and it’s about what you’d expect: a selectively thorough takedown that relies heavily on analysis by friendly economists to support the ISP’s view. Read More
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Microsoft’s Path Guide is an unconventional approach to indoor navigation
Indoor mapping is one of those problems that seems to only have solutions that involve a great deal of money and infrastructure: beacons, lasers, emitters, scanners… who wants to install those in malls across the world? Microsoft Research has produced an indoor navigation app that keeps things simple, using existing sensors and the fact that people already go most of the places you want… Read More
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Researchers 3D print a soft artificial heart that works a lot like a real one
The science of prosthetics has been advancing by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and research into soft robotics has been especially complementary. The same techniques that go into making a robot arm that flexes and turns like a real one can go into making more complex, subtle organs — like the heart, as Swiss researchers have demonstrated. Read More
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Net Neutrality Day of Action spurs millions to speak out for online freedoms
Yesterday was the much-ballyhooed “Net Neutrality Day of Action,” an online protest day on which thousands of websites, people and services called attention to the impending revocation of net neutrality rules by the FCC. And the turnout, it turns out, was quite impressive. Read More
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Here’s what a bunch of companies are doing for the ‘Net Neutrality Day of Action’
The FCC is planning to reverse the net neutrality rules passed by the previous Commission — but we’re not going to take it lying down. Companies and organizations across the world and web have banded together for a big, showy “Day of Action.” Here’s what a bunch of well-known companies and sites are up to today — and we’ll be adding more as we see them… Read More
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These stretchy, durable sensors could be woven right into clothing
If we must have an Internet of Things, it makes no sense to leave clothes out of the party. But clothes must be worn, washed, bunched up and folded — it’s hard to make electronics that can survive all that. Plenty are trying, though; the latest attempt is from Harvard’s Wyss Institute, which uses a simple but effective layering method to make a durable, customizable flex sensor. Read More
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Logitech picks up gaming hardware maker Astro for $85M
Logitech is expanding its territory in the rapidly growing gaming space with the acquisition of Astro Gaming, a younger company known for their high-quality headsets. The price: a highly respectable $85 million. Read More
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Facebook’s Messenger ads are bad and must be destroyed
When Facebook removed messages from the main app, I swore I would never download Messenger. That’s been a pretty easy promise to keep, especially since they introduced the idea of huge ads that take up half your screen while you try to use the service. Today Facebook redesigned them as part of a larger rollout — but fixed none of the reasons these ads are bad and should be destroyed. Read More
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Ethics and Governance AI Fund funnels $7.6M to Harvard, MIT and independent research efforts
A $27 million fund aimed at applying artificial intelligence to the public interest has announced the first targets of its beneficence: $7.9 million will be split unequally between MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and seven smaller research efforts around the world. Read More
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Make your Nokia 3310 great again with a special $2,500 Putin-Trump gold and titanium edition
It’s time for the big G-20 summit in Hamburg, and Russian phone customizers Caviar are commemorating the occasion with a very special Nokia 3310 (the new one). Encased in the best metals, titanium and gold, the back features a touching double profile of Trump and Putin. Only 149,000 rubles, or about $2,500. Read More
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WTF is a particle collider?
How do things work? To find out, we observe them and we take them apart. But not everything is easily observed, and until recently some things couldn’t be taken apart. Read More
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5 years after the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is just getting started
It’s been five years since physicists at CERN reported that they had observed a particle “consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.” The discovery capped decades of theory and was an important triumph for the Large Hadron Collider, the means by which the elusive particle was found. But they didn’t close up shop and go home after that — the LHC is just getting up… Read More
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Manufacturing civility
Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about everything in the world — and hidden in that unending torrent are hidden an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report from ProPublica, seems unsuited to the task… Read More
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Zillow and McMansion Hell bury the hatchet after nastygram rouses internet’s ire
All is well in McMansion Hell, the blog doing god’s work by sassing the hideous architecture on display in our otherwise pleasant suburbs. Zillow sent a letter earlier this week threatening legal action over the blog’s use of images taken from the real estate giant’s site — but as these boneheaded corporations just can’t seem to learn, this sort of thing… Read More
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What each model of the iPhone added to the game
It was 10 years ago today that Steve Jobs announced the long-rumored iPhone to a crowd of tech lovers excited to a fever pitch. We’ve already looked at the history of the iPhone going back to the Newton, but 10 years of iPhone have brought us more than a dozen devices, each of which brought something new and important to the smartphone game. Let’s go through them, shall we? Read More
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Analysts think Petya ‘ransomware’ was built for targeted destruction, not profit
The description of the Petya infections hitting computers worldwide as “ransomware” may be a misnomer, security analysts suggest. The malicious software’s code and other evidence indicate that the profit motive may have been a camouflage for an act of cyber-espionage targeting Ukraine. Read More
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Magic Wormhole is a clever way to send files easily and securely
If you need to transfer a couple hundred megs to a coworker or friend across the country, you aren’t short on options. In fact, options are thick on the ground, and all have their own issues. Don’t you wish you could just speak a few magic words and send stuff directly to them, no intermediate upload, no web interface, no login? Magic Wormhole is a clever way to do just that. Read More
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Japan’s SNES Classic gets Famicom look and tweaked game selection
Everyone’s excited about the SNES Classic Edition, what with its twee 90s look and fantastic selection of games. But as with its NES predecessor, the Japanese version of the device is significantly different, outside and in — here are the differences between the two. Read More
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Boundless, Navigator CRE and Off the Record take prizes at TechCrunch’s Seattle pitch-off
It was a lovely day for a meetup in Seattle, and the Showbox SoDo was packed as TechCrunch’s annual pitch-off in my home town took place last week. But as impressive as our 10 contestants were, only three would leave with tickets to Disrupt SF. And here they are. Read More
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