Technology news

A Huawei executive was involved in a plot to steal trade secrets, claims California-based electronics startup CNEX Labs. Chinese telecommunications company Huawei and CNEX — which was co-founded by a former Huawei employee — have filed dueling lawsuits over trade secret theft. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports that high-level Huawei figure Eric Xu has been accused of helping oversee an alleged conspiracy.
The Journal quotes a newly released hearing transcript that offers some det

Paris startup campus Station F and Le Studio Next have teamed up once again for a second season of Foundation, a documentary series about building a startup. If you liked the first season, you’ll feel right at home.
A video team followed the entrepreneurs working for three startups through their work issues, their personal life and their emotional reactions. You’ll feel like you know them after watching the series.
This year, Foundation focuses on three startups that try to have a so

Consumer Reportsis calling the automatic lane-change feature on Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot “far less competent” than a human driver and cautioned it could pose safety risks.
The consumer advocacy organization posted its review Wednesday on the newest version of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system.
Navigate on Autopilot is an active guidance system that is supposed to navigate a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp, including interchanges and making lane changes

Earlier this month, I shadowed several restaurants throughout New York and talked to restaurant employees across the US to see how they’ve received Google Duplex, the AI that makes life-like calls for reservations on your behalf. Most agreed that the AI sounded unmistakably human — and according to Google’s response to reporting by The New York Times, there’s a 25 percent chance that they were.
Google says that a quarter of Duplex calls start with human callers, and 15 p

Smart home assistants need smarter timers. Today, you can use Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to set timers. You can use all three smart assistants to control your smart home gadgets.But frustratingly, you cannot use the two features together: setting your lights to arbitrarily turn off in 30 minutes is impossible with today’s most sophisticated, cutting-edge smart home technology.
Now, you could use a pre-programmed routine, but that’s not the same thing. You can set your lights t

Modsy has raised some new cash as the computer vision startup looks to get physical and build more of the furniture it recommends. The startup announced they have closed $37 million in Series C funding led by TCV. They’ve now raised north of $70 million to date.
The service combines computer vision tech with human designer know-how to let users design the trendy home of their dreams. The process begins with a user snapping pics of their room (or multiple rooms), which Modsythen stitches in

A group of legal experts has delayed a controversial vote about contracts that affects any internet user who’s clicked “Agree” without really reading a platform’s terms of service.It’s difficult to buy products, use apps, or even go online without accepting the terms of dauntingly long user agreements, which govern everything from how companies use your data to whether you can sue them. People almost universally ignore these contracts, which has created a conundrum

Memorial Day is coming up next Monday, May 27th. Several retailers are already lowering prices for the US holiday, and you can find deals on all sorts of tech. You still have time to check out the Google Express sale, which includes some great deals on some Apple products and gaming consoles. It knocks almost $100 off of the PS4 Pro and $200 off of an Xbox One X, to name a few examples.The Apple Watch Series 3 (38mm, GPS) is back down to its lowest price: $199 on Amazon. This makes it $200 chea

If there’s a special place in your heart for single-purpose utilities that solve a nagging problem, then you’re going to want to skip your daily Starbucks coffee and instead buy yourself a copy of the new iOS contacts utility Vignette. The new app is focused on doing one thing well: finding photos for your contacts by scouring social media profiles and updating them.
Many people don’t bother to add a photo when entering in an iOS contact for the first time — it’s of

Like many of you, I’m assuming, my desk was purchased at Ikea and is the center of my life. Such as it is, the desk is littered with bits of crackers, memory cards, branded Moleskin notebooks and countless coffee cups. I’m not a slob. I just live here. The desk is clean enough.
Then Dysonsent me its new task light to try out. My desk suddenly felt dirty. After assembling the light, I looked around and took inventory of my life and choices. If I was going to have something as lovely a

