Devin Coldewey
Writer & Photographer
The Latest from Devin Coldewey
You can do it, robot! Watch the beefy, 4-legged HyQReal pull a plane
It's not really clear just yet exactly what all these powerful, agile quadrupedal robots people are working on are going to do, exactly, but even so it never gets old watching them do their thing. The
From launch to launch: Peter Beck on building Rocket Lab’s orbital business
Breaking into the launch industry is no easy task, but New Zealand's Rocket Lab has done it without missing a step. The company has just completed its third commercial launch of 2019, and is planning
Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life
Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also of p
Panic’s Playdate is a pint-sized gaming machine with a ‘season’ of 12 intriguing titles
Tired of your smartphone games, and don't want to take the Switch with you on the train today? Panic, renowned creator of useful Mac apps and more recently publisher of interesting games, has created
DefinedCrowd offers mobile apps to empower its AI-annotating masses
DefinedCrowd, the Startup Battlefield alumnus that produces and refines data for AI-training purposes, has just debuted iOS and Android apps for its army of human annotators. It should help speed up a
Stanford’s Doggo is a petite robotic quadruped you can (maybe) build yourself
Got a few thousand bucks and a good deal of engineering expertise? You're in luck: Stanford students have created a quadrupedal robot platform called Doggo that you can build with off-the-shelf parts
Why is Facebook doing robotics research?
It's a bit strange to hear that the world's leading social network is pursuing research in robotics rather than, say, making search useful, but Facebook is a big organization with many competing prior
This clever transforming robot flies and rolls on its rotating arms
There's great potential in using both drones and ground-based robots for situations like disaster response, but generally these platforms either fly or creep along the ground. Not the "Flying STAR," w
Blue Origin and SpaceX get million-dollar NASA nod to test Moon lander tech
Eleven aerospace companies will share more than $45 million in funds from NASA to design and test prototypes for the Artemis moon missions, the agency announced today. Among the established names like
Minecraft Earth makes the whole real world your very own blocky realm
When your game tops a hundred million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number. That's the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game ha
A year after outcry, carriers are finally stopping sale of location data, letters to FCC show
Reports emerged a year ago that all the major cellular carriers in the U.S. were selling location data to third-party companies, which in turn sold them to pretty much anyone willing to pay. New lette
ObjectiveEd is building a better digital curriculum for vision-impaired kids
Children with vision impairments struggle to get a solid K-12 education for a lot of reasons — so the more tools their teachers have to impart basic skills and concepts, the better. ObjectiveEd is a
Rivals in gaming, Microsoft and Sony team up on cloud services
For the last two decades, Sony and Microsoft's gaming divisions have been locked in all-out war against one another: on price, on hardware, on franchises, on exclusives... you name it. But it seems th
Global Learning Xprize splits $10M purse for best teaching app for disadvantaged kids
Kids need a good education to have the best chance of succeeding in the world, but in distant parts of developing countries there may be neither schools nor teachers. The Global Learning Xprize aims t
Xnor’s AI2GO serves up custom edge AI models with a few clicks
AI would be useful for tons of everyday tasks for small businesses and other operations — if people just knew how to build and deploy their own machine learning agent. Unfortunately, few do. Edge-ba
7 accessibility-focused startups snag grants from Microsoft
Microsoft has selected seven lucky startups to receive grants from its AI for Accessibility program. The growing companies aim to empower people with disabilities to take part in tech and the internet
Watch SpaceX’s 60-satellite Starlink launch tonight right here
SpaceX's launch tonight is being performed for a very important client: itself. Yes, the Falcon 9 that will lift off at 7:30 PM Pacific time is loaded not with government or commercial payloads, but t
Google’s Translatotron converts one spoken language to another, no text involved
Every day we creep a little closer to Douglas Adams' famous and prescient babelfish. A new research project from Google takes spoken sentences in one language and outputs spoken words in another — b
SpaceX kicks off its space-based internet service with 60-satellite Starlink launch
As wild as it sounds, the race is on to build a functioning space internet — and SpaceX is taking its biggest step yet with the launch of 60 (!) satellites tomorrow that will form the first wave of
NASA gives its new Moon mission a name: Artemis
Cool missions need cool names, and NASA's new plan to establish a permanent lunar presence and put an American on the Moon again now has one: Artemis. It's nod both to Apollo, the 50th anniversary of