Finnish telecoms company Elisa is supporting the digital upgrade of around 100 factories owned by US consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, following an initial rollout of IoT monitoring and insights at 10 sites. The partnership, which has been openly discussed by Elisa on the conference circuit for some time, has shifted up a gear,…
After a 17-month rendezvous with an asteroid hurtling through space some 200 million miles from Earth, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is on its way home. In a tweet, Japan’s space agency (JAXA) described the spacecraft’s departure from the Ryugu asteroid on Wednesday as “an emotional moment.” But Hayabusa2 isn’t coming back empty-handed. Assuming its homecoming is…
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. MacBook Pro 16” first impressions: Return of the Mack Over the past few years, Apple’s MacBook game had begun to suffer…
Launching and operating shared bikes and scooters has lost its novelty. Worldwide, numerous companies are operating shared micromobility services — so many that the industry is well into a consolidation phase. In Latin America, Grow Mobility formed as part of a merger between micromobility providers Grin and Yellow. In the U.S., Bird acquired Scoot. And,…
Big changes are afoot for Wire, an enterprise-focused end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service that advertises itself as “the most secure collaboration platform”. In February, Wire quietly raised $8.2 million from Morpheus Ventures and others, we’ve confirmed — the first funding amount it has ever disclosed — and alongside that external financing, it moved its…
Legendary coder John Carmack is leaving Facebook’s Oculus after 6 years to focus on a personal project — no less than the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or “Strong AI.” He’ll remain attached to the company in a “Consulting CTO” position, but will be spending all his time working on, perhaps, the AI that finally…
More than 50% of residential apartments and other real estate properties in Jakarta are currently vacant, according to official estimates. A startup that is attempting to make it easier for tenants to rent these properties in Jakarta and other places in Indonesia said on Thursday that it has closed a new financing round. Travelio has…
Are foldable phones the future? The Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X are two examples of what future smartphones could look like, with tablet-sized screens hidden beneath a fold. But what if the future doesn’t mean making even bigger screens, but instead shrinking down the size of our existing displays? Motorola has revealed the…
“There is but one truly serious question in philosophy, and that is suicide,” wrote Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. This is equally true for a human navigating an absurd existence and an artificial intelligence navigating a morally insoluble situation. As AI-powered vehicles take the road, questions about their behavior are inevitable — and…
NASA has a new app (or web-based game, if you’re on desktop) that provides a simplified simulation of what it’s like to plan and run a commercial crew mission — meaning one of the planned varieties of mission that will actually take place aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner once they begin flying…
