Kiran Upadhyay

The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology. Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC) northeast of downtown Pittsburgh. During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars. Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars react to passengers — and how passengers react to them. “How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?” said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC. If they a

Heap announced today that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding. We’ve written about the company’s “capture everything” approach to analytics before — it aims to collect data about every tap, swipe and other action that a user takes on a website or app. CEO Matin Movassate said this should allow anyone at a company to answer any question they might have about user behavior without having to go through an engineer. In fact, Movassate said Heap is “most successful when it’s adopted by basically everyone in the organization and becomes the foundation for analysis across teams.” He recalled that when he was a product manager at Facebook, there were many analytics tools available, but “despite all of that apparatus, it was really difficult for me to use data effectively.” “It was always bottlenecked,” he continued. “By the time I’d get the answer to my question, I needed to loop in three different stakeholders.” Heap has now raised a total of $13 million. The new round

As the 10pm newscast drew near one night last month, the chief meteorologist of Birmingham's ABC-affiliate began to get worked up. Balding and characteristically attired in suspenders, James Spann is one of the most recognizable and respected local TV meteorologists in the country. But he had a familiar problem. The day had been pleasant in Alabama, and more of the same temperate spring weather lay ahead—so what the heck was he going to talk about? “I’ve got 2 minutes and 30 seconds to fill,” Spann explained. “Everyone in my audience is going to know what the weather is going to do. Except maybe my mom. She’s 85 years old. But most everybody has looked on their phone or some other device already. So what am I going to do? Am I just going to rehash everything they already know?” Many forecasters have been asking themselves this question lately. Two technologies have converged to rapidly displace the primary function of meteorologists. First are computers that are generally be

By now everyone has heard of Google’s RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses. So what is artificial intelligence? There are generally three different classifications of artificial intelligence: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): This is like AI for one particular thing (e.g. beating the world champion in chess). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): This is when the AI can perform all things. Once an AI can perform like a human, we consider it AGI. Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): AI on a much higher level for all things

Europe’s DocPlanner, an online booking platform for healthcare appointments, has raised a $20 million Series C round, and at the same time is announcing a merger with Spain’s Doctoralia. The new funding, which was led by Target Global, will be used for further international expansion and development of the company’s online practice management software solution. ENERN Investments and EBRD also participated, bringing total raised by DocPlanner to $34 million. That the acquisition of Doctoralia is being billed as a merger is interesting and apt, although no further details are being disclosed. Doctoralia claims 9 million users monthly and is available in 20 countries, including Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. DocPlanner on the other hand, claims 8 million monthly users and is available in 25 countries, with a HQ in Poland and 200 employees based in offices in Warsaw, Istanbul and Rome. The idea is to make the combined company the market leader in healthcare online booking. T

Facebook is removing the messaging capability from its mobile web application, according to a notice being served to users: “Your conversations are moving to Messenger,” it reads. Welcome news to the millions like me who switched to the web app in order to avoid Messenger in the first place! At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business. But this summer the warning will become an impenetrable wall, and your only option will be to download the official Messenger app. I’m a little worried about this, because surely the mobile site is much used by people who have good reason not to download the app. People whose phones don’t have official clients, for instance, or who can’t upgrade to the latest version of an OS, and must access via the web. And really, it strikes me as quite a hostile move, as it did before when they axed messaging from the main app. If, as everyone in the company is constantly repeating, mantra-like, that they want to connect the

For more than a month, users of the remote login service TeamViewer have taken to Internet forums to report their computers have been ransacked by attackers who somehow gained access to their accounts. In many of the cases, the online burglars reportedly drained PayPal or bank accounts. No one outside of TeamViewer knows precisely how many accounts have been hacked, but there's no denying the breaches are widespread. Over the past three days, both Reddit and Twitter have exploded with such reports, often with the unsupported claim that the intrusions are the result of a hack on TeamViewer's network. Late on Friday afternoon, an IBM security researcher became the latest to report a TeamViewer account takeover. "In the middle of my gaming session, I lose control of my mouse and the TeamViewer window pops up in the bottom right corner of my screen," wrote Nick Bradley, a practice leader inside IBM's Threat Research Group. "As soon as I realize what is hap

