Kiran Upadhyay

  As part of its lineup overhaul, Harley-Davidson officially pulled the sheet off its new 121-horsepower Sportster S model, topping off the performance bike range with double the output of its Iron 1200 model. Harley has been teasing the new Sportster S for a while now, touting its performance and hinting that it would render the bikes it replaces obsolete. Power comes from Harley-Davidson's new 1,250cc water-cooled V-twin, dubbed the Revolution Max 1250T. It makes 121 horses and 94 pound-feet in the Sportster S (as opposed to the 150 horsepower it produces in Harley's Pan America 1250 adventure touring bike). Despite nearly doubling the Iron 1200's horsepower, its fuel economy is expected to be 1 mpg better (49 vs. 48). “The Sportster S is the next all-new motorcycle built on the Revolution Max platform and sets a new performance standard for the Sportster line," said Jochen Zeitz, chairman, president and CEO, Harley-Davidson. "This is a next-generation Sportster...

  The custom van craze of the 1970s was huge, but relatively few have survived. They were unlikely to be squirreled away by collectors, nor were their original owners the type who only drove them to church on Sundays. All of which makes this 1974 Ford Econoline, with just 873 miles from new, a most unusual time capsule. And it's for sale right now on eBay Motors, offered by Classic Auto Mall. Bought new from Miller McVeigh Ford of State College, Pennsylvania, in November 1974, this Econoline sold new for $6,791.02. The bill of sale shows the original owner as Larry A. Brown, and his Econoline Custom 100 was equipped with a 302-cubic-inch V8, three-on-the-tree, and a high-output heater. Moreover, it was decked out in full-'70s regalia, with an 8-track stereo, Cragar slotted mags, side pipes, and bubble porthole windows. A flame-design stripe encircles the exterior, and there's the must-have mural. In this case, a trippy mountain scene with a dead tree in the foreground. The ...

    Zoom is taking advantage of the impressive rise in its stock price in the past year to make its first major acquisition. The popular video conferencing firm, which was valued at about $9 billion at its IPO two years ago, said Sunday evening it has agreed a deal to buy cloud call centre service provider Five9 for about $14.7 billion in an all-stock transaction. 20-year-old Five9 will become an operating unit of Zoom after the deal, which is expected to close in the first half of 2022, the two firms said. The proposed acquisition is Zoom’s latest attempt to expand its offerings. In the past year, the video conferencing software has added several office collaboration products, a cloud phone system, and an all-in-one home communications appliance. The acquisition of Five9 — which has amassed over 2,000 customers worldwide including Citrix and Under Armour and processes over 7 billion minutes of calls annually — will help Zoom enter the “$24 billion” market for contact centers,...

  BERLIN — Germany will in July have 1 million electric cars on the road, hitting its target six months late, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told the Tagesspiegel daily on Friday, saying subsidy programs had boosted demand. "We will reach our target of 1 million electric cars by 2020, which everyone thought was unattainable, this July, just six months late," the minister was quoted as saying.   Read More

    Wally Funk, a woman who trained for NASA's "Mercury 13" program in the 1960s, is Jeff Bezos' guest for the trip to be made by his aerospace company, Blue Origin, on July 20. The 82-year-old Funk was trained as an astronaut in 1961 in a class known as the "Women in Space Program," which was privately funded with the goal of including women on NASA expeditions. However, after the group of 13 women finished their training, they were not selected to travel to space because they were women. "They told me I had done better and completed the job faster than any of the guys," Funk explains in the promotional video for Blue Origin.   Read More

  With the controversial design of the BMW 4 Series, we've anxiously awaited what the company would do with the 2022 2 Series coupe. The good news is that the über- grille has not reappeared. In addition, the 2 Series packs even more power than before. Although the grille is relatively normal by BMW standards, the 2 Series coupe is still distinctive. It has shark-like headlights and bulging, blistered fenders. The long nose and short deck seem even more prominent than before. And some of that may be a result of the fact that the new 2 is in fact larger than its predecessor. Depending on whether it's a 230i or an M240i, it ranges between 3.5 and 4.3 inches longer overall. And both versions have a 2-inch longer wheelbase and are 2.6 inches wider. Powering the 2 Series is a choice of two engines. The base 230i models will get a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder making an extra 7 horsepower and 37 pound-feet of torque for totals of 255 and 295 respectively. The M24...

MoviePass, the subscription service that lets consumers pay a monthly fee to see unlimited movies in theaters across the U.S., is slashing its prices yet again. The company announced today it’s now offering its service for $6.95 per month, down from the current price of $9.95 per month, when customers commit to a one-year subscription plan. That works out to a flat fee of $89.95 annually. The deal is a limited-time promotion, as opposed to a permanent pricing change, but MoviePass didn’t say how long the offer is valid. However, it is open to both new and existing subscribers – the latter who would receive a 25 percent savings on their current subscription if switching over to the annual plan. This is not the first time that MoviePass has dropped its pricing. When the company introduced its $9.95 per month, one-movie-per-day plan this August, down from $15 for 2 movies per month (or more in select markets like L.A. and NYC, and going as high as $50), it saw so many new sign-up...

