Year: 2018

 Goodlord, the London ‘proptech’ startup that has built a software platform to handle transactions and the “paperwork” normally associated with renting a home, has laid off nearly 40 employees, while TechCrunch understands from sources that co-founder and CEO Richard White will soon be leaving the company. Read More

 Ford and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership at CES 2018 on Tuesday to work together on cellular vehicle-to-everything (C2VX) tech, designed to validate and ensure a smooth rollout for the connective communication tech that’s going to help cars connect up to things like smart traffic lights, street signs, bikes, roads and more. Cellular connectivity is already poised to be a… Read More

 i.am+ is a strange company — of course, we’d expect no less from startup owned by Black Eyed Pea turned tech entrepreneur, Will.i.am. Probably best known for its gaudy Buttons headphones and the largely panned Puls smartwatch/wrist-band dealie, the company has been making some strange and seemingly disparate moves of late. At Dreamforce back in November, it announced that it… Read More

 Ford and Silicon Valley-based Autonomic will work together to build a new open platform upon which cities can build out infrastructure communications, including connected traffic lights and parking spots, called the “Transportation Mobility Cloud.” Ford CEO Jim Hackett announced the news on Monday at the CES 2018 keynote kicking off the annual conference. The platform is designed… Read More

 Ford is ramping its autonomous vehicle program in 2018, with plans to expand testing its cars in a new city this year. This will serve a number of purposes, including helping partner autonomous platform partner Argo AI build out its self-driving tech, as well as helping to research further its dedicated AV vehicle design requirements. But it’s also going to allow Ford to test its new… Read More

 Kickstarter projects are always a crapshoot. Blocks’ modular smartwatch had a been of a leg up, in that the company had an actual working product to show to people — but even so, the device always felt like a bit of a long shot. Ever since raising $1.6 million on Kickstarter, the company’s made a point of demonstrating its device for anyone who would listen that the product was… Read More

 Ford has a new partner for its autonomous vehicle program: Postmates. The on-demand delivery service provider is working with the automaker through its self-driving vehicle platform, in a similar way to existing partner Domino’s Pizza. Postmates is the first on-demand delivery app to work with Ford in this capacity, and will test with the platform this year, including in a pilot in a… Read More

 SpaceX is planning to perform a static test fire of its massive Falcon Heavy rocket later this week, the company revealed today in a statement from company President and COO Gwynne Shotwell. Now that the rocket is vertical on launchpad LC-39A, a static test fire to ensure the rocket’s 27 Merlin engines are in good working order and ready for the full, inaugural test launch targeting… Read More

 Patents may sometimes get a bad rap for how they are abused (and misused) by some companies for commercial gain, but they also remain a marker of how a tech company is progressing with its R&D and pushing ahead on innovation. For one measure of that advance, today, IFI Claims, the patent analytics firm, published its 2017 list of companies with the most U.S. patents assigned for the year.… Read More

 As Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook all look towards getting augmented reality glasses out into the market to push their vision of the world directly into viewers’ eyeballs, they’re running into a common challenge. While these tech titans have grown familiar with miniaturizing complex technologies, AR displays are an area where the technology is still requiring a lot of R&D… Read More