Arsenal football club has introduced an official chatbot to liaise with fans. The Arsenal bot has been dubbed ‘Robot Pires’, after former left-winger and midfielder Robert Pires – a leading player in the successful 2000-2006 seasons – who returned to the club as a coach in 2016. The new AI-powered personality was developed in collaboration…
Snapchat is launching its first Mac and Windows software that takes over your webcam and brings its augmented reality effects to other video streaming and calling services. Snap Camera can be selected as a camera output in OBS Skype, YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom and more, plus browser-based apps like Facebook Live so you can…
NEWSBYTE Fujitsu is teaming up with Ericsson to develop and manufacture base stations for 5G wireless communications. Tokyo-based Fujitsu is to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Swedish telecoms provider, with Fujitsu contributing its miniaturisation and energy-saving expertise, and Ericsson bringing a much larger share of the base station market – nearly 30 percent,…
Blockchain startup Blockchain shared its roadmap for the coming months. The company is launching a hardware wallet in partnership with Ledger. Blockchain is also launching a new trading platform called Swap — this platform will find the best trading prices across a variety of exchanges and liquidity pools so that you can exchange tokens at…
A new survey from MIT into the ethical challenges of autonomous vehicles reveals both global preferences and regional variations in answers to some tough questions. Chris Middleton reports. There are 1.2 billion cars in use worldwide, and every year 1.2 million people die on the roads, meaning that one person loses his or her life…
Vishal Makhijani, the longtime chief executive of online education company Udacity, is stepping down as its chief executive officer, TechCrunch has learned. Makhijani first joined the company in 2013 as chief operating officer under Sebastian Thrun, the company’s founder and chief executive at the time. In 2016, Thrun, the original architect of Alphabet’s self-driving car…
The influx of robots into the workplace tends to conjure images of automated warehouses and monotonous manufacturing tasks taken over by an army of soulless machines. But behind the buzz, we don’t often appreciate that robots can take on roles that require more than the ability to keep going without sleep or toilet breaks. Machines…
Twitch continues to dominate the live streaming market, with approximately 2.5 billion hours watched by viewers in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new industry report out this morning. While YouTube still trails, it’s begun to close the gap with Twitch, it appears. YouTube’s live streaming platform, YouTube Live, started the year with…
Ride-sharing platform Lyft is already competing with Uber in cities around the world to provide on-demand mobility to the public. But this week, the San Francisco company has taken concrete steps toward competing in the driverless taxi space, too. In July 2017, Lyft announced the creation of its own autonomous transport division, Level 5. Fifteen…
If your Instagram followers aren’t aware that you’ve voted, did you really even vote? In 2018, the act of voting is great social media fodder. People want their friends to know they’ve registered to vote, or that they’ve just mailed in their absentee ballot or even that they’ve bought some sort of “look, I voted”…
