Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you. But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud…
Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab is probably best known as the birthplace of the modular snake robot. Initially designed to squeeze into tight spots for search and rescue missions and infrastructure inspections, the lab’s snake robot has given rise to an army of different projects, and at least one Pittsburgh-area startup. Several years ago, the robot…
It’s getting bare-knuckled out there again in the ride-hailing wars. According to a report earlier today from The Information, newly public Lyft threatened Morgan Stanley with legal action earlier this week, demanding in a letter that the powerful investment bank stop marketing a short-selling product that it believed was disrupting trading in its stock. It…
Photo editing app-maker VSCO has filed a lawsuit against competitor PicsArt. The suit focuses on 19 PicsArt filters that were supposedly “reverse engineered from VSCO’s filters,” with VSCO alleging it’s become a legal issue involving false advertising and violations of the app’s terms of service. “VSCO has invested significant time and resources in developing its presets…
A report coming out of Bloomberg today says Amazon is working on its own competitor to Apple’s ubiquitous AirPods. Naturally, it’ll be powered by Alexa. I’m surprised it’s taken this long. According to Bloomberg, Amazon is aiming to release the earbuds as early as the second half of this year. “The headphones will look and…
EXCLUSIVE — Beware, if you are using a Xiaomi’s Mi or Redmi smartphone, you should immediately stop using its built-in MI browser or the Mint browser available on Google Play Store for non-Xiaomi Android devices. That’s because both web browser apps created by Xiaomi are vulnerable to a critical vulnerability which has not yet been…
Seemingly the sole government body policing tech platforms, the ol’ European Union, is now taking aim at desktop gaming’s biggest storefront, Steam, and its creator Valve. The commission sent a “Statements of Objections” to Valve and five other video game publishers, raising a fuss over the companies’ habits of “geo-blocking” purchases, i.e. prohibiting users from…
Relativity, the Los Angeles-based manufacturer of 3D-printed rockets, has signed its first public commercial contract with Telesat, the longtime vendor of satellite services for telecommunications and business information. The deal marks the first agreement between a major satellite operator and an entirely venture-backed company in the “New Space” industry and is a huge win for…
Bad news for home gardeners: criminals might have your credit card data. AeroGrow, the maker of the at-home garden kit AeroGarden, said in a letter to customers that its website had credit card scraping malware for more than four months. The company said anyone who bought something through its website between October 29, 2018 and…
Twitter continues to experiment with ways to make conversations on its platform easier to follow. In addition to its prototype app twttr, which is testing threaded replies, the company also recently tested labeling replies to highlight those from the “original tweeter” — meaning it would show when the person who first tweeted a post then…
