The number of elderly adults requiring home care is set to grow at an alarming rate in most western countries as people live progressively longer. But underinvestment in technology and healthcare means society is at risk of vastly under-delivering. It’s very hard to scale these service and subsequently, no company has more than a low…
Alibaba Group introduced its first AI inference chip today, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800 that it says makes performing machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy-efficient. The chip, announced today during Alibaba Cloud’s annual Apsara Computing Conference in Hangzhou, is already being used to power features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product…
NBCU is again going after Gen Z and millennials with the launch of a new digital news brand and soon-to-arrive streaming network, called LX — short for “Local X.” Local, because the focus is on local news and “X” because…well, it sounds cool? (NBCU says it’s for LX’s “exponential abilities,” if you want the official…
Investors are betting on gaming platforms as an area of consumer tech with plenty of room left to grow. Today, Manticore Games, a stealth gaming startup announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Correlation Ventures, BITKRAFT Esports Ventures, M Ventures, Arrive, Sapphire Sport, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel. The…
How do you attract the attention of a prince? Aside from being Meghan Markle, of course. One answer came recently in the form of Prince Harry’s backing of a new initiative designed to make offsetting the carbon from your airline flights a properly mainstream idea. For Harry, the initiative had a double whammy. It might…
If you’re a VC or founder in London, Bangalore or San Francisco, you’ll likely interact with some part of Africa’s tech landscape for the first time — or more — in the near future. When measured by monetary values, the continent’s tech ecosystem is small by Shenzhen or Silicon Valley standards. But when you look…
Stationhead, the mobile app that turns its users into streaming radio DJs, got a big upgrade today. Where Stationhead DJs were previously limited to broadcasting live, they can now record their shows, making them available on-demand for anyone to listen later. The idea behind Stationhead is to democratize and recapture the personality of traditional radio…
Amazon is introducing a new feature to its Alexa Show device designed to help blind and other low-vision customers identify common household pantry items by holding them up in front of Alexa’s camera and asking what it is. The feature uses a combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques in order to recognize the…
Yahoo Mail is getting a mobile update, with new versions of the iOS and Android app launching today. Many of you probably haven’t tried out Yahoo Mail in years, but Senior Director of Product Management Josh Jacobson noted that it’s one of the top productivity apps in the Apple App Store, where it has been…
Amazon must be pretty happy after tonight’s primetime Emmy Awards, where its shows “Fleabag” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” dominated the comedy categories. “Fleabag” did particularly well, winning the big award for Comedy Series, as well as additional awards for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pictured above), Writing for a Comedy Series…
