Gadgets

By Kyle Russell StartX, the Stanford-funded and affiliated incubator, just held its demo day for the Fall 2014 batch of startups at its headquarters in Palo Alto. The companies presenting ran the gamut from bitcoin and cybersecurity to open source machine learning. Read More …read more Source: TechCrunch Gadgets

By John Biggs The Swatch Group dropped a bombshell – in its staid way – announcing plans to release a smartwatch in the next three months, potentially to coincide with the April launch of the Apple Watch. First, understand that watch companies don’t know how to market to tech consumers. As I wrote here, Swatch…

By Matt Burns “What a piece of junk!” said Luke Skywalker. “She’ll make point five past lightspeed (30km/h.),” Han replied. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself including a 1800mAh battery, a GoPro 3 and a handmade Styrofoam body shaped…

By Steve O'Hear Investors are wont to follow. It therefore shouldn’t be a surprise to see Airtame pick up a VC round of funding. Read More …read more Source: TechCrunch Gadgets

By Kyle Russell FiftyThree, maker of the Paper app and the accompanying Pencil stylus for the iPad, is shaking up its strategy by dropping the price of every feature in its app to absolutely nothing. Read More …read more Source: TechCrunch Gadgets

By Darrell Etherington Are we hurtling towards technological dystopia, or a futuristic fantasy world in which our hardware and software innovations provide a human experience that excels in almost every way compared to that which we know today? That’s the basic question at the heart of Peter Nowak’s [em]Humans 3.0[/em], a survey of our technical…

By Jon Russell In a PR stunt reminiscent of Amazon’s Black Friday drone revelation in 2013, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is dabbling with drones with a teeny, tiny pilot program. Read More …read more Source: TechCrunch Gadgets

By Darrell Etherington Disney says that it’s looking at other ways to work with services like Dish’s Sling TV, which offers unbundled content to broadband subscribers independent of a cable or satellite TV subscription. That’s not the best part, though: Disney’s planning around this possibility includes Marvel and/or Star Wars-specific offerings, which could mean that…

By Darrell Etherington The *New* Nintendo 3DS XL doesn’t exactly have a name that rolls off the tongue, but it does reflect that what you’re getting is hardware that’s very similar to its predecessor, albeit with some fresh paint and new features that really do help make a big difference in very specific areas. The…

By Darrell Etherington If you’ve been hanging on to those paper books because the idea of having to repurchase them all as Kindle titles is daunting, Amazon has a new option for you: Kindle Convert, a program for Windows that turns print books into digital versions fully compatible with Amazon’s Kindle software, including adjustable font,…

By Kyle Russell Razer is once again proving it’s capable of squeezing a lot of power into a tiny space with the debut of the 2015 Razer Blade, the latest in the company’s series of flagship laptops that put an Apple-like spin on the gaming segment. Read More …read more Source: TechCrunch Gadgets

By John Biggs Since I posted about a potential Mini Meet-Up in Barcelona I’ve gotten quite a few emails and requests to attend. To that end, I’ve decided to open Pitch-Off applications and RSVPs for a few days to get a rough number of how many people will attend. I don’t know if we’ll charge…

By John Biggs Diego Corredor wanted to play guitar but lost his right hand at birth. While he could use a prosthesis to grab a glass of water or pick up objects, he wasn’t able to hold a pick and strum the strings. Then a group of makers at 3D Gluck came along. The team…

By Darrell Etherington While Lego’s own crowdsourcing platform exists, letting users submit ideas for community voting, eventually resulting in some being made, the process is slow and somewhat difficult to navigate. Now Lego set sharing platform Pley is debuting a crowdsourced set creation platform called PleyWorld that can see a submission go from concept to…

By Darrell Etherington Apple will build a $2 billion global command center located in Mesa, Arizona, the company revealed on Monday (via CNBC). It will employ 150 full-time personnel, and will also result in between 300 and 500 construction and trade jobs, and will play host to the company’s data operations across the globe. Apple’s…