Year: 2018

 Today, Intel showed off a pretty awesome-looking pair of smart glasses that look better than pretty much anything we’ve seen to date. It’s unclear what the development future will be for the glasses as the company is reportedly exploring a partial sale of the division and it has already shut down work on its “merged reality” headset program. While there are a lot of… Read More

 The head of Twitter’s AR/VR team announced today via a tweet that he is leaving the social media site after 18 months. Alessandro Sabatelli joined Twitter in June of 2016 after leaving a virtual reality startup he led which created music-focused VR experiences. Sabatelli had previously worked as a designer at Apple. We’ve reached out to Sabatelli for more details on what… Read More

 SpaceX is launching its Falcon Heavy rocket tomorrow, and if it’s successful, it’ll be twice as powerful in terms of cargo capacity as its next closest active rival. That will help give SpaceX an edge in the growing private space race, and open up new opportunities in terms of potential clients, as well as set the stage for traveling to Mars. The launch itself is happening on… Read More

 Last month we characterized 2017 as the year Sub-Saharan Africa’s startup scene found its stride. Twenty-eighteen looks to be the year of numerous VC investments. TPG acquires TRACE January got the funding party started. U.S. based private equity firm TPG Growth acquired a majority stake (of an undisclosed value) in entertainment company TRACE. TRACE is a global multimedia giant… Read More

 Nutrigene believes your genes may hold the secret to what you might be missing in your diet. The company will send you tailor-made liquid vitamin supplements based on a lifestyle quiz and your DNA. Read More

 Tomorrow is a huge day for SpaceX: It’s the first-ever flight of the company’s massive, reusable rocket, Falcon Heavy. (It’s also the day, if all goes as planned, that Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster will go to space.) But will it go as planned? This one is just a test flight, so no one — even Musk himself — is truly certain how it’ll go. Read More

 Like many who attended CES 2016, we were taken with the Ehang 184. If nothing else, the passenger drone was a nice break from all the smartphones and giant TVs. That said, the big quadcopter amounted to little more than a giant paper weight and some goofy composite videos. Earlier today, however, the company showed off some pretty impressive video of the drone carrying actual humans. Read More

 Nick Montfort is a professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the author of a new book, “The Future.” His book explores “future makers” – people who create the future with their work. It’s a fascinating read and he’s a fascinating thinker in the space. Our conversation on Technotopia started with the Norman Bel Geddes, designer of… Read More

 I’ve been struggling with whether or not to download Facebook’s new app aimed at children, Messenger Kids, onto my daughter’s iPad. This weekend, I took the plunge. I sat with her as she typed her first message and sent a selfie. I watched as she discovered GIFs. I wasn’t sure I had done the right thing. No one wants to surrender their kids to online social networks,… Read More

 The passwords of some people using sites monitored by popular analytics provider Mixpanel were mistakenly pulled into its software. Until TechCrunch’s inquiry, Mixpanel had made no public announcement about the embarassing error beyond quietly emailing clients about the problem. Yet some need to update to a fixed Mixpanel SDK to prevent an ongoing privacy breach. It’s unclear… Read More