And there it is. After years of speculation, the Tesla Model 3 has been unveiled. We’re live in Hawthorne, CA, where the company has just shown the car for the very first time. Here’s what we know so far: Deliveries will begin at the end of next year, and start at $35,000 for the base model. Base model will do 0-60 in under 6 seconds, with versions that go “much, much faster” to be announced later. Base model will get at least 215 miles per charge, and Elon said that “these are minimum numbers, we hope to exceed them”. Base model is rear wheel drive; dual motor versions are planned. All Model 3s will have autopilot hardware built-in — it’s not an additional upgrade. Like the Model S, it will have front and rear trunks. All Model 3s will come with supercharging support standard. The roof area is “one continuous pane of glass”. It has a 15-inch horizontal (widescreen) monitor in the dash, as opposed to the 17-inch portrait (vertical) monitor in the Model S and Model X.

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin

Google today announced a new machine learning platform for developers at its NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference in San Francisco. As Google chairman Eric Schmidt stressed during today’s keynote, Google believes machine learning is “what’s next.” With this new platform, Google will make it easier for developers to use some of the machine learning smarts Google already uses to power features like Smart Reply in Inbox. The service is now available in limited preview. “Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply),” the company says. “Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.” Google’s Cloud Machine Learning platform basically consists of two parts: one that allows developers to build machine learning models from their own data, and another that offers developers a pre-trained model. To train th

In case there was any doubt that messaging apps were the future of communication in the mobile-first era, a new study released this morning puts some solid numbers behind their traction – and their increasing dominance over email, among today’s youngest users. According to a report from App Annie, email is effectively dying among this crowd. Those aged 13 to 24 now spend more than 3.5 times overall usage time in messaging apps than those over 45 years old, while the older users still default to apps that replicate desktop functions, like email and web browsers. The data for these findings comes from a large sample of real-world users, notes App Annie, combined with the company’s own proprietary data sets. However, it only focuses on Android smartphone users, which in the U.S., doesn’t present a holistic overview of the market. Adding iOS data could change these numbers somewhat, though it’s likely that the larger trends would remain. For those who did not grow up with a smartphone

Good news for amateur and professional photograph enthusiasts. Google has just made its Nik Collection photo editing software available completely free of charge. That collection includes seven different desktop services that fell into Google’s lap after it acquired Nik Software back in 2012. That deal was largely about getting control of popular photo app Snapseed, a pretty powerful tool in itself, but Google later pulled the remaining Nik Software services together in an attractive $149 bundle. That’s now become free, and anyone who forked out to buy it this calendar can claim a refund. Read More

Gmail supports encryption in transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS), and will automatically encrypt your incoming and outgoing emails if it can. Some other email services don't support TLS, and therefore messages exchanged with these services will not be TLS encrypted. In Gmail on your computer, you can check that a message you’ve received was sent over TLS by clicking the small down arrow at the top-left of the email and reading the message details. If you see a red open padlock icon  on a message you’ve received, or on one you're about to send, it means that the message may not be encrypted. If you see the red padlock while composing a message Don’t send confidential material, like tax forms or contracts, to that email address. If you see the red padlock when viewing a received message This message was sent unencrypted. In most cases, there’s nothing you can do. If it contained particularly sensitive content, you should let the sender know and they can cont

Air conditioning is one of the biggest costs in running data centers. Traditional data centers use as much electricity for cooling as they do for running the actual IT equipment. Accordingly, much of the innovation seen in the high-density cloud server space has been to develop data centers that are cheaper to cool and hence cheaper to run. With its much higher heat capacity than air, water has become the coolant of choice, pumped around and between the computers to transport their heat outside. Microsoft has demonstrated an experimental prototype of a new approach: instead of pumping water around the data center, put the data center in the water. Project Natick is a research project to build and run a data center that's submerged in the ocean. The company built an experimental vessel, named the Leona Philpot, and deployed it on the seafloor about 1 kilometer off the Pacific coast. It ran successfully from August to November last year. Read More

