A month before Disrupt, Yu Zhou sent us an email titled, “We want to help solve the Flint water problem.” WaterO’s CEO wasn’t claiming to have the catchall solution to the lead problem plaguing the Michigan city, but his company was in a unique position to lend a hand. Since then, the Los Angeles-based startup […]
It’s the year, or perhaps the decade, of the drone, and the popular craft are only getting cheaper, better and easier to control. But why should drones be limited to the air? The SeaDrone, demonstrated onstage at Disrupt NY today, brings the benefits and simplicity of multi-rotor airborne drones to underwater applications. “You could consider […]
TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016’s “wildcard” participant GeoOrbital has a different take on the electric bike. Instead of putting a motor on the bike, they put it in the wheel. This crazy idea was actually prompted by something founder Michael Burtov saw in the movie Tron. He thought there was a lot of wasted space inside the […]
uBeam could be vaporware, according to a blogger claiming to be uBeam’s former VP of Engineering. They accuse the startup of being unable to fulfill promises made about its technology. uBeam CEO Meredith Perry uBeam says it’s building a device that could wirelessly charge your phone or other electronics from several meters away. But in […]
Insensi has been working hard on a brand new device to make it easier to communicate with other family members. The device, Ily, is a modern take on landline phones that is so easy to use that children and grandparents don’t need directions. Ily is now available on Kickstarter for $149 to $199. The startup […]
A panel discussion on finding a balance between security and privacy here at Disrupt New York 2016 touched on various aspects of a complex topic, including strategies for securing customer data and the big risks posed as more types of devices come online. How can startups best lock down customer data? By not having access to it in the first place, suggested Nate Cardozo, senior […]
In the list of things that we want science to solve I suspect the creation of a wireless 5.1 speaker system that is easy to use and set up ranks up there in between a cure for shingles and the colonization of Mars. Thankfully, there are people on the job. Enclave Audio has been working […]
Mike Gault Crunch Network Contributor Mike Gault is the founder and CEO of blockchain technology platform Guardtime. More posts by this contributor: How to join the network Many people scoffed in January 2014 when Cisco CEO John Chambers pegged the “Internet of Everything” as a potential $17 trillion market, five to 10 times more impactful […]
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 […]
It’s another victory for the machines: a robotic surgical system outperformed humans and robot-assisted human operators in a soft-tissue procedure, bringing us that much closer to automated medical care (and the robocalypse). The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) was designed at the Children’s National Medical Center as an attempt to bring automation to soft-tissue surgery, […]