Who helped your startup grow? Nominate a growth marketing agency.
For those who have been members of Extra Crunch for a while now, you have seen us go through two cycles of Verified Experts, covering startup attorneys and brand designers. Now, we turn our attention to our third community of startup professionals: growth marketers / hackers. Growth is the single most important objective of any startup, and so these professionals can have an outsized impact on which companies grow, and by how much

Monique Villa ContributorShare on Twitter Monique Villa is an investor at Mucker Capital, a seed and “pre-seed” stage fund investing in companies powering a software-enabled world. She is also the Founder of Nashville-based ModernCapital, a community of startup founders and ecosystem partners committed to company building in the Southeast (#BuildInSE).We are witnessing the greatest paradigm shift in power since the advent of the venture capital industry. Since taking my first VC rol

The Boring Company’s Loop transit system that aims to shuttle people in autonomous electric vehicles between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. fails to meet several key national safety standards, a review of its proposal reveals.
The underground system appears to lack sufficient emergency exits, ignore the latest engineering practices and proposes passenger escape ladders that one fire safety professor calls “the definition of insanity.”
Details of the 35.3-mile system, the first

It’s been a frantic few weeks in nerd culture. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wrapped up more than 10 years of story build-up with Avengers: Endgame. Game of Thrones concluded after eight seasons on HBO. And the nerd-centric sitcom The Big Bang Theory closed up shop on CBS after more than a decade on the air. What makes all these events so notable, though, is that they aren’t the niche interests they might have been 20 years ago. Avengers: Endgame is going to make around $3 billion w

Barslose 20% of their alcohol to overpours and “free” drinks for friends. That amounts to $50 billion per year in booze that mysteriously disappears, making life tough for every pub and restaurant. Nectar wants to solve that mystery with its ultrasound depth-sensing bottle caps that measure how much liquid is left in a bottle by measuring how long it takes a sonar pulse to bounce back. And now it’s bringing real-time pour tracking to beer with its gyroscopic taps. The result is

One of the books that defined my childhood was Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story. National Geographic has adapted it for a dramatic series set to start next week, and to prepare, I flipped through a couple of the chapters to refresh my memory on it.The book is as it felt to me back when I read it in 7th grade: it’s a gripping story about the horrors of Ebola and the early outbreaks that brought it to the world’s attention. Reading it again in 2019 is a go

Working at an Amazonfulfillment center is tough and tedious. Stories of problematic working conditions have plagued the company for years now, and pressure has likely only increased as the retail giant is pushing to get packages out even faster.
To give the company some credit, it has worked to improve conditions, including the addition of a $15/hour minimum wage and automating certain tasks with the help of its growing robotics offering. Turns out the company has also been, quite literally, gam

Tech ethics can mean a lot of different things, but surely one of the most critical, unavoidable, and yet somehow still controversial propositions in the emerging field of ethics in technology is that tech should promote gender equality. But does it? And to the extent it does not, what (and who) needs to change?
In this second of a two-part interview “On The Internet of Women,” Harvard fellow and Logic magazine founder and editor Moira Weigel and I discuss the future of capitalism an

Remember the OUYA?
As a cheap Android-powered game console, it was pitched as being able to “open the last closed platform: the TV.” It was one of the first huge Kickstartercampaigns, raising nearly $9 million on the site in 2012. Even half a decade later, it remains one of the biggest campaigns Kickstarter has seen.
Outside of Kickstarter, the $99 console never really found its audience. OUYA was split up by 2015, its software assets and team acquired by Razer.
Razerkept the OUYA st

In July 2018, Lyft announced that it was buying Motivate, the largest bike-share operator in the US, including Citi Bike in New York City. At the time, it was seen as a major move by the ride-hailing company to expand beyond cars. Now, bikes and cars are on equal footing as Lyft announces that Citi Bike has been completely integrated into its smartphone app.
Lyft previously announced the beta-testing of Citi Bike in its app for about 20 percent of its users. Today, it will be available to every

