Technology news

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment firm financed by billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Jack Ma that invests in companies developing technologies to decarbonize society, is investing $12.5 million in a geothermal project development company called Baseload Capital.
Baseload Capital is a project investment firm that provides capital to develop geothermal energy power plants using technology developed by its Swedish parent company, Climeon.
Like the spinoff from Google’s

Tesla will unveil its Model Y crossover SUV on March 14th during an event at the company’s design studio in Los Angeles, CEO Elon Musk announced Sunday. The new electric car will be Tesla’s fifth since the company was founded in 2003.The Model Y will share about 75 percent of its parts with the Model 3, which is currently Tesla’s most affordable car. Musk said the Model Y will be about 10 percent bigger, cost about 10 percent more, and will have slightly less range than the Mo

Tesla will unveil its Model Y crossover SUV on March 14th during an event at the company’s design studio in Los Angeles, CEO Elon Musk announced Sunday. The new electric car will be Tesla’s fifth since the company was founded in 2003.The Model Y will share about 75 percent of its parts with the Model 3, which is currently Tesla’s most affordable car. Musk said the Model Y will be about 10 percent bigger, cost about 10 percent more, and will have slightly less range than the Mo

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec,senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fourth edition of our newsletter, a weekly jaunt into the wonderful world of transportation and how we (and our packages) move.
This week we chat with PolestarCEO Thomas Ingenlath, dig into Lyft’s S-1, take note of an emerging trend in AV development, and check out an experiment with paving. Oh, and how could we forget Tesla.
Never heard of TechCrunch’

Google says that it won’t pull Absher, a controversial government app from Saudi Arabia, from its app store, telling California representative Jackie Speier that it did not violate its policies, and that it would remain up, according to Business Insider.The app allows Saudi users to access government services, letting them apply for jobs or permits, pay fines, renew licenses, or to report crimes. However, it also allows Saudi men to track female dependents and control their movement.A rec

Netflix’s“Umbrella Academy” opens in 1989, with 43 women across the world giving unexpected, simultaneous birth. Fast forward 30 years, and seven of those (mostly) super-powered children were adopted by a wealthy benefactor, formed a crimefighting team called The Umbrella Academy, experienced tragedy and went their separate ways.
On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by our original co-host Darrell Etherington to review the show. The descript

A pair of reports last week painted a negative picture of UK-based finance startup Revolut. Wired described a workplace where turnover and toxic behavior is rife, while The Telegraph says that the company had turned off a system designed to prevent money laundering for three months in 2018, something that Revolut denies.Revolut is the company behind a finance app that allows users to transfer money to one another, exchange different types of currencies and cryptocurrencies, and issues a debit c

The 2018 Holiday shopping season was the biggest on record for e-commerce, with nearly $126 billion in online sales. But as e-commerce continues to expand, the demand for warehouse workers is growing faster than the labor supply and creating an increased need for automation.
Given its dominance in e-commerce and the massive scale of its business, there’s no surprise that Amazonwas one of the first companies to supplement their human workforce with robotics. Since t

Mary Ann Azevedo ContributorShare on Twitter Mary Ann Azevedo covers startups and tech at Crunchbase News.More posts by this contributorInvestor momentum builds for construction tech Austin in January: Cash rich and maturing
Texas startups will soon have two new sources for capital.
Crunchbase News has learned that two Austin-based venture capital firms, ATX Seed Ventures and Quake Capital, are in the process of each raising $100 million funds.
The news comes off a period in whic

The attention economy is dying, and it’s not pretty; there is only so much time in the day to pay attention to things, and we as a society have reached the limit. (By things I mean ads.) Fortnite, though, has managed to stay culturally relevant and even grow since its 2017 launch — which is unusual. And that’s because its creator, Epic Games, has figured out how to get people to keep paying attention.
“Paying attention” was a phrase before it became a literalizatio

Earlier this month you may have seen a website named ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com doing the rounds, which uses AI to generate startlingly realistic fake faces. Well, here’s the sequel: WhichFaceIsReal.com, which lets you test your ability to distinguish AI-generated fakes from the genuine article. Just head to the site and click on who you think is the real person!
WhichFaceIsReal.com also has a higher purpose though. It was set up by two academics from the University of Washington, Jevin W

Last year, author Michael Moreci released his debut novel, Black Star Renegades, about a young man named Cade Sura who finds himself chased by agents of an extremist galactic empire when he comes into possession of a powerful weapon. If that sounds a bit like the plot of a Star Wars film, that’s by design: the book is an admitted homage to George Lucas’ franchise.
Black Star Renegades is a fun, pulpy, familiar read: a dash across space with a lovable band of misfits trying to stay o

Facebook has been overhauling its Messenger app recently, slimming it down to focus more on chat, and promised that it would eventually roll out a dark mode for users. That mode is now rolling out, but there’s a tongue-in-cheek trick you need to do in order to activate it: you have to moon someone.The trick, spotted by Android Police, 9to5Mac, and others, is simple: send someone (or yourself) a crescent moon emoji ( ). Once you do so, a shower of moons appears in the chat window, and you&

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
Cities at night can be magical. There’s a turning point, after all the late night people have gone home, before the early morning risers head to work, when things start to feel weird. Familiar places don’t become unfamiliar, exactly. But they do feel off. You’ll w

In The Wandering Earth, the sun will soon expand and destroy the Earth, so engineers concoct an ambitious plan — move the planet to another solar system, using giant engines. China’s first big science fiction film is a goofy disaster movie, with some outstanding special effects that bring the world to life. One of the studios behind the special effects, Pixomondo, has released a VFX breakdown that shows how one of the special effects studios created the futuristic, frozen Earth and

Entrepreneur Marc Köhlbrugge has launched Expensive Chat, a web-based chat service where every character typed costs a penny. As spotted by Motherboard, Köhlbrugge announced the site in a tweet, calling it “a social experiment to see what happens to a chatroom when it’s not a free-for-all, but every message cost you cold, hard cash.” And where does all that cash go? Directly to Köhlbrugge.
The site shows a leaderboard, with those who have spent the most at the t

If Bloomberg and the New York Times are to be believed, later this year Facebook will introduce a cryptocurrency which will allow WhatsApp users to send money instantly. Yes, that’s right: Facebook. Cryptocurrency. Earthquake! Revolution! The world is tilting on its axis! The end times are cometh!
Except – um – what exactly are people going to do with FaceCoin, once they receive it?
This is not Facebook’s first venture into virtual currencies, payments, or peer-to-peer pa

In December, Google rolled out a new feature that allowed users to find Lime bikes and scooters in Google Maps in 13 different cities. This weekend, the company announced that it is expanding the feature to more than 80 cities worldwide.Google has steadily been adding ride-share options into Google Maps in recent years, partnering with companies like Uber and Lyft. Like those features, the app provides users with the location, the time it takes to walk over the vehicle you select and a pricing

Just a day after launching to orbit, SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule automatically docked to a port on the International Space Station this morning — a critical part of its current test flight. This docking maneuver is something the capsule will have to do routinelyin the future, when it starts transporting astronauts to and from the ISS.
The Crew Dragon has been in orbit since around 3AM ET Saturday, when it was launched into space on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy S