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In our perambulations through the halls of museums, who hasn’t wanted to give paintings we pass by a little touch-up in a spontaneous act of yellowism? Disney has created an augmented reality app to allow just this, but given the company’s core competencies I can’t help but wonder if the museum use case is just a smokescreen for another: the smartification of millions of… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Day two of YC S’17 brought us autonomous store checkout, cannabis genomics and at home fertility testing. We whittled down the strong day of pitches to just seven hot companies. These are the startups our writers and the investors we spoke with were most excited about. If you want to check out the full list of startups from day 2 you can read about them here. Additional reporting by… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
How the bugs in our gut and elsewhere on our body affect our overall health still remains largely a mystery. But IBM is hoping to shed some light on the human microbiome and its role in autoimmune diseases using crowdsourced supercomputers through its World Community Grid. IBM has partnered up with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Roku isn’t only maintaining its lead as the top streaming media player device in the U.S., it’s increasing it. That’s the conclusion from the latest industry report out today from market intelligence firm Parks Associates, which states that 37 percent of streaming devices in U.S. households are Roku devices, as of the first quarter of this year. That’s up from 30 percent… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
VIPKID, an online English teaching tool, announced today that it has raised $200 million in financing. That financing round values the company at $1.5 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg. That wouldn’t just give VIPKID unicorn status — it also exposes a huge amount of demand there is in China and other countries as a tool to learn English from English speakers. VIPKID… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
HP has been producing some solid gaming hardware as of late — the OMEN 17 laptop I reviewed and the cube desktop built by Maingear are good examples. However, HP has yet to go all out with their OMEN X brand — the “X” denoting the upper echelon of its high-performance brand — until now, with two new laptops. The OMEN X laptop comes in 15-inch and 17-inch… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Guy Fierens, Stijn Huys and Jasper Slaets realized that finding sign-language interpreters in Belgium – or anywhere, really, was wildly difficult. Their solution? A 3D-printed hand that recreates sign language automatically. Called Project Aslan (Antwerp’s Sign Language Actuating Node), the hand is available for printing and you can also have it printed for you by 3DHubs.… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
When we imagine the existential threat to the humanity posed by automation, we usually think of the negative impact on the workforce, not robots quite literally bludgeoning us to death. In a post titled “Exploiting industrial collaborative robots,” security researchers at IOActive detail how popular models of consumer and industrial robots have already been compromised in such a… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
Lilium is almost as ambitious as European startups come. The Munich-based company is developing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet, which it hopes will one day power an on-demand “air taxi” service, arguably making flying cars a reality. Read More
Source: Tech Crunch
The Village Voice, the oldest and best-known of the alternative weekly newspapers, announced today that it will no longer publish a print edition. The decision was made by new owner Peter Barbey, who emphasized that this isn’t the end of The Voice itself — the company says the publication will “maintain its iconic progressive brand with its digital platform and a variety of… Read More
Source: Tech Crunch