Amazon shareholders have voted down proposals meant to curb sales of the company’s controversial facial recognition tool and to limit its carbon output.The proposals, which were driven by shareholding activists and employees, were nonbinding, but represented a moment of defiance against Amazon. The company’s Rekognition tool, which is sold to law enforcement, has been criticized on civil liberties grounds, and employees have said the company could be doing more to fight climate chan

An extended pre-credits sequence in one episode of Amazon’s Good Omens displays the best part of the six-episode miniseries based on the book of the same name by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The segment traces the 6,000-year relationship between prissy angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen of The Queen and Frost/Nixon) and swaggering demon Crowley (Doctor Who star David Tennant), who have known each other since the Garden of Eden was a going concern. The sequence is an entertaining romp thr

Google is the subject of its first GDPR probe from Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DCP), Reuters is reporting. It’s the first major standoff between the company and its lead privacy regulator in Europe, raising difficult questions about how the ad giant handles personal data across the internet.
The probe will investigate how Google treats personal data at each stage of its ad-tracking system. Those questions originate in part from a complaint filed by the browser company Br

U.S. consumers are still embracing subscriptions. More than a third (34%) of Americans say they believe they’ll increase the number of subscription services they use over the next two years, according to a new report from eMarketer. This is following an increase to three subscription services on average, up from 2.4 services five years ago.
The report cited data from subscription platform Zuora and The Harris Poll in making these determinations.
The study also debunks the idea that we&rsqu

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Republican and Democratic leaders discussed growing concerns over the use of facial recognition software by law enforcement. In an unusual show of bipartisanship, both parties agreed it was time to take a hard look at the technology and potentially draft legislation to regulate it.
The hearing, held by the House Oversight Committee, was the first in a series of hearings that will analyze the impacts of facial recognition technology offered by Amazon and

Last week, SpaceX sued the US government over an unknown federal contract it didn’t receive — and now the company’s rivals Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance want to intervene with the lawsuit. The two companies believe that SpaceX is protesting a combined $2 billion award the US Air Force gave to Blue Origin, ULA, and Northrop Grumman last October to develop new rockets for the Air Force. SpaceX didn’t receive any money at the time, and now it’s possible t

To become a global fintech player, locate your company in San Francisco and Africa.
That’s the approach of payments company Flutterwave,digital lending startup Mines, and mobile-money venture Chipper Cash—Africa-founded ventures that maintain headquarters in San Francisco and operations in Africa to tap the best of both worlds in VC, developers, clients, and the frontier of digital finance.
This arrangement wasn’t exactly coordinated across the ventures, but TechCrunch coverage

The Ouya gaming service and all games on the platform will cease functioning on June 25th, Razer has announced. That date will mark the unremarkable end of what began as a runaway Kickstarter success story: the inexpensive Ouya mini-console was powered by Android and introduced games such as TowerFall. But despite being positioned as the indie console, Ouya never quite took off after its $8.5 million crowdfunding campaign. The goal was to move Android’s indie gaming scene to TV screens &m

DJI is about to make it harder to fly its drones too close to larger aircraft. The Chinese tech company announced Wednesday that all DJI drones weighing more than 250 grams — which includes every one it currently offers — released in 2020 onward will have built-in airplane and helicopter detectors.Each of those new drones will now include sensors that can receive the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signal that planes and helicopters send out. It’s a technolo

Google is introducing some noticeable changes to how it displays mobile search results, meant to better highlight the source behind each link. Mobile search results will soon display a website’s icon and name above the title of the specific page being surfaced. Until now, Google has somewhat downplayed the source of search results, displaying a website’s name in a smaller font beneath each link.
The design will begin rolling out in the “next few days.” Google says the de

Mario Kart Tour, the smartphone debut of Nintendo’s long-running kart racing franchise, has started its closed beta in Japan and the US, and it hasn’t taken long for videos and screenshots to start appearing on the web. But Kotaku reports that the game also features lootbox-style (or “gacha”) systems where you spend virtual currency for a shot at unlocking new items which offer different degrees of rarity and functionality.For five green gems, for example, you get a rand