For someone who claims to be working for the American people, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sure doesn’t seem to care what they have to say. In his announcement today that the Commission would vote whether to roll back net neutrality rules on December 14, he made no mention of the inconvenient and embarrassing fact that his proposal had attracted historic attention, garnering over 22 million comments — the majority of which opposed it. The statement mentions benefiting or protecting consumers five times, so clearly the idea here is to help the users of internet services. Yet those very same consumers wrote the Chairman by the millions to say that they felt the existing rules protect them very well and that to remove them would be detrimental to their safety and privacy. Just like when their safety and privacy were put at risk by the elimination of the Broadband Privacy Rule earlier this year. Strangely enough, the Chairman didn’t listen to the outcry then, either. The response has bee...

Uber has entered into an agreement with carmaker Volvo to purchase 24,000 of its XC90 SUVs between 2019 and 2021 to form a fleet of autonomous vehicles, according to Bloomberg News. The XC90 is the base of Uber’s latest-generation self-driving test car, which features sensors and autonomous driving computing capability installed by Uber after purchase on the XC90 vehicle. The deal is said to be worth around $1.4 billion, per the Financial Times, with the XC90 starting at $46,900 in the U.S. in terms of base model consumer pricing. Uber is already testing the XC90 in Arizona, San Francisco and Pittsburgh in trials with safety drivers on board to help refine and improve their software. Uber also paired up with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous driving and a vehicle ready for self-driving implementation, with investment from both sides committed last year. Uber’s new fleet of XC90s will go further than the existing test vehicles, in that they will incorporate redundant systems fo...

Though a lot has changed since 2016, not much has changed for energy economics in the US. The cost of wind generation continues to fall, solar costs are falling, too, and the cost of coal-power energy has seen no movement, while the cost of building and maintaining nuclear plants has gone up. And none of those conclusions reflect subsidies and tax credits applied by the federal government. The conclusions come from Lazard (PDF), an asset management company that publishes cost estimates for various types of electricity-generation assets each year. Lazard’s numbers reflect the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which averages the estimated costs of construction, maintenance, and fuel for electricity-generating assets over the number of megawatt-hours that each asset is expected to produce over its lifetime. In other words, the LCOE is the lifetime cost of a turbine divided by the amount of energy that turbine will produce over its lifetime. LCOE is a good way of comparing electricity...

If you’re a company working on an electric skateboard that’s already raised nearly $500,000 on Kickstarter and slayed the Shark Tank sharks what do you do for an encore? The answer, at least for Inboard Technology, is to go out and raise $8 million in a new round of venture funding to become the Tesla of skateboards. Founded in 2014 by Ryan Evans and Theo Cerboneschi, the company began with Cerboneschi’s collegiate vision of zooming around campus on an electric skateboard. Evans, the former president of the action sports gear maker Pure Action Sports, met Cerboneschi, who had become a professional kite-boarder, when the two worked together at Pure Action. Both men shared a love of skateboarding and both loved the idea of a rugged, software enabled electric skateboard and from that, Inboard Technology was born. Based in Santa Cruz, Calif., the company has skated from success-to-success culminating in this most recent round, led by Los Angeles-based Upfront Ventures. Kobie F...

Facebook wants to turn mindless, passive video consumption into “time well spent,” and now it’s giving social media stars a powerful tool to foster communities around their content. Today Facebook launches Facebook Creator, offering influencers Live Creative Kit for adding intros and outros to broadcasts, a unified inbox of Facebook and Instagram comments plus Messenger chats, cross-posting to Twitter and expansive analytics. Facebook promised the Creator app back in June at VidCon and today it launches globally on iOS with Android planned for the coming months. It’s actually a rebrand and update of the 2014 Facebook Mentions app that was only available to verified public figures and Pages, but now is open to everyone. Weirdly, it still appears as “Mentions” in the App Store for now.

Tesla’s Semi is off to a promising start, despite there being no official pricing information available yet: In addition to a Walmart pilot, Canadian grocery giant Loblaw is purchasing 25 of the heavy duty all-electric transport trucks (via Canadian Press), with a $5,000 deposit for each upfront even though pricing is TBD for the vehicle, which is supposed to start shipping in 2019. Loblaw has a target of running a fully electric vehicle fleet to support its stores, as part of a goal of reducing its emissions impact by 2030. The plan is to eventually have as many as 350 zero-emission vehicles in operation by that time, and taking those diesel cars off the road could help it reduce its carbon footprint by the equivalent of taking around 20,000 consumer cars with internal combustion engines off the road. Tesla has said that its cost of operation for the Semi will help shippers save money on a per mile basis right away, and that’s likely meant to help lessen the impact of sticker s...

