Missed today’s Samsung Unpacked event in San Francisco? In all, we have five new phones — one of them a foldable — some new earbuds, a virtual assistant and a watch. Here’s everything you need to know. Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, presented at Unpacked in San Francisco (Source: Samsung) Samsung’s Galaxy Fold launches April 26, starting at…
If you’re doing ordinary photography and videography, there’s rarely any need to go beyond extreme wide-angle lenses — but why be ordinary? This absurd custom fisheye lens has a 270-degree field of view, meaning it can see behind the camera it’s mounted on — or rather the camera mounted on it. It’s certainly a bit…
Last July, at its Cloud Next conference, Google announced the Cloud Services Platform, its first real foray into bringing its own cloud services into the enterprise data center as a managed service. Today, the Cloud Services Platform (CSP) is launching into beta. It’s important to note that the CSP isn’t — at least for the…
Allianz X, the venture capital arm attached to German insurance giant Allianz, has increased the size of its fund to €1 billion, around $1.1 billion, according to an announcement made today. The fund was initially €430 million, or around $490 million, when it launched in 2016. This new injection comes directly from parent Allianz SE, the 124-year-old…
Before Oculus kickstarted a lot of the fervor around consumer headsets, the VR headsets that were being built for enterprise rigs were multi-thousands-dollar rigs that still sucked. As Oculus and HTC expanded their platforms, a lot of these enterprise-focused VR companies shriveled up or were forced to significantly retool how they approached fat-wallet customers. Things…
Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state — especially a shabby one, as China’s apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition — an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy and incompetence. The security lapse was discovered by Victor Gevers…
Nauto, the transportation company that aims to make human drivers safer and train autonomous vehicles for all types of scenarios, has scooped up the team from Newton Technologies, following the company’s ceasing of operations.* Newton Technologies aims to reduce the number of driving-related deaths to zero by leveraging AI to create solutions geared toward connected…
Eight years after raising its first $30 million fund, 212 is back in the market with a $30 million first close for its latest fund focused on investments in Turkish and Eastern European startups. Looking to invest in business-to-business software as a service startups, financial services technologies, and marketplace businesses, the firm has already launched four…
“The Breaker Upperers” kicks off with an ingenious premise: What if you could pay an agency to take care of your awkward romantic break-ups? And what if that agency was run by two longtime friends who are starting to drift apart? The film was a big hit in New Zealand last year and is now…
In addition to competing for smart speaker market share, Google and Amazon are also competing for developer mindshare in the voice app ecosystem. On this front, Amazon has soared ahead — the number of available voice skills for Alexa devices has grown to top 80,000 the company recently announced. According to a new third-party analysis…