LIVINGSTON, La.—The rain began to fall as Joe Giaime and I scrambled down a lonely rise, back toward the observatory’s main building. It wasn’t so much rain as a hard mist, characteristic of the muggy weather southern Louisiana often sees in January when moisture rolls inland from the Gulf of Mexico. As gray clouds fell like a shroud over the loblolly pines all around us, Giaime mused, “Well, I guess you’ve already gathered that we’re in the middle of nowhere." Middle of nowhere happens to be ground zero in the search for gravitational waves, which were first posited by Albert Einstein a century ago and may soon become one of the hottest fields in science. Livingston is remote in terms of geography, but as humans scan the heavens for gravitational waves this forest is practically the center of the physics universe. Because of general relativity, we understand that large masses curve spacetime, kind of like standing in the middle of a trampoline distorts the fabric. When mas

Today was a huge day for Alphabet — the first day it finally broke out its “other bets” in its earnings report — and boy did the company not disappoint. The company smashed expectations on both ends, bringing in $21.3 billion in revenue and earnings of $8.67 per share. Analysts were expecting earnings of $8.09 on $20.8 billion in revenue. And with that, Alphabet became the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world — coming in at a market cap $558 billion after jumping about 8% after the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings, and passing Apple, which sits at a market cap of $535 billion. There weren’t any huge surprises on the earnings call that caused the stock to dip, but its ranking still depends on whether or not the company gives up those gains in extended trading. Either way this is a significant moment for the company and the technology market in general. Alphabet had a huge opportunity to finally pass Apple as the most valuable company in the world. T

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams. The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security. "It's all over the place," he told Ars Technica UK. "Practically everything you can think of." We did a quick search and turned up some alarming results: The cameras are vulnerable because they use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) to share video but have no password authentication in place. The image feed is available to paid Shodan members at images.shodan.io. Free Shodan accounts can also search using the filter port:554 has_screenshot:true.

Jewelbots, a programmable friendship bracelet that debuted on Kickstarter last week, is on a mission to make coding popular among pre-teen girls. Jewelbots surpassed its $30,000 crowdfunding goal in the first 19 hours. In the past five days, the campaign has pulled in over $70,000 from nearly 800 backers, and it still has 25 days to go. “When MySpace was a big thing, knowing HTML and CSS was cool, and now that Minecraft is big, kids want to make awesome models so they’re coding in Java,” says Jewelbots co-founder Sarah Chipps. “We’re trying to reverse engineer that with Jewelbots.” The relatively simple friendship bracelets are equipped with four LED lights and a button. They pair with the Jewelbots iOS or Android app and are designed to hold a charge for three days. Girls can add their friends to different friend groups designated by color, and the bracelet will light up with that color when their friends are nearby. They can also send “secret messages” in the form of vibrati

India’s e-commerce boom continues unbounded. Beyond the top players such as Flipkart and Snapdeal raising billions to support their capital intensive businesses, startups in other parts of the online retail space are raising significant numbers too. One such company is MySmartPrice, a Hyderabad-based price comparison and search site, which has landed $10 million. The round was led by Accel with participation from Helion Venture Partners. MySmartPrice, which was founded in 2010, plans to use the fresh influx of capital to grow its focus on the offline shopping experience. The startup raised $1.3 million across two prior funding rounds. The company began life as a tech and gadget-focused price comparison service, but over the years it has added verticals and new components to the experience. Today, it is designed to navigate the maze of Indian e-commerce sites to find specific products, and at the best prices possible. MySmartPrice co-founder and CEO Sulakshan Kumar told TechCrunc

Unless you’re Jaqueline Voorheese from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, chances are you’re not letting Uber drivers shuttle around your kids to and from school, practice, classes, etc. But that doesn’t mean there’s no need for a little transportation-based help with the little ones. HopSkipDrive, a startup that just received $3.9 million in seed funding, is looking to hook up cautious yet busy parents. The startup lets parents set up pre-scheduled pick-up times for their kids with trusted, thoroughly vetted drivers to help get kids around town when time simply doesn’t allow parents to do it themselves. Here’s how it works: Parents schedule a ride with a ‘CareDriver’ and are sent a short bio for that driver, a picture, and are required to enter in a code word for the ride. The parent then relays that information to the child, and then to the school or daycare organization from which the kid is getting picked up. That way, little Tommy or Patty knows how to identify their ‘CareD