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Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec,senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or air taxis, too.Yup, another transportation newsletter. But I promise this one will be different. Here’s how.
Newsletters can be great mediu

There aren't going to be many characters left from the early seasons of The Walking Dead after next year.
Danai Gurira, the actor who plays Michonne in the TV show, will be leaving The Walking Dead at some point during Season 10, The Hollywood Reporter reported Friday. 
Gurira has been a key part of the series since her debut as Michonne in Season 3 and has taken over as the main protagonist since Rick Grimes' (Andrew Lincoln) departure earlier in Season 9. The character Michonne quickly be

A decade ago, about a dozen or so engineers gathered at Google’smain Mountain View campus on Charleston Road to work on Project Chauffeur, a secret endeavor housed under the tech giant’s moonshot factory X.
Project Chauffeur — popularly know as the “Google self-driving car project” — kicked off in January 2009. It would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymoin 2016.
The project, originally led by Sebastian Thrun

Indie games often slide under the radar, even when they’re brilliant — more so if they’re not part of a popular genre. So in the interest of making sure a gem of a game doesn’t go unsung, I thought I’d recommend the game that wowed me the most in 2018: Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn. This game is a bit tricky to describe and even trickier to recommend. I know enough about the gaming community to know a brain teaser is not everyone’s preferred form

If you’ve ever seen a lamp or chair that you liked and wished you could just take a picture and find it online, well, GrokStyle let you do that — and now the company has been snatched up by Facebookto augment its own growing computer vision department.
GrokStyle started as a paper — as AI companies often do these days — at 2015’s SIGGRAPH. A National Science Foundation grant got the ball rolling on the actual company, and in 2017 founders Kavita Bala and Sean Bell r

Last night on Laura Ingraham’s show, The Ingraham Angle, a strange thing happened (stranger than usual, I mean). Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) stopped by for an interview, ostensibly to talk about Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) latest actions regarding the ongoing Russia probe. “This is clearly an investigation again, without a crime. We’ve looked for two years — didn’t find anything, at all,” Nunes said, which is misleading at best. He went on to speak about the

Nothing like a fresh meme to revive the senses and inspire some genuine chuckles.
This week, a new meme went viral on Twitter, inspiring some very important tweets. The format is simple and allows for a myriad of possibilities, as any hearty format should. It goes like this: Twitter users come up with a protagonist to ask, "who gon' check me, boo?" along with a villain to answer, made up by a face of emojis, depending on the answer. fourteenth century europeans: who gon check me boo?rats: &

In this special edition of MashTalk, Mashable sits down with Mike Fasulo, President of Sony Electronics, at CES 2019. While Sony wowed at the tech conference with their new 85" and 98" 8K TVs, Fasulo said the trend to watch for 2019 is the further adoption of 4K by a widespread consumer base and the integration of smart home features within those popular TVs. Read more...More about Technology, Sony, Mashable Video, Mashtalk, and 4k

Amazon is taking another page out of the brick-and-mortar playbook, this time by launching its own shopping channel to promote products on the platform called Amazon Live, as first spotted by TechCrunch. The copying of physical stores’ strategies may be extra stinging to retailers because Amazon controls about half of the United States’ e-commerce market, ahead of more traditional stores like Best Buy, Macy’s, and Walmart.
On the list of companies that Amazon has crushed in ma

Earlier this week, the first official Stranger Things tie-in novel hit stores, providing some detail on events that led up to the TV series. Now, Netflix has announced a second canonical prequel novel about Chief Jim Hopper, Darkness on the Edge of Town, which will come out this summer, just before the show’s third season begins streaming in July.The book will be written by Adam Christopher, who wrote in a blog post that the story will come out on June 4th, and it will follow Hopper durin

It's not just you: Twitter has been experimenting with a lot more features lately. 
From "original tweeter" tags, to "good morning" news briefs, the service has been testing a ton of tweaks to make it easier to keep up with conversations and news unfolding on its platform.
Now, we have a new look at a whole other set of features it appears Twitter has been quietly experimenting with, including improvements to night mode, encrypted direct messages, and new ways to use GIFs.
The features were

Cartoons are for kids. They're also for college students, teenagers, adults, and anyone with a pulse, really. 
It's true: animated entertainment is for everyone. Cartoons can educate, entertain, distract, or transport us away to worlds that we could only imagine in our dreams.
In this modern age of entertainment, you can find cartoons anywhere and everywhere thanks to all the streaming services available now. Some act as a general hub for all kinds of shows, films, and genres, while others

