The idea of jumping into a self-piloting flying taxi for a trip downtown sounded like the stuff of fantasy only a few years ago, but with so many companies now developing such a vehicle, it’s hard not to believe it’ll soon be a thing. And no, we’re not talking about some crackpot glueing a pair…
Tired of your smartphone games, and don’t want to take the Switch with you on the train today? Panic, renowned creator of useful Mac apps and more recently publisher of interesting games, has created a tiny handheld console that goes anywhere and receives a regular trickle of new games. It’s called Playdate. One has to…
When Google launched Duplex with a demo at I/O last year, the audience was left wondering how much of the call was staged. The AI-based reservation booking service seemed almost too impressive to be a machine. Now that it’s been used for real-world reservations, Google has revealed that it frequently isn’t. The company recently told…
Music streaming giant Spotify has notified an unspecified number of users that the company has reset their account password, but has left dozens of users asking why. In an email, some Spotify users were told their password was reset “due to detected suspicious activity,” but gave no further details. Anyone else getting emails from Spotify…
Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person’s face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also paintings. It’s not perfect, but when it works, it is — like much AI work these days — eerie and fascinating. The model…
While much of the world remains fixated on the competition to build autonomous cars, there’s another race that’s gaining momentum fast. It centers on supersonic jets that can fly faster than the speed of sound, or 767 miles per hour. Indeed, while most commercial airliners today fly at between 400 and 650 miles per hour…
The 2019 Memorial Day sales have already begun, and Dell has hit the ground running. The Dell Memorial Day sale has some of the best offers we’ve seen this season: This computer maker and retailer is slashing prices left and right on laptops, TVs, monitors, and more, with deep discounts that can save you thousands on…
Bars lose 20 percent 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…
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…
Monique Villa Contributor 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…
