Robots are going to have to work together if they want to destroy us, their soft, fallible masters. But the current paradigm of having a Skynet-like (or rather, Zerglike) overmind control a set of semi-autonomous drones is too easy to beat — take out the brain and the rest fail, right? Not if they’re all the brain, which is the idea demonstrated in a wonderful new paper in Nature. Read More
Apple today announced the digital equivalent of a singing telegram, a perversion of the emoji concept that embodies the worst of both the company’s exclusionary philosophy and the worst of CG animals and excreta. Animoji are dumb and I loathe them. Here’s why. Read More
For someone getting major dental work or reconstructive surgery, it can be hard to visualize what they’ll look like afterwards. You can do casts and make wax molds, but that’s a bit… 19th century, isn’t it? A Swiss startup brings the, in retrospect, obvious solution of augmented reality to the problem, giving patients a virtual view of the smile they could soon have. Read More
The way Iron Man flies may be cool, but it’s also impractical. Even if your core strength is off the chart, as I assume Tony Stark’s is (you’re basically planking the whole time), putting jets on your hands and feet is just asking for broken bones. But the seeming foolishness of this method hasn’t stopped a handful of Italian researchers from suggesting we give it a… Read More
Still, Essential saw something missing in the now very mature smartphone market, and led by Android creator Andy Rubin, set out to address that gap.
The Essential Phone (PH-1 by technical model name) is the fruit of that labor, created by what seems like an impossibly small team, that number under 100 and for much of the device’s development, actually numbered far fewer. It’s an… Read More
Kristoffer Lawson created one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while: Solu, the social computer. His tiny device uses a unique UI and UX to allow you to connect with friends and collaborate using an icon-based OS that lets you zoom in and out of work. Lawson and I spoke about the future of computing and how his ideas – and the ideas of other OS thinkers – will change the… Read More
In a pleasant Friday surprise, Roku dropped its S-1 document today, detailing its financial performance and corporate strategy. The filing indicates that the company intends to raise $100 million in its debut. The figure is a widely-recognized placeholder number. The company could raise more or less in its IPO. Follow Crunchbase News on Twitter & Facebook As a private company,… Read More
Ever wanted to build an R2-D2 to call your own? You could drop a few million dollars to get all the screen-used parts/props… Or you could spend a few weeks in the shop bangin’ on scrap metal to build one from scratch. Or you could grab littleBit’s new Droid Inventor Kit and call it a day. It’s pint-sized and not quite as intense as the aforementioned options, but hey… Read More
Essential has a unique port around back on its debut Phone, which can handle data and power transfer, and which attaches to accessories via magnets. The first such accessory is Essential’s own 360 camera, which offers you an easy way to capture immersive images and video in a very small package. The Essential 360 camera is much smaller than most other consumer 360 cameras out there, and… Read More
