Day: September 20, 2018

If the Echo Show was the Amazon device most desperately in need of a makeover (please and thank you), the Dot was certainly a close second. After all, while the cheapest (and best selling) Echo device has already been through a couple of iterations, the hardware wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d proudly display […]

The first big piece of hardware news news at today’s Amazon event is a long awaited refresh to the Echo Dot — what the company calls the “best selling speaker, ever.” The new product features a fully refreshed designed with a much nicer cloth covering — akin to the new Echo and Echo Plus, along […]

Amazon today announced it’s rolling out new features for its FreeTime service for parents and children, which recently started working with Alexa, allowing parents to control children’s experience with the personal assistant. Now, the FreeTime service for Alexa will also support routines – the combination of voice commands that can be kicked off with a single […]

Today’s big Amazon event was all about the hardware, but Amazon kicked things off with a few extra tricks. Among the cooler features rolling out for the smart assistant in the coming weeks is improved contextual understanding. One piece that’s coming in the next few weeks is the ability to understand when the user needs […]

Former Facebook executive turned venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya announced this morning that his firm, Social Capital, would no longer raise outside capital. The firm will transition into a technology holding company by the end of 2018 and will invest $50 million to $250 million off a “multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only.” “[We] will focus […]

Geofenced sharing, Quiz stickers, Stories Highlight stickers, and a separate interface for adding hashtags to posts are amongst a slew of new features Instagram has prototyped or is now testing. The last one could finally #cure #the #hashtag #madness that’s infected many of Instagram’s 1 billion users, causing them desperately fill up their captions with […]

The investment arms of BMW and the Chinese search technology giant, Baidu, along with a large original equipment manufacturer for the auto industry and a slew of technology investors have all come together to back Lunewave, a startup developing new sensor technologies for autonomous vehicles. The $5 million seed round which the company just closed […]

With the Apple Watch Series 4, Apple introduced a new, larger display. It now has rounded edges and thinner bezels. And the company took advantage of that display to introduce new fire, water, liquid metal and vapor faces. Apple didn’t use CGI to create those faces — they shot those faces in a studio. Many […]

Graph databases have always been useful to help find connections across a vast data set, and it turns out that capability is quite handy in artificial intelligence and machine learning too. Today, Neo4j, the makers of the open source and commercial graph database platform, announced the release of Neo4j 3.5, which has a number of […]

Bird just announced 10 million scooter rides since launching about one year ago. If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because Bird competitor Lime earlier today announced it surpassed 11.5 million rides across its shared bikes and scooters. Bird, which launched last September in Santa Monica, Calif., currently operates in 100 cities and […]