Kiran Upadhyay

Streaming video service Netflix will be available to Cuban customers starting today, at the $7.99 U.S. per month rate that it offers in the U.S., the company announced today. It’ll still require an international payment method for now, as well as Internet access (which still isn’t ubiquitous in the U.S.), but it’s an early start that Netflix says it wanted to offer in order to have it available as Cuban Internet access expands, and debit and credit cards become more available to Cuban citizens. With this move, Netflix becomes one of the first U.S.-based companies to take advantage of the U.S. government’s decision to relax trade restrictions that have been imposed on Cuba since the 1960s. “We are delighted to finally be able to offer Netflix to the people of Cuba, connecting them with stories they will love from all over the world,” Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement released by Netflix. “Cuba has great filmmakers and a robust arts culture and one day w...

Google purchased Boston Dynamics last year, which means it now owns the company’s ongoing robotics projects, including BigDog. Today, the Google subsidiary posted videos of a smaller dog-like robot, aptly named Spot, which weighs around 160 lbs, has an electric powerhouse and can operate both indoors and outside. The robot, as you can see from the clip, can walk, trot and climb across all types of terrain, and can even survive attempts to destabilize it by unfeeling humans eager with their kicks. The robot isn’t quite the pack animal that BigDog is, since its larger predecessor weighs 240 lbs and can carry 340 lbs, but it looks like it might be able to travel with more agility, if not more speed, and it’s more able to operate in environs where there isn’t much room to navigate. You could easily see Spot bravely rushing into blown out buildings, for instance, or navigating crowded city streets while recovering from attempts by passers-by to upend it. Spot manages to look surpris...

An artificial limb can cost more than a car. And there are an estimated 2 million amputees in the United States alone. So for Jeff Huber, an entrepreneur who had dabbled in education and advertising who happens to also an amputee, this market was close to heart. While an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, he had long thought about how to make prosthetics at a fraction of their current costs in emerging markets. But he wound up dropping out to do an online education startup called Knowit and then working on data-driven marketing at MightyHive. After leaving last year, he returned to tinkering on his old ideas around affordable artificial limbs. Now Huber’s work has become a startup called Standard Cyborg that’s backed by Y Combinator. He’s still the sole founder and employee. For most of his life, Huber has used a prosthetic leg. He was born with a congenital birth defect that left him without a fully formed fibula. As a growing child, Huber would get a new l...

Police officials have lobbied for the right to conduct a variety of unfettered electronic surveillance tactics on the public, everything from being able to affix GPS trackers on vehicles to acquiring mobile phone cell-site location records and deploying "stingrays" in public places—all without warrants. Some law enforcement officials, however, are frightened when it's the public doing the monitoring—especially when there's an app for that. Google-owned Waze, although offering a host of traffic data, doubles as a Digital Age version of the police band radio. Authorities said the app amounts to a "police stalker" in the aftermath of last month's point-blank range murder of two New York Police Department officers. That's according to the message some officials gave over the weekend during the National Sheriffs Association meeting in Washington. "The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the resp...

I seem to be developing a penchant for these things. The Displio is the latest in a line of Internet-connected ‘displays’ designed to sit on a desk, or perhaps on a shop counter, and exhibit various online information, such as Facebook ‘Likes’, weather, number of unread email, and so on. However, although similar to the LaMetric, a fully-programmable but simple, ticker-style Internet-connected display, the Displio is considerably smaller, housing a 2.7 inch e-ink screen. Not only does this change the aesthetics considerably, and allows for a greater amount of information to be displayed, but e-ink’s lower power consumption — requiring power upon refresh only — means the Displio claims to be able to run on a single charge for up to a month. It’s also testament to my long-held belief that the display technology has applications far beyond an e-reader, from desktop clock, smartwatch, to the backside of a mobile phone. Like LaMetric (whose shipping date, I’m told, has slipped t...

And there it is; the death knell we all knew would ring out eventually. RadioShack has officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Once a home base to the radio/homebrew/DIY geeks of the world, RadioShack devolved into a glorified cell phone store in the early 2000s. While they’ve spent the last few years trying to find their roots with things like a dedicated section for Arduino gear*, they’ve mostly failed to get bodies back in the store. (* A section which employees never seemed to understand. I bought two Arduinos there over the period of about six months, as I was working on projects and didn’t feel like waiting for delivery. Both times, the employee behind the register asked something along the lines of “So… what is this thing?”) This news comes as rumors swirl that RadioShack intends to sell off half of its stores and close the rest. Read More

Apple has a new patent (via AppleInsider) that covers modular accessories for mobile devices like the iPhone, which include a physical gamepad with action buttons, D-pads and analog joysticks; a QWERTY hardware keyboard for typing; additional camera, speaker and microphone units; and even a full, secondary multitouch input like a trackpad. The accessories in the patent are described as using either hardware or Wi-Fi connections (i.e. Bluetooth) to talk to the main device. The accessories described in the patent would make for a range of iPhone add-ons that turn it into a modular device with a range of potential uses. You can imagine how iOS devices might be able to better fit the needs of niche users with these kinds of add-ons, including not only gamers but also users in specific industries, as well as creative professionals and those looking for more comprehensive on-the-go audio recording solutions. Some of the variations of the accessories even include provisions for adding o...