After a week of culturally dividing moments like the Patriot's Super Bowl win and Trump's State of the Union Address, the internet turned to memes to help release some tension.
In this week's episode of All The Memes, we cringe at Super Bowl "queso" recipes, praise Nancy Pelosi's sassy SOTU clap, and admire the determination and creativity of trolls who continued to roast Ariana Grande for the "BBQ grill" tattoo mishap. Read more...More about Twitter, Memes, Mashable Video, Super Bowl, and Meme

Valentine’s Day is the one day a year where you have a free pass to be cheesy AF. We are officially granting you permission to indulge in the lovey dovey-ness of the holiday. Go all out with flowers and chocolate hearts. Have a candlelit dinner. Get your Valentine something romantic.
SEE ALSO: 20+ Valentine’s Day gifts that your girlfriend will actually want
The average American plans to spend $69 on Valentine’s Day this year, according to LendingTree — why not ensure tha

Brands are coming for the 2020 national election, whether you like it or not.
Don't believe me? Take a look at how brand Twitter has evolved in the past few years. We started off 2017 with MoonPie, a graham cracker marshmallow dessert, telling absurd jokes on Twitter. It was slightly annoying to watch a brand co-opt a joke format beloved by millennials, but it was largely benign. By 2018, brand Twitter's voice had gotten bolder, more sophisticated, and more intimate: The maker of the Honey Bun,

Ariana Grande's highly anticipated album, thank u, next, is finally here in full, and there's a lot to discuss, including NASA. 
Mac Miller and Pete Davidson theories are already floating around, and a new music video with a twist ending even dropped. But I, for one, can't stop thinking about Grande's new ode to space: "NASA."
When I first learned a track would be named after the space agency, which Grande loves to follow on social media, I wondered if it'd quite literally be a jam about ou

Last night, Android Police caught two new job listings at Google: “Vice President, Hardware Engineering, Wearables” and “Wearables Design Manager, Consumer Hardware.”Given the sorry state of Wear OS smartwatches, everybody has their fingers crossed that this finally means that Google is getting serious about doing something to improve its smartwatch offering — specifically, by making one itself.
It’s certainly a reasonable conclusion to jump to. There are lot

The two biggest discounts of the day are both Apple products: the 2018 iPad and MacBook Air. These are notable deals, not just because Apple gear rarely gets a discount worth talking about, but also because what’s on sale is worth buying if you’re in the market. If you’re not, we’ve added a few other deals below that we think are worth checking out.
The latest iPad tablet with 128GB of storage usually retails for $429.99, though it’s now down to $329.99 at Amazon.

Decorating a new place is super fun, but if paying for new furniture has you convincing yourself that you can live with that horrendous hand-me-down plaid couch for a few more years, we have a solution.
Walmart just announced a new line of furniture and decor called MoDRN (or MōDRN, if you want to be fancy) that puts high-quality pieces in your home for a fraction of luxury prices. (Yes, that Walmart!) Shop everything from bed frames and couches to dinnerware and wall art, all composed of p

A new bill introduced in the Senate today would legalize weed, and it’s not just the text of the bill that’s a nod to marijuana culture. The bill, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), is labeled with a conspicuous number: S.420.The new bill would give the Drug Enforcement Administration 60 days to remove the drug from its list of controlled substances, while also barring the sale of marijuana in states where it’s still illegal. S.420 would also require merchants to add an exci

Amazon’s second headquarters may not be coming to New York City after all.
According to the Washington Post, Amazon may be reconsidering its decision to open its long-touted HQ2 to the borough of Queens in New York City. Sources “familiar with the company's thinking” told the Post that the reassessment comes following local opposition from politicians and activist groups.
Last November, Amazon announced it had chosen New York’s Long Island City and Arlington, Virginia as

With the release of the new 11-inch iPad Pro, Apple has really outdone themselves with the sheer amount of power packed into an all-new elegant design. Luckily, this model is on sale for $49 off its retail price on Amazon. However, you can save an additional $100 with Amazon's "clip and redeem" coupon. That's a $149 savings altogether on the latest model of the iPad Pro, which brings the total price down to just $799.99.
Note: The additional savings is only good for select Prime members. You hav

Can’t Unsee is a web-based game that presents two choices of iOS interface designs, and asks the user a simple question: Which one is more correct? There are three rounds that ramp up in difficulty, asking you to pick between two mock-ups presented side by side that start out with design choices that seem obviously wrong, but then escalate to images that are nearly indistinguishable. Created by software engineer Alex Kotliarskyi with product designer Amanda Hum, it’s a game of &ldqu

No one knows what’s happening with Foxconn’s promised factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin (my hometown!) after conflicting reports surfaced last week that construction was on hold, then not on hold, on hold again, and then maybe back on track after Trump personally called Foxconn CEO Terry Gou. We’ve been tracking the story closely, Bloomberg Businessweek just ran a cover story about it, and there’s a great Reply All episode about it as well. It’s... well, it&rsqu

The richest man in modern history is caught in a bizarre sexual blackmail plot with geopolitical implications.
Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused the National Enquirer of “extortion and blackmail” involving a story published last month. Bezos had announced an investigation into how the Enquirer had obtained texts and photos revealing he’d had an affair. According to emails he posted, the tabloid then threatened to reveal compromising photos if Bezos didn’t drop his

You probably remember Oren Aks as the often exasperated former FuckJerry employee who was featured in the Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud. 
The graphic designer managed the disastrous festival's social media accounts but quit the company about six months after the festival fell apart. After Hulu's documentary was released, Twitter users voiced their support (and thirst) for him — even Chrissy Teigen gave him a shout out. Hi. It is me. Oren Aks. I’m actually the designer behind

British startup OakNorth has raised a $440 million funding round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund as well as the Clermont Group. The company is creating a digital bank and focuses on loans for small and medium enterprises and the technology behind those loans.
Today’s funding round is the biggest funding round in a European fintechcompany. OakNorth has raised $848 million in primary funding since its creation.
With this funding round, the company plans to double down on what it already do

Carbonite, the online backup and recovery company based in Boston, announced late yesterday that it will be acquiring Webroot, an endpoint security vendor, for $618.5 million in cash.
The company believes that by combining its cloud backup service with Webroot’sendpoint security tools, it will give customers a more complete solution. Webroot’s history actually predates the cloud, having launched in 1997. The private company reported $250 million in revenue for fiscal 2018, accor

Tesla Emissions Testing Mode
$0. It's free with any Tesla (starting at $42,900).View Product
The Good
Old-school toilet humor • Great for pranks • High-quality and realistic sounds
The Bad
Gross • Immature • Potentially offensive
The Bottom Line
Bathroom humor will never go out of style. Tesla's fart mode will have you and your unwitting passengers laughing, or cringing and then laughing. It's a gas.
⚡ Mashable Score
4.75😎 Cool Factor
4.0📘Learning Curve

Amazon’s proposed 25,000-employee office in Queens, New York, may not go forward after all, according to a report from The Washington Post. Citing local opposition from activist groups and politicians, two sources tell the Post that the company is reexamining the deal and mulling over whether to move its planned second headquarters elsewhere. Amazon has not yet leased or purchased office space in the Long Island City area where it’s scheduled to expand upon an existing satellite off

Who will guard the guards? Amazon!
Amazon has released guidelines for facial recognition software that it wants lawmakers to consider when crafting legislation. With the post, Amazon joins Microsoft in calling for regulation of the technology, and notably, its application in law enforcement.
SEE ALSO: Amazon's Ring has been reportedly spying on customers
Notably, as the ACLU points out, Amazon's suggestions place the burden of "misuse" of the technology onto the people using the tech — not

Google partnered with Gallaudet University to design an app that translates spoken words from 70 languages and dialects into text in real timeLive Transcribe was specifically designed to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The app has been rolled out in limited beta for Android devices, and from now on it will come pre-installed on Pixel 3 phones.  Read more...More about Google, Mashable Video, Accessibility, Accessible Technology, and Deaf

With Valentine's Day coming up soon, it might be a good time to upgrade your old HD TV for a new 4K TV so you and your special someone can get on your "Netflix and Chill."
Buy why pay full price? We never do.
We found the best deals from Amazon, Walmart, the PCMag Shop, and Best Buy on amazing 4K TVs of various shapes and sizes for your home. 
Here are just some of our favorites:Save $402 on Samsung UN49NU8000FXZA Flat 49-inch 4K UHD 8 Series Smart LED TV (2018) on Amazon.
Save $200 on JVC