Niantic Labs, a small gaming company previously owned by Google, has gone from a somewhat obscure gaming shop to one of the most prominent developers overnight. The company launched Pokémon Go in July 2016, the first very long-awaited smartphone version of a Pokémon game. After holding out for nearly a decade, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have finally unleashed one of its most… Read More
Need a tiny, $5 computer to build a robot that will bring you your slippers, initiate a massage chair session, and pour out your daily dose of bourbon? The Onion Omega2 can do all that and more. This tiny board is Arduino-compatible but also runs Linux natively. This means you can plug it in and get a command line or access the system via a desktop-like web interface. It has Wi-Fi built in and… Read More
In the year 2000, the music business was still strong. Record companies produced albums and shipped these physical objects to the stores that sold them. The internet was slowly becoming a system of mass consumption and distribution, but the majority of consumers still purchased physical media. And while the record industry was aware of piracy online, the threat seemed minimal. Then came Napster. Read More
If you’re a big fan of wine but still want to run a startup, there may not be that much innovation you can get away with on the product side. Wine, when all is said and done, is still wine. That doesn’t mean you can’t turn the industry inside out by turning the traditional winery business model on its head — and that’s exactly what Naked Wines did. I decided to have… Read More
With an incredibly important national election coming up, it’s more critical than ever that everyone who can vote does — and is able to. Election tech firm Free and Fair is hoping to help avoid overflowing voting locations with a simple, open source device that automatically monitors waiting times and keeps voters and officials informed. Read More
Growing up, I can remember spending a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to be frozen in carbonite, the way Han Solo was after being betrayed by Lando on Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back. I never imagined it might feel like you were a fridge, but a new video on Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube channel has me thinking differently. The concept of the video is simple enough: Can… Read More
Pay-per-article journalism startup Blendle, which aggregates the written work of different publishers onto a single, ad-free platform where readers can pick and choose which stories to consume, paying a few cents per article, is touting passing one million registered users. Read More
Everyone loves a good plant in their home, but few have the time and dedication to keep it healthy over the course of the year. Changing temperatures and humidity levels paired with vacations or business trips can limit the variety of plant-life that most people can sustain in their homes. That’s where the Grow Box comes in. Developed by former Apple engineer Andrew Pletenetskyy, the… Read More
The first OSVR headset made its debut at last year’s CES. The wearable wasn’t aimed at Oculus or HTC – nor were its creators looking to take on Samsung’s low cost Gear VR. Rather, the prototype represented the first step in a multi-company effort to build a new, non-proprietary paradigm in the burgeoning world of virtual reality.
And Min Liang-Tan helped lead the charge. Read More
We’ve come a long way since the days of selecting a CPU player for the other Pong paddle, tank, or hand-to-hand combatant. Now the computers are taking it to us, in meatspace, and seemingly nothing no tabletop activity is safe from their depredations. The latest to succumb to computer domination? Foosball. Read More