Parkour! That’s what we should all be devoting our combined robotics expertise towards. There’s no nobler human pursuit, so of course we should create a robot that can master the so-called ‘sport of kings.’ And yes, that is the true sport of kings. Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, a robot dog that’s slightly less intimating cased in its more consumer friendly rounded future armor. But now it’s also catching us up on what’s been going down with its bipedal Atlas bot, the most humanoid of its creations. Atlas can now jump from elevated block to elevated block, and do a complete about-face in the air. It can leap pretty high, and also do a backflip – and then celebrate its backflipping ability. I could do without the grandstanding, future destroyer of worlds.

Tesla has unveiled a new Roadster, the new version of its original sports car. It’s the fastest production car ever made, according to Elon Musk, with speeds of just 1.9 seconds for 0 to 60 4.2 seconds for 0 to 100. It can handle a quarter-mile in 8.9 seconds. “This is the base model,” Musk said, then went on to mention that its top speed is above 250 mph. and it has a 200 kWh battery pack that offers 630 miles of highway driving range. It’s also a 2 by 2 four-seater, and it’s available in 2020 starting at $200,000, with the first 1,000 sold being Founder’s Series models that will retail for $250,000 apiece. Which is a steal for the fastest production car ever. Understandably, the crowd was in awe when Musk revealed the new Roadster, which has a look inside and out that owes a lot to classic sports car design. The car also ripped up the runway at the hangar where the event was held, before pulling to a stop and being flanked by the two new Tesla Semi trucks on either side. ...

Mozilla has released Firefox 57, codenamed Quantum, into the wild. This is the most ambitious version of Firefox released in a long time. It’s faster, better-looking, more streamlined, and more useful, and it may be able to give Chrome a run for its money. It certainly uses less RAM. In terms of web browsers, Firefox was once the big daddy. But now Google Chrome enjoys a 55 percent share of the market, and Firefox is down in third, behind Safari. Rather than carry on releasing incremental updates, Mozilla has taken a risk with a bold new version of Firefox… Firefox Quantum Is Flat Out Better Firefox Quantum has been built from the ground up, with Mozilla pulling out all of the stops to get back in the game. Mozilla claims Firefox Quantum is “the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004,” and “just flat out better in every way”. And this may well be true. The most obvious improvement is the speed, with Mozilla claiming Quantum is “twice as fast as Firefox...

Since Puerto Rico was struck by Hurricane Maria in late September, the island has struggled to repair power lines, water pumps, cell phone towers, roads, and bridges. The electrical system has come under the most scrutiny. The commonwealth’s power provider—Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority or PREPA—was bankrupt going into the disaster and has faced scandal after scandal in recent weeks. After reconnecting more than 40 percent of its generating sources early last week, a major power line failed on Thursday, reducing the grid's online capacity to 18 percent. Although the line was quickly fixed, PREPA's grid is only working at 47 percent capacity now, according to statistics from the Puerto Rican government. With more than 50 percent of the grid offline, previously connected Puerto Ricans have been living off generators or solar panels for nearly 7 weeks, or they live without power. On Thursday, Governor Ricardo Rosselló demanded that his entire cabinet submit undated le...

Record labels are obsolete. They haven’t kept up as music evolved from selling CDs to streaming songs to promoting concert tickets and merchandise. Labels were meant to help artists generate albums, fame, and money. But now anyone can record themselves and no one “buys” music. So today that requires being a technology company, combining analytics with hyper-targeted advertising. And the old labels don’t have the engineering talent for it. That’s why last year, the former president of Interscope Records Steve Stoute secretly raised $70 million from Google’s corporate umbrella Alphabet, prestigious venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and entertainment giant 20th Century Fox. Today, his startup UnitedMasters emerges from stealth. UnitedMasters is ready to give musicians an alternative to exploitative record label deals. Artists pay UnitedMasters a competitive rate to distribute their music across the internet from Spotify to YouTube to SoundCloud, and they split the royalties while...

A few hours after announcing a review of its verification program, Twitter began revoking the verified status of some accounts. White supremacists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler are among the users who no longer have a blue checkmark displayed on their profiles. On Wednesday, Twitter admitted in a thread on its support account that “verification has long been perceived as an endorsement,” something its critics have argued for years about the program, which began in 2009 to prevent impersonation accounts. The problem was compounded last year when the verification program opened to allow public submissions. Twitter said yesterday that it has stopped accepting public submissions as it reviews the program and “remove(s) verification from accounts whose behavior does not fall within these new guidelines.” Its updated rules says Twitter will now remove verification for “behaviors on and off Twitter,” including promoting hate and violence; threatening people on the basis of race, et...

It's been one of the most contentious debates in anthropology, and now scientists are saying it's pretty much over. A group of prominent anthropologists have done an overview of the scientific literature and declare in Science magazine that the "Clovis first" hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas is dead. For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free corridor between glaciers in North America. But evidence has been piling up since the 1980s of human campsites in North and South America that date back much earlier than 13,500 years. At sites ranging from Oregon in the US to Monte Verde in Chile, evidence of human habitation goes back as far as 18,000 years. In the 2000s, overwhelming evidence suggested that a pre-Clovis group had come to the Americans before there was an ice-free passage...