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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Facebook’s Instant Articles restore subscription options they previously stripped
Facebook has announced that news sites which rely on paid subscriptions, limiting readers to a certain number of articles per week, will now be able to do so through Instant Articles. The company has spent the last two years promoting these Facebook-hosted versions of articles, which unfortunately lacked this rather critical ability. Google’s AMP and Apple News have supported it for a while. Read More
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Timekettle’s WT2 real-time translation earpieces enable ordinary conversation across language barriers
At TechCrunch’s event in Shenzhen last month, we had a chance to test out the WT2, a clever and ambitious device from startup TimeKettle. It’s a pair of wireless earpieces; each person in a multilingual conversation wears one, and they translate what’s said into the language spoken by each participant. Essentially it’s a Babel fish, though admittedly a rough draft of one. Read More
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Microsoft’s Imagine Cup crowns its 15th winner, the X.GLU smart glucose meter for kids
Microsoft’s annual Imagine Cup, a global competition of high-tech student projects, reached its culmination this week accompanied by the usual pomp at the company’s headquarters in Redmond. The winner of the $100,000 grand prize and 365 days of bragging rights is X.GLU, a Czech team that created a custom smart glucose meter for children with diabetes. Read More
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Hear dispatches from the frontiers of security and privacy at Disrupt SF 2017
Your data is in demand: just about everyone, from hackers and scammers to multinationals and governments wants it. How can you keep it safe? How can we set limits on tracking, advertising, and the fast-advancing field of data-sucking AIs? And what does the situation look like from the side of the companies and adversaries? Those are questions we aim to tackle in September at Disrupt SF. Read More
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This facial recognition system tracks how you’re enjoying a movie
As moviemaking becomes as much a science as an art, the moviemakers need ever-better ways to gauge audience reactions. Did they enjoy it? How much… exactly? At minute 42? A system from Caltech and Disney Research uses a facial expression tracking neural network to learn and predict how members of the audience react, perhaps setting the stage for a new generation of Nielsen ratings. Read More
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ThinkGeek has NES Classics in stock — with a catch
If you want an NES Classic Edition (and you should) but don’t want to pay hundreds on eBay (and you shouldn’t), you’re in luck. ThinkGeek has a few in stock that its parent company, GameStop, mysteriously didn’t sell back when everyone was trying to buy them. They’re on sale right now, and will probably run out within an hour. Read More
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The Envirobot robo-eel slithers along the shore for science
The next time you’re swimming in Lake Geneva, don’t be surprised when you feel something eel-like and yet artificial touch your leg. That would be Envirobot, the latest biomimetic creation from Swiss researchers that autonomously swims around bodies of water and tests them for toxins and other factors. Read More
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Snopes seeks crowdfunding in ownership battle
How many times have you heard some urban legend, chain letter or misleading bit of news repeated and immediately found a thorough, fact-based debunking on Snopes? Like every damn day for the last 20 years or so, right? Snopes was there for you when you were looking up fake news and cryptids — but it’s in trouble, and asking you to return the favor. Read More
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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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