I used to answer every message. Not any more. When Messenger buzzes, now I don’t know if it will be a friend or a bot. Every chime forces me to do a little Turing test in my head. Was I expecting to be pinged by a pal? Or is it 8:11pm again and TechCrunch’s bot […]
Google today announced that it is bringing some of its Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps tools a little bit closer together. BigQuery, Google’s serverless analytics data warehousing service, will now be able to read files from Google Drive and access spreadsheets from Google Sheets. There has long been something of a firewall between Google’s cloud computing […]
Chris Sacca, the angel investor in companies like Twitter, Uber and Instagram, gets it. He understands that diversity is simply good for business. “There is a greed case for diversity,” Sacca told CNN’s Laurie Segall at the Collision Conference yesterday. “Diverse perspectives bring us into markets we didn’t know existed.” It’s true. There’s a very strong […]
Swedish edtech startup DigiExam, which also has offices in the U.S. and U.K., offers software-as-a-service for academic testing and grading. It enables students to take tests digitally and in turn teachers to grade the results more efficiently. To fuel further international expansion, the Stockholm-headquartered company has closed $3.5 million in Series A funding in a […]
It wasn’t that long ago that most companies were still refusing to move from the Internet’s ancient IPv4 networking protocol. IPv6 was slowly catching on, but the vast majority of Internet users were still stuck on IPv4. Things have changed. Starting soon, Apple will require its iOS app developers not merely to use IPv6, and […]
“As a rule of thumb, if your [Director of Photography] mentions something with a German-sounding name, it means it’s going to be super expensive.” Ain’t that the truth…
Anything is possible if we all work together — and no one gets left behind. That is the lesson these tiny “VelociRoACH” robots taught me today. The name stands for velocity robotic autonomous crawling hexapod, which really says it all. They were designed by roboticists at UC Berkeley’s Biomimetics Millisystems Lab, where a number of […]
Amazon has hired Xerox PARC employee and artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Ashwin Ram to head up AI R&D for Alexa, the e-commerce behemoth’s virtual assistant. Ram first tweeted about his appointment on Tuesday, and a spokesperson for Amazon has now confirmed the hire but declined to offer any further comment. The veteran computer science researcher […]
Lo and behold! A new wave of technology is preparing to crash down upon the unsuspecting consumer. Chatbots are surging towards our conversations at breakneck speed! No, not the kind of chatbots that have been around for donkeys’ years, adding robotic interjections to irreverent chatrooms when the Internet was a niche playground just for nerds. This […]
Google is launching Slides Q&A today, a new feature for Slides, its PowerPoint competitor. With Slides Q&A, presenters can get questions and general feedback from their audience — and audience members can vote for their favorite questions. Slides Q&A is rolling out globally today. Presenters who want to use it will see a button in the Slides […]