Author: admin
The Loop Quiet 2 look almost identical to the Loop Experience earplugs, but there are two crucial differences: With no acoustic filter, they’re capable of blocking out more noise—24 dB rather than 18—and they’re made entirely from soft silicone, including the round protrusion that sits almost at right angles to the interchangeable tip. That means these silicone earplugs fit right inside the concha of your ear, entirely flush with your head, so when you lie on your side there is very little force applied to the earplug and also less chance of inadvertently knocking them loose. That makes the Loop…
Starcloud’s latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator. The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s another sign of the interest in outsourcing data centers to orbit as resource and political obstacles slow their development on Earth, but the business model depends on unproven technology and significant capital expenditure. Starcloud has now raised a total of $200 million, and launched its first satellite with an Nvidia H100…
Other Video Doorbells to ConsiderI’ve tested several other video doorbells. These are the ones that narrowly missed out on a place above.Photograph: Simon HillSwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell for $100: I don’t love the design of this wide doorbell, but it does come with a wee display that you can use to view who’s there and answer. This could be handy for folks who don’t want to rely on a phone and it lets anyone in the house check who is calling. Video quality is decent, though the frame rate is limited to 15, and the display is low res. You…
Calling all current and aspiring chief marketers: Your Tuesday-morning coffee (or workout, or meditation, or commute) has a new companion: Introducing the Marketing Vanguard newsletter from ADWEEK.This CMO-first digest is the latest offering in ADWEEK’s Marketing Vanguard franchise: a collection of invitation-only events, including our signature Inspiration Excursions and annual Summit; our weekly Marketing Vanguard podcast; our annual Marketing Vanguard Awards; and curated content and dialogs, with membership at the center.The newsletter, sponsored by Sparks, will bring you all the news, insights, interviews, research, executive shifts, and announcements you need to download to get the job done. We’ll skew toward…
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the meetings, but an official who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED at the time: “The White House does not comment on mysterious meetings with unnamed staffers.”Simultaneously, Trump has also sought to absolve officials of any wrongdoing in the wake of the 2020 election. Last year, Trump gave “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to a slate of people who had tried, and failed, to help him overturn the 2020 election results. In recent months, Trump has pressured Colorado governor Jared Polis to release Tina…
OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI video-generation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public raised immediate suspicions. The app had invited users to upload their own faces — so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new WSJ investigation, the real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that nobody was using, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI the AI race. So what happened? After a splashy launch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile,…
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently insisted that he isn’t worried about Netflix and other streaming services luring away the service’s most popular creators. Mohan’s comments came during a long interview with The New York Times series The Interview — which, as Mohan noted, streams on YouTube. Indeed, he seemed to play the magnanimous winner for much of the conversation; when asked about Oscar host Conan O’Brien’s poking fun at YouTube, Mohan simply replied that O’Brien is “very funny” and that his “Team Coco channel does really well on YouTube.” As for popular podcasts like “The Breakfast Club” and “My Favorite…
For years now, smartphone makers have made the camera bump on devices bigger in order to chase camera improvements. Even if that kind of design makes cameras better, at times, it creates usability issues. With the Pixel 10a, Google took a new approach of entirely removing the camera bump and making a flat phone that lies completely on surfaces. While this is a delightful change in the world of big camera bumps, Google hasn’t otherwise made major design changes with its newest budget smartphone. The Pixel 9a looked mostly the same, with a very small camera bump. I have the…
Amazon’s bet on “Project Hail Mary” has paid off handsomely, with the film recently surpassing “Creed III” to become the company’s highest grossing movie ever. And it was a big bet, with a reported budget of around $200 million. That’s a big price tag for any film, but especially one that’s not a sequel or part of an existing franchise. Instead, it’s based on a bestselling science fiction novel by Andy Weir, whose book “The Martian” was adapted into a successful film a decade ago. And that’s not the only thing that makes “Project Hail Mary” feel unconventional. For long…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Waymo shared that it is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week. That number is small compared to its human-driven ride-hailing counterparts, like Lyft and Uber. But that’s not what I found most interesting. The pace of growth in rides, new markets, and how it compares to its fleet size is what got my attention. We built a chart (which you can view below) that…
OpenAI announced this week that it’s shutting down its Sora app and related video models just six months after launching the app. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated what the decision means for OpenAI and for the industry more broadly. To some extent, the move seems consistent with what we’ve been hearing about OpenAI as it focuses on enterprise and productivity tools ahead of a possible IPO. In fact, Kirsten suggested that OpenAI’s decision to shutter Sora was “a sign of maturity that was nice to see in an AI lab.”…
FAQSWe tested and recommend all of the heart rate monitors below, which do a pretty impeccable job. But what do all these terms mean?Heart rate zones: If someone tells you they’ve been doing 80/20 training, they’ve been doing heart rate zone-based workouts. Heart rate zones are an easy way to break down your range of effort during exercise. Zones go from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating working at 90 to 100 percent of your maximum heart rate. Zone 2 represents training at 60 to 70 percent of maximum heart rate and represents light training. 80/20 training is intended to…
The air felt different at this year’s SXSW, the annual March festival where tech meets pop culture in Austin. I was reminded of the 2019 SXSW when people packed downtown, and snake lines formed out of local ventures. Attendees said it was like that again this year, though my friend, who lives in the area and has attended many times, admitted that some stuff has changed. For instance the festival is now two days shorter than it used to be. It was also “decentralized,” mainly due to the demolition of the Austin Convention Center, which scattered events and panels throughout downtown…
Cars didn’t always have steering wheels. The very first car—the 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen, invented by Karl Benz—used a tiller system: a horizontal bar with a handle mounted to a vertical bar. The lever-like handle was similar in many respects to a boat’s rudder. Amazingly, it would be another nine years before French engineer Alfred Vacheron saw sense and fitted the first known steering wheel to his 4-horsepower Panhard for the Paris-Rouen race. Just four years later, in 1898, Panhard made the infinitely preferable and safer steering wheel standard on all its cars. And we’ve been using them ever since.”A car…
Take a photo on any digital camera or smartphone and it’s not just the pixels that are saved. The image also gets a bunch of metadata appended to it, also known as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data, including details of when it was taken, the device that was used to capture it, and the camera settings that were used.If your phone or camera has a GPS chip and is tracking your location, then this gets invisibly stamped on to the photo as well. That’s good if you want to look back at all the pictures you’ve ever taken in…
One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.